Melting Ice 'Will Swamp Capitals' (Global Warming)

Independent (UK) ^ | 12-7-2003 | Geoffrey Lean

[blam]

Melting ice 'will swamp capitals'

By Geoffrey Lean Environment Editor
07 December 2003

Measures to fight global warming will have to be at least four times stronger than the Kyoto Protocol if they are to avoid the melting of the polar ice caps, inundating central London and many of the world's biggest cities, concludes a new official report.

The report, by a German government body, says that even if it is fully implemented, the protocol will only have a "marginal attenuating effect" on the climate change. But last week even this was thrown into doubt amid contradictory signals from the Russian government as to whether it will allow the treaty to come into effect.

Global warming already kills 150,000 people a year worldwide and the rate of climate change is soon likely to exceed anything the planet has seen "in the last million years" says the report, produced by the German Advisory Council on Global Change for a meeting of the world's environment ministers to consider the future of the treaty in Milan this week.

It concludes that the protocol must urgently be brought into force, but only as a first step, insisting that "catastrophic" climate change "can now only be prevented if climate protection targets are set at substantially higher levels than those agreed internationally until now".

The report, written by eight leading German professors, says that "dangerous climatic changes" will become "highly probable" if the world's average temperature is allowed to increase to more than 2 degrees centigrade above what it was before the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Beyond that level the West Antarctic ice sheet and the Greenland ice cap would begin gradually to melt away, eventually raising sea levels world wide by up to 30 feet, submerging vast areas of land and key cities worldwide. London, New York, Miami, Bombay, Calcutta, Sydney, Shanghai, Lagos and Tokyo would be among those largely submerged by such a rise.

Above this mark too, other "devastating" and "irreversible" changes would be likely to take place. These include a cessation of the Indian monsoon and the ending of the Gulf Stream, which would dramatically worsen the climate in Britain and western Europe, even as the world warms. Another risk is the so-called "runaway greenhouse" where rising temperatures lead to the release of huge reservoirs methane stored in permafrost and the oceans, adding to global warming and starting a self-reinforcing cycle that would eventually make the earth uninhabitable.

To avoid such catastrophe, the report says that industrialised countries will have to cut emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide by at least 20 per cent by 2020, and by up to 60 per cent by 2050. The Kyoto Protocol would at best cut them by 5 per cent by 2012, and probably less, even if it were brought into force and fully implemented.

In the meantime the world looks as if it will greatly exceed the targets. Writing in The Independent on Sunday today, Michael Meacher, the former environment minister, calculates that global emissions of greenhouse gases could increase by 75 per cent by 2020, "putting the world well on the way to doomsday".

[willyboyishere]

apres moi le deluge........
(which is probably what inspired this whole global warming/environmental doomsday crap.

[Jackson Brown]

More pure BS form the doom and gloom -- global warming --entrepreneurs

Snippet from article below --

According to John Carlisle, director of the environmental policy task force of the National Center for Public Policy Research, "the advance of the Antarctic and Greenland glaciers, which contain more than 90 percent of the world's glacial ice, completely contradicts previous predictions that warming would cause these glaciers to retreat." "

Far from providing scientific proof of global warming," he notes, "the behavior of glaciers represents yet another powerful indictment of the already-controversial global warming theory." Carlisle concedes that proponents of global warming theory are not lying outright when they warn of glacial melting. Some melting of the Earth's mid-latitude glaciers is in fact taking place.

But those glaciers represent only 6 percent of the planet's total ice mass. In the remaining 94 percent, represented by the Antarctic [which is ALSO growing] and Greenland, the ice sheets are expanding. The West Greenland Ice Sheet, the largest mass of polar ice in the Northern Hemisphere, has thickened by up to seven feet since 1980.

http://www.heartland.org/archives/environment/may99/melting.htm

Here is a google search link with many other articles on how Greenland glaciers are GROWING, not shrinking.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=Greenland+glaciers+expanding&btnG=Google+Search

[Redcloak]

First of all, for safety's sake, lets move the UN to Tibet next week.

What did the Tibetans ever do to you?

[Major_Risktaker]

"Global warming already kills 150,000 people a year"

WOW! I must call to see if my life insurance policy covers Global Warming.

Will a doctor sign a death certificate saying the cause of death due to Global Warming and who is financing the global warming agenda?

[U S Army EOD]

Well Greenland then since it will be bright and sunny there soon.

[ChemistCat]

They need to take this up with the sun. The sun's variations heterodyne with the Earth's own fossil heat to produce far more wide-ranging climate change than we could manage, even if we did the best we could to change it.

But of course, these people think that governments are onmnpotent, so if evil bad things happen to any human or animal anywhere, it's because government refused to act in time.

[Drammach]

As noted, (somewhere else, another article) the planet's poles are melting..
ON MARS..

Seems to me, Man's ability to change climate must have reached "interplanetary" proportions.

I agree completely, the cyclical activity of the Sun is probably more responsible for the cycles of climate change on THIS planet than anything humanity can do.

Interesting aside;
Did you know that it has been recently discovered, as part of this solar cyclic activity, the Sun actually "shed's it's skin" ??
Note similarities to Ancient Indian (Native American) legends tying the symbol of Sun and Snake and "circle of life" together..
Sometimes I wonder how much those ancients "really" knew, and how they "knew" it?

[U S Army EOD]

They had an ancient copy of Tribal Inquirer.

[FReepaholic]

>>...Um, help me out here...ICE displaces water and raises the level. When it melts, the level subsides. What am I missing?...<<

My 6th graders' science textbook had a statement about how if the polar ice cap melted the seas would rise.

To prove to him that was wrong, I had him take a glass of water half-filled and put several ice cubes in and mark the water level.

The next morning he saw that when the ice melted the water level actually was LOWER than before.

He saw for himself that you can't always believe what's preached in government schools.

[boris]

"if true, the Sun's increased activity would correspond to the gradual (albeit historically small) global increase in temperatures over the past 100 years."

You are correct.

--Boris

[Normal4me]

Woo Hoo!! I am 31 feet above sea level. I am beach front just a waiting to happen!

[Redcloak]

There's a slight risk of then getting sacked by time-travelling Vikings, but Greenland is a better choice than Tibet.

[Malsua]

>>Um, help me out here...ICE displaces water and raises the level. When it melts, the level subsides. What am I missing?

Thank you. I never have a puddle of water on the table when I let a glass of water and ice melt.

What are we both missing?<<

Not that I believe the global warming claptrap, but the issue isn't with ice shelfs or glaciers already floating in the water. It's with land bound glaciers such as the Ross Ice Shelf which is partly floating and mostly on land. The shelf is the size of France and upon melting entirely, the sea levels would rise some 10-20 feet, depending on who you ask.

I don't for a second think that all of the glaciers are going to melt any time soon which definately would raise the sea level some few hundred feet. Everything is cyclical, mother Earth has been at this a very very long time. Whatever happens, we will adjust.

[Jim Noble]

Here's what the world has seen for the past 450 000 years:

All these global warming lies are getting so OLD.

[Drammach]

want to know exactly how global warming is already killing 150,000 a year. How do they distinguish gobal warming deaths from other deaths?

Me Oui, is it not obvious?
Did not all those French Senior Citizens die of heat stroke just this summer? As well as many other seniors in various European countries?

Sacre Bleu!
Is this not evidence enough?
( Snide, anti-european sarcasm OFF )

[Wonder Warthog]

"History really isn't their strong suit."

Neither is science (or logic for that matter).

[Capitalist Eric]

You know, anybody with more than three grey-cells that can fire together, will look at this "report," and immediately disregard the findings.

Consider, if you will, statistical theory. I can prove, using multiple regression analysis, that churches cause crime, and that hospitals are death-traps. Because you see, Churches and ministers go where they're needed. And more people die in hospitals than anywhere else...

Of course, both conclusions have one small problem- the fail the "sniff-test."

This report also fails the sniff-test... And the history test.

[U S Army EOD]

Well let me try this, would you agree with me, if we could just move it out of the US, say some place like Anartica?

[U S Army EOD]

Those quick spikes downward are scary.

[crz]

That means that all that garbage that is laying around on the streets of the UK will float out to sea. Those who live in glass houses.. I cant quite get over how much trash is simply thrown out and left by the Brits in their country. The worst is in Scotland where in a lot of places you couldnt walk anyalong without stepping on garbage. Just get off the main roads and take a look. Then the question of dumping raw sewage into the ocean. Take a trip along the shores into some of these villages and note the sewer lines that run into the sea. And dont walk on the shores along there as you'll step on someones dinner from the night before. I cant imagine what it looks like on the continent.