Posted on 11/08/2004 8:11:13 AM PST by cogitator
Boulder climate researcher Michael Glantz predicts that future historians will look back on the 21st century as the Climate Century.
"Climate will dominate the news, now and then, throughout this century," Glantz said Sunday at a meeting of the Geological Society of America.
Food production, water resources, energy needs, infectious-disease outbreaks, wildfires and the frequency and severity of extreme weather events will be altered in unknown and surprising ways by climate changes, said Glantz, a social scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
And humans will help shape future climate by their actions - or by failing to act.
Heat-trapping greenhouse gases emitted by the burning of fossil fuels are blamed for part of the 1 degree global temperature increase of the past century. Most climate researchers expect the warming to accelerate in coming decades.
"People are now part of the climate system, and we have to accept that," Glantz said during a session titled "Geoscientific Aspects of Human and Ecosystem Vulnerability."
During another Sunday session, three climate researchers explained how sea ice and glaciers are already responding to a warming world.
For the third consecutive summer, extreme sea-ice losses were observed in the Arctic in 2004, said Mark Serreze of the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Arctic sea ice is the floating mass of ice that covers the Arctic Ocean. It shrinks during the summer melt season, then expands again starting in the fall.
At the end of summer, Arctic ice normally covers a region the size of Australia. But in recent years, big summer losses have taken a huge bite from the Arctic ice.
This year, the September sea-ice extent was 13.4 percent below the long-term average, a reduction in area nearly twice the size of Texas. The loss of Arctic sea ice worsens coastal erosion problems.
"There are entire villages in coastal Alaska that are having to be moved because of the erosion," Serreze said Sunday.
CU glaciologist Mark Meier said the global retreat of mountain glaciers is "perhaps the most visible evidence of global warming."
Melting glaciers are contributing to rising sea levels, which threaten coastal areas with flooding and erosion, he said.
Satellite observations show that the global sea level is rising 0.12 to 0.16 inches per year, Meier said. By the end of this century, the sea level could rise 1 to 1.3 feet, he said.
In the Antarctic, the outer edges of the continental ice sheet are thinning, while inland ice is slowly thickening.
The collapse of ice shelves along the outer fringes of Antarctica does not affect sea level because the shelves float on the ocean.
But the shelves act as dams that block the seaward flow of glacial ice off the continent, said Pennsylvania State University researcher Richard Alley.
In March 2002, a Delaware-sized Antarctic Peninsula ice shelf, called -Larsen B, collapsed. Since then, some glaciers in the region have been flowing seaward five times faster.
Losing substantial amounts of glacial ice from the Antarctic and Greenland could increase the rate of sea-level rise dramatically, Alley said Sunday.
"At this point, it would be reckless to predict any disaster," Alley said. "But it would also be reckless to assure that there's no disaster coming."
More than 6,000 researchers are attending this week's Geological Society of America meeting at the Colorado Convention Center.
There were wars in the 20th century over water rights.
Me, I find it amazing that we'll have nothing to talk about for the rest of the century other than the weather.
This can't be true. Globull warmers are telling us we are all gonna die in 100 years. How can there even be future historians?
How does a guy get to be a social scientist, and work for the federal government!?? Since he's presenting these findings, he's probably a GS-12 or GS-14 ... unbelievable ...
Figures.
"There are entire villages in coastal Alaska that are having to be moved because of the erosion," Serreze said Sunday.
Name one ...
What's unbelievable?
Global warming is a total crock, junk science at its worst. See the work of Sun and Baliunas at Harvard, or look up "Medieval Warm Period" (it really was provably warmer back then, yet they had no industry to speak of).
That's SOON and Baliunas. Middle age is so much fun...
Chicken Little now has a government job, I see.
Shishmaref.
"The CIA 2015 report predicted that there would be wars in the 21st century over water rights."
If not water, they would have to find something else....
Three words: Propaganda. Hegel. HAARP.
'....You now face a new world, a world of change.
The thrust into outer space of the satellite, spheres, and missiles marks
a beginning of another epoch in the long story of mankind.
In the five or more billions of years the scientists tell us it has taken to
form the earth, in the three or more billion years of development of the
human race, there has never been a more abrupt or staggering evolution.
We deal now, not with things of this world alone, but with the illimitable
distances and as yet unfathomed mysteries of the universe.
We are reaching out for a new and boundless frontier.
***We speak in strange terms of harnessing the cosmic energy, ****of making
winds and tides work for us, of creating unheard of synthetic materials to
supplement or even replace our old standard basics, ***to purify sea water
for our drink, of mining ocean floors for new fields of wealth and food,
of disease preventatives to expand life into the hundred of years,
***of controlling the weather for a more equitable distribution of heat and cold,
of rain and shine, of spaceships to the moon, of the primary target in war,
no longer limited to the armed forces of an enemy, but instead to include
his civil populations; of ultimate conflict between a united human race
and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy, of such dreams
and fantasies as to make life the most exciting of all times.
And through all this welter of change and development your mission
remains fixed, determined, inviolable.
It is to win our wars....."
Excerpt:
General MacArthur's Thayer Award Speech
Duty - Honor - Country
1962
http://members.tripod.com/~DARTO/macarthur/macarthur.html
"Global warming morons. They can read ALL about global warming in the Bible at - "
I would take it a step or two beyond that:
Mic 4:3 And he shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
Zec 14:17 And it shall be, [that] whoso will not come up of [all] the families of the earth unto Jerusalem to worship the King, the LORD of hosts, even upon them shall be no rain.
(may not be the Jerusalem you are probably thinking of)
That's because they're the "reality based" community :-)
Uh...help me out here.. :-) Which Jerusalem? "New Jerusalem"?
These guys would have curled up and died in the Jurassic Period then. It was a LOT warmer than now
It has scientific in the title so it must be scientific (women and minorities hit hardest).
And a bear defecates al fresco. They've always had a dark view -- of course, it used to be a new ice age they were fretting about.
Erosion has nothing to do with global warming -- it's just the sea doing its primordial thing, eroding here, depositing beaches there.....There is more erosion during Ice Ages than during warming periods.
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