Starship Asterisk*

I am saddened to see APOD put out a politically tainted topic today. There is not even any mention that a vast area of Antartica is actually COOLING rather than WARMING. There should be no place to make drastic claims like the sea level will rise by "5 meters" in the near future. Let's discuss supposed global warming in a scientific way, and please, not on an Astronomy related forum.

Thanks,

verkle wrote:I am saddened to see APOD put out a politically tainted topic today. There is not even any mention that a vast area of Antartica is actually COOLING rather than WARMING. There should be no place to make drastic claims like the sea level will rise by "5 meters" in the near future. Let's discuss supposed global warming in a scientific way, and please, not on an Astronomy related forum.

Thanks,

I was at NOAA ten years ago when, sadly , it was not politically correct to even
suggest that global warming was taking place (particularly man made warming).

Now, sadly , it was not politically correct to even suggest that
global warming is NOT taking place (particularly man made warming).

The proper scientific approach is to allow for a free & open debate
on all sides of the issue and let the most convincing case win.

http://nsidc.org/seaice/characteristics/difference.html

This site clearly shows antarctic sea ice has returned to normal, whatever that is. Besides, it melts a lot every summer, which is when this picture was taken.

I'm not qualified to know whether global warming is occurring or not; but, I don't think we should ignore the possibility.

Orin

It is a spectacular failure of science that no logical debate is allowed on global warming. We might as well throw some virgins in the volcano and hope for cooler weather.

Absolutely no mention of the startling lack of sunspots which actually has a scientific explanation of weather impact. Rather the ongoing CO2 scare for which there is no scientific explanation of how this would affect the weather to the degree predicted by the computer models.

Why not take photos from near that same spot twice a year and show us what it looks like during summer and winter? Right now all we have is a single photo and a statement that it's all gone with an implication that it will never return. But we don't have a photo of it all gone. I know it's hard to take photos in Antarctica. But hey, if all the ice is really gone, it should be a lot easier to get there by boat and show us, eh? I dunno. The instances where I have seen this argument presented to me in an objective way are very, very few and far between. In the past I remember some APOD descriptions mentioning global warming but never really taking a side on it. I suppose now we know on which side the editors stand.

Stated condition - Ice floats because it's density is 90% of that of water; hence, we see tthe 10% as surface ice floating.

My interest is that this accepted fact when ice sheet "calve" and melt the water level should lower levels close to 10%, not raise the level. I will give some credit to a slighter rise for the temperature difference from ice to the liquid phase.

When I understand this point ,then I will progress to a significant rise in relative humidy and other water-temperature questions on a global level.

Thanks for any imput.

<<Scientists: Pace of Climate Change Exceeds Estimates

By Kari Lydersen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 15, 2009; Page A03

CHICAGO, Feb. 14 -- The pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems, scientists said Saturday.

"We are basically looking now at a future climate that's beyond anything we've considered seriously in climate model simulations," Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Field, a member of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said emissions from burning fossil fuels since 2000 have largely outpaced the estimates used in the U.N. panel's 2007 reports. The higher emissions are largely the result of the increased burning of coal in developing countries, he said.

Unexpectedly large amounts of carbon dioxide are being released into the atmosphere as the result of "feedback loops" that are speeding up natural processes. Prominent among these, evidence indicates, is a cycle in which higher temperatures are beginning to melt the arctic permafrost, which could release hundreds of billions of tons of carbon and methane into the atmosphere, said several scientists on a panel at the meeting.

The permafrost holds 1 trillion tons of carbon, and as much as 10 percent of that could be released this century, Field said. Melting permafrost also releases methane, which is 25 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

"It's a vicious cycle of feedback where warming causes the release of carbon from permafrost, which causes more warming, which causes more release from permafrost," Field said.

Evidence is also accumulating that terrestrial and marine ecosystems cannot remove as much carbon from the atmosphere as earlier estimates suggested, Field said.

In the oceans, warmer weather is driving stronger winds that are exposing deeper layers of water, which are already saturated with carbon and not as able to absorb as much from the atmosphere. The carbon is making the oceans more acidic, which also reduces their ability to absorb carbon.

On land, rising carbon dioxide levels had been expected to boost plant growth and result in greater sequestration of carbon dioxide. As plants undergo photosynthesis to draw energy from the sun, carbon is drawn out of the atmosphere and trapped in the plant matter. But especially in northern latitudes, this effect may be offset significantly by the fact that vegetation-covered land absorbs much more of the sun's heat than snow-covered terrain, said scientists on the panel.

Earlier snowmelt, the shrinking arctic ice cover and the northward spread of vegetation are causing the Northern Hemisphere to absorb, rather than reflect, more of the sun's energy and reinforce the warming trend.

While it takes a relatively long time for plants to take carbon out of the atmosphere, that carbon can be released rapidly by wildfires, which contribute about a third as much carbon to the atmosphere as burning fossil fuels, according to a paper Field co-authored.

Fires such as the recent deadly blazes in southern Australia have increased in recent years, and that trend is expected to continue, Field said. Warmer weather, earlier snowmelt, drought and beetle infestations facilitated by warmer climates are all contributing to the rising number of fires linked to climate change. Across large swaths of the United States and Canada, bark beetles have killed many mature trees, making forests more flammable. And tropical rain forests that were not susceptible to forest fires in the past are likely to become drier as temperatures rise, growing more vulnerable.

Preventing deforestation in the tropics is more important than in northern latitudes, the panel agreed, since lush tropical forests sequester more carbon than sparser northern forests. And deforestation in northern areas has benefits, since larger areas end up covered in exposed, heat-reflecting snow.

Many scientists and policymakers are advocating increased incentives for preserving tropical forests, especially in the face of demand for clearing forest to grow biofuel crops such as soy. Promoting biofuels without also creating forest-preservation incentives would be "like weatherizing your house and deliberately keeping your windows open," said Peter Frumhoff, chief of the Union of Concerned Scientists' climate program. "It's just not a smart policy."

Field said the U.N. panel's next assessment of Earth's climate trends, scheduled for release in 2014, will for the first time incorporate policy proposals. It will also include complicated models of interconnected ecosystem feedbacks.

The panel's last report noted that preliminary knowledge of such feedbacks suggested that an additional 100 billion to 500 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions would have to be prevented in the next century to avoid dangerous global warming. Currently, about 10 billion tons of carbon are emitted each year.>>
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<<Predicted California doom unlikely
Energy secretary's vision will pass without incident

February 15, 2009
by George Will
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 15, 2009; Page A03

WASHINGTON -- A corollary of Murphy's Law ("If something can go wrong, it will") is: "Things are worse than they can possibly be."

Energy Secretary Steven Chu, an atomic physicist, seems to embrace that corollary but ignores Gregg Easterbrook's "Law of Doomsaying": Predict catastrophe no sooner than five years hence but no later than 10 years away, soon enough to terrify but distant enough that people will forget if you are wrong.

Chu recently told the Los Angeles Times that global warming might melt 90 percent of California's snowpack, which stores much of the water needed for agriculture. This, Chu said, would mean "no more agriculture in California," the nation's leading food producer. Chu added: "I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going."

No more lettuce or Los Angeles? Chu likes predictions, so here is another: Nine decades hence, our great-great-grandchildren will add the disappearance of California artichokes to the list of predicted planetary calamities that did not happen. Global cooling recently joined that lengthening list.

In the 1970s, "a major cooling of the planet" was "widely considered inevitable" because it was "well established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950" (The New York Times, May 21, 1975). Although some disputed that the "cooling trend" could result in "a return to another ice age" (the Times, Sept. 14, 1975), others anticipated "a full-blown 10,000-year ice age" involving "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation" (Science News, March 1, 1975, and Science magazine, Dec. 10, 1976, respectively). The "continued rapid cooling of the Earth" (Global Ecology, 1971) meant that "a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery" (International Wildlife, July 1975). "The world's climatologists are agreed" that we must "prepare for the next ice age" (Science Digest, February 1973). Because of "ominous signs" that "the Earth's climate seems to be cooling down," meteorologists were "almost unanimous" that "the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century," perhaps triggering catastrophic famines (Newsweek cover story, "The Cooling World," April 28, 1975). Armadillos were fleeing south from Nebraska, heat-seeking snails were retreating from central European forests, the North Atlantic was "cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool," glaciers had "begun to advance" and "growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter" (Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 27, 1974).

Speaking of experts, in 1980 Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford scientist and environmental Cassandra who predicted calamitous food shortages by 1990, accepted a bet with economist Julian Simon. When Ehrlich predicted the imminent exhaustion of many nonrenewable natural resources, Simon challenged him: Pick a "basket" of any five such commodities, and I will wager that in a decade the price of the basket will decline, indicating decreased scarcity. Ehrlich picked five metals -- chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten -- that he predicted would become more expensive. Not only did the price of the basket decline, the price of all five declined.

An expert Ehrlich consulted in picking the five was John Holdren, who today is President Obama's science adviser. Credentialed intellectuals, too -- actually, especially -- illustrate Montaigne's axiom: "Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know."

As global levels of sea ice declined last year, many experts said this was evidence of man-made global warming. Since September, however, the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began. According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.

An unstated premise of eco-pessimism is that environmental conditions are, or recently were, optimal. The proclaimed faith of eco-pessimists is weirdly optimistic: These optimal conditions must and can be preserved or restored if government will make us minimize our carbon footprints, and if government will "remake" the economy.>>
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Im with vergle 100%. I use the Pic of the day for ASTRONOMY images and I see this image. Then to make matters worse, I have to put up with the global warming, er, I mean, 'global climate change' drivel. I wish the NASA geeks would get back to their real jobs and stay off this political garbage. Let me correct myself, its now a religion and not even politics.
Just curious, how many SUVs were there polluting the planet the last time that the ice sheets retreated...?
Junkerjunk

I've posted links to today's "Picture of the Day" in a variety of places with the caption, "Well, I see "Astronomy Picture of the Day" has gone over to the dark side."

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap090215.html

APOD wrote:Scientists are watching the much-larger Ross Ice Shelf, which, if it fully collapses, could cause global sea levels to rise five meters over the next few hundred years.

Is "collapse" a way to describe a slow (over the next few hundred years) disintegration? I think not. If collapse (a more sudden process) happens, why would it take a "few hundred years" to affect sea level? It wouldn't. What exactly are these scientists watching for?

verkle wrote:I am saddened to see APOD put out a politically tainted topic today.

In the quest to introduce everyone in the world to APOD, controversy casts a wider net.

verkle wrote:I am saddened to see APOD put out a politically tainted topic today. There is not even any mention that a vast area of Antartica is actually COOLING rather than WARMING. There should be no place to make drastic claims like the sea level will rise by "5 meters" in the near future. Let's discuss supposed global warming in a scientific way, and please, not on an Astronomy related forum.

As far as I'm concerned there's nothing political here. The image is an observation, and the caption is based on widely accepted science. Any politics here is being externally applied.

What I question is whether the image, and the topic in this context, has much of anything to do with astronomy. We already have Spaceweather.com, which focuses on weather, climate, and the intersection of our atmosphere and space events, and it does a fine job of it. I don't think APOD needs to be competing with Spaceweather by showing melting ice or atmospheric phenomena. It isn't like there's a shortage of truly astronomical images!

Chris Peterson wrote:... showing melting ice ...

Tomorrow's picture: paint drying

Everything I have recently read says that the Antartic ice shelf is GROWING not shrinking. Global warming is now "climate change;" this is because the manmade global warming theory has been pretty much debunked......unless you're a washed up politician with no portfolio like al gore.

Zubenelgenubi wrote:Everything I have recently read says that the Antartic ice shelf is GROWING not shrinking. Global warming is now "climate change;" this is because the manmade global warming theory has been pretty much debunked......unless you're a washed up politician with no portfolio like al gore.

That, of course, is utter nonsense. Scientifically, the case for global warming is stronger than ever, and the percentage of climate scientists who think otherwise is very small.

Your comment, however, wonderfully demonstrates the grave risk we face having such a scientifically illiterate populace. We no longer live in a world where a lack of understanding of science (in its true sense, as a method of understanding) can be tolerated.

Shame on APOD!

To speak of "global warming" as if it's a factual phenomenon, and not an issue frought with debate over terms, methods, biases, serious conflicts of interest, outright fraud, and global political ties, is downright irresponsible.

APOD authors may have their political and even scientific prejudices about the issue, and as human beings they're entitled to such things, but as the guardians of an allegedly non-political site, friendly to all comers - not just those with like-minded views, they should have the intellegence to completely avoid offensive rhetorical statements.

Shame on your intellegence, shame on your insensitivity, shame on your cultural ignorance, shame-shame-shame!

I have taken APOD off my Firefox FastDial homepage, removed it from my web page Links, and have suggested to all my clients and friends that they cease to promote the site as well.

You guys blew it - BIG time. Not only because of which side you took, but because you TOOK a side.


svs95

svs95 wrote:Shame on APOD!

To speak of "global warming" as if it's a factual phenomenon...

I predict that the politicized postings by the scientifically illiterate will rapidly dominate this discussion, resulting in the need for the moderators to lock it before long.

I watched a documentary about Antartica that turned into a global warming scare-a-thon at the end.

Scene** Pans and vistas of Antartica--go to a man in a powered (by a gasoline motor) inflatable. They introduce him as Dr. so and so (I cannot remember his name) as the most prominent scientist in the world as to the effects of global warming on Antartica-----wait till you hear this---- " I know there is evidence of the effects of global warming here in Antartica and I will keep looking until I find it" This would be funny if I wasn't paying his paycheck and fantastic government benefits and early retirement funds.

I have been visiting apod for years but have woefully forgotten that this site and it's employees (federal union members most likely) are my employees. Apod is a taxpayer owned website. It's employees (should read as OUR employees) paycheck is directly or indirectly affected by the amount of cash that can be extracted from our pockets (that is--those of us that pay taxes). Apod's employees has in the past kept kept their political POV (global warming is as political as it is religious) hidden until now. Is anyone at all suprised that an apod like this would appear so shortly after the recent election?

I was going through the recent soialism of America stimulus bill ( http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.R.1: ) and came upon the following:

For an additional amount for `Procurement, Acquisition and Construction', $600,000,000, for accelerating satellite development and acquisition, acquiring climate sensors and climate modeling capacity, and establishing climate data records: Provided further, That not less than $140,000,000 shall be available for climate data modeling.

For an additional amount for `Science', $400,000,000, of which not less than $250,000,000 shall be solely for accelerating the development of the tier 1 set of Earth science climate research missions recommended by the National Academies Decadal Survey.

Yep--another 850 million dedicated to studying global warming on top of what was allready designated. I found this in just 2 pages of the stimulus bill. If you are a senior citizen or near it---you might want to read the sections on the socializing of health care. Soylent green is not far away. (For younger readers----watch the movie Soylent Green)

PS--you can expect much more of this type of propaganda in the future as our employees will not listen to us anymore---they have a new messiah.

TomR wrote:Stated condition - Ice floats because it's density is 90% of that of water; hence, we see tthe 10% as surface ice floating.

My interest is that this accepted fact when ice sheet "calve" and melt the water level should lower levels close to 10%, not raise the level. I will give some credit to a slighter rise for the temperature difference from ice to the liquid phase.

When I understand this point ,then I will progress to a significant rise in relative humidy and other water-temperature questions on a global level.

Thanks for any imput.

To help you understand, Ice that is floating on water is displacing water in an equal volume to that which lies under water. The Ice above the surface is the differential ammount that stands to raise sea levels. The Ice Shelves are actually supported by land and as such, displace a somewhat smaller ammount of water than they would if supported by the water 100%. So this allows more ice to be above the water than just the 10%. So you have two factors involved to add to water level rise. And even a third, The Antarctic land mass is being pushed down (slightly) by the weight if the Ice. When the ice weight is removed, the land mass is free to decompress which will also displace water in the southern polar area.

So When the Ice sheets calve, the now unsupported ice bergs will displace more water than when supported by the land mass.

casomega wrote:http://nsidc.org/seaice/characteristics/difference.html

This site clearly shows antarctic sea ice has returned to normal, whatever that is. Besides, it melts a lot every summer, which is when this picture was taken.

These Antarctic Sea Icesheet images clearly show the difference between 2007 ice sheet minimun and that of 2008
and yesterday Feb 14,15.
There is a clear and undeniable decrease in summertime sea ice especially near the more massive West Ice Shelf. Your indicated site seems to only show summer vs winter ice averages.

And although this graph does indicate a relatively stable annual ice coverage in the south, this one indicates a gradual but significant annual decrease in the northern hemisphere, Where man has more influence due in part to a vastly larger presance of industrialized nations and human populations.

Rocky Planet wrote:http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap090215.html

APOD wrote:Scientists are watching the much-larger Ross Ice Shelf, which, if it fully collapses, could cause global sea levels to rise five meters over the next few hundred years.

Is "collapse" a way to describe a slow (over the next few hundred years) disintegration? I think not. If collapse (a more sudden process) happens, why would it take a "few hundred years" to affect sea level? It wouldn't. What exactly are these scientists watching for?

Keep in mind, there is a difference between "gradual collapse" and total, sudden and catastrophic collapse" though both use the same "Collapse" term in their descriptions and the same overall process/effect.

svs95 wrote:Shame on APOD!

To speak of "global warming" as if it's a factual phenomenon, and not an issue frought with debate over terms, methods, biases, serious conflicts of interest, outright fraud, and global political ties, is downright irresponsible.

APOD authors may have their political and even scientific prejudices about the issue, and as human beings they're entitled to such things, but as the guardians of an allegedly non-political site, friendly to all comers - not just those with like-minded views, they should have the intellegence to completely avoid offensive rhetorical statements.

Shame on your intellegence, shame on your insensitivity, shame on your cultural ignorance, shame-shame-shame!

I have taken APOD off my Firefox FastDial homepage, removed it from my web page Links, and have suggested to all my clients and friends that they cease to promote the site as well.

You guys blew it - BIG time. Not only because of which side you took, but because you TOOK a side.


svs95

Shame on svs95 for claiming that global warming isn't happening when all that is needed to confirm the fact is to determine summertime sea ice extent and the gradual decrease in polar ice that is residual rather than annual.

Here is where the whole discussion gets side tracked. The vast majority of so called "deniers" will not argue the fact that there are global temperature variations--truly only a moron would argue that. What we "deniers" are against is the faithfulls doctrine that IT is caused by man. I have yet to get an explanation (a credible one) from any of the faithfull as to why we are finding villages UNDER receding glaciers or why we find written (in an non-extra terrestrial language) documents verifying a temperate climate in Greenland (with matching archaelogical evidence) or why the poles of other planets in our solar system are sharing the same percentages of polar melting at the same time we are.