Are Democrats exhibiting epic fail on climate change?

brianlux said:

Halifax2TheMax said:

Not to be a Debbie Downer but t

Remember, 1/3 of repub voters, maybe more, think its all a hoax. Until they become engaged and care, our politicians, from both parties, cant/wont do shit. Because, freedumb.

Two Antarctic glaciers that have long kept scientists awake at night are breaking free from the restraints that have hemmed them in, increasing the threat of large-scale sea-level rise.

Located along the coast of the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica, the enormous Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers already contribute around 5 percent of global sea-level rise. The survival of Thwaites has been deemed so critical that the United States and Britain have launched a targeted multimillion-dollar research mission to the glacier. The loss of the glacier could trigger the broader collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which contains enough ice to eventually raise seas by about 10 feet.

The new findings, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, come from analysis of satellite images. They show that a naturally occurring buffer system that prevents the glaciers from flowing outward rapidly is breaking down, potentially unleashing far more ice into the sea in coming years.

The glaciers’ “shear margins,” where their floating ice shelves encounter high levels of friction that constrain the natural flow of ice, are progressively weakening and in some cases breaking into pieces.

“The stresses that slow down the glacier, they are no longer in place, so the glacier is speeding up,” said Stef Lhermitte, a satellite expert at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands who led the new research along with colleagues from NASA and other research institutions in France, Belgium, Austria and the Netherlands.

While many of the images have been seen before, the new analysis suggests that they are a sign of further disintegration to come.

“We already knew that these were glaciers that might matter in the future, but these images to me indicate that these ice shelves are in a very bad state,” Lhermitte said.

It’s just the latest in a flurry of bad news about the planet’s ice.

Arctic sea ice is very close to — but likely to not quite reach — a record low for this time of year. Last month, Canada lost a large portion of its last major Arctic ice shelf.

And in Greenland, the largest still-intact ice shelf in the Northern Hemisphere, sometimes known as 79 North because of its latitude (its full name is Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden), just lost a large chunk of ice, equivalent in size to roughly two Manhattan islands, according to the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. Experts there blamed the fracture on a strong general warming trend and temperatures that have been “incredibly” high in the northeast of Greenland in recent years.

Ice shelves are vast floating platforms that extend across the surface of the ocean at the outer edge of marine-based glaciers. As they flow over the water, these shelves freeze onto mountainsides and islands and anchor themselves to bumps in the seafloor. In this way, the shelves provide a braking mechanism on the natural outward flow of ice.

The buttressing effect occurs in the shear margins, where faster-flowing ice meets ice that is more static and stable, often because it is moored to some part of the landscape. In these places, the ice frequently crumples and contorts, a visible indication of the powerful stresses that it is under.

But when those stresses become too much, ice breaks. That’s what’s now happening in West Antarctica, the new research argues, suggesting that warm ocean water has thinned the ice shelves out enough from below that they became brittle.

At the same time, and for the same reason, the glaciers themselves began to flow outward faster. The resulting forces led the shear-margin ice to break into pieces — which means that the glacier, less constrained, will now be able to add ice to the ocean even faster.

For the Pine Island Glacier, the new study finds that while the cracking and fraying at the shear margin dates to 1999, it accelerated in 2016. Here’s a video based on images from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel satellite, showing the changes in the past four years:

Even more concerning is the Thwaites Glacier. Here, again, the breakdown of the shear margin has increased in recent years:

“This is important work,” Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Pennsylvania State University, said of the new study.

Alley noted that the processes playing out in Antarctica appear to have already reached their completion in parts of Greenland, where one of the largest glaciers, Jakobshavn, no longer has any significant ice shelf at all. When it lost that shelf around the year 2000, Jakobshavn’s rate of ice loss steeply increased.

The 79 North glacier still has a major ice shelf, as do some of Greenland’s other northernmost glaciers, but many of these have lost considerable size in recent decades.

“The new paper shows that the Amundsen Sea Embayment ice shelves have gone through most, but not all, of the Jakobshavn steps,” Alley said in an email. “[A] warming ocean thinned the ice shelves, this reduced buttressing, this let the non-floating ice move faster, contributing some to sea-level rise and also starting to break the sides of the ice shelves, but additional acceleration could occur if the rest of the steps (further fracture and ice-shelf loss) should occur.”

Multiple ice-shelf collapses have already been seen in Canada, Greenland and the warmer Antarctic Peninsula, where the onetime Larsen A and Larsen B ice shelves fractured and, today, no longer exist.

“When the ice shelves are damaged by climate change, as we saw in the Antarctic Peninsula in the last several decades, their buttressing effect is reduced and the ice streams speed up and raise sea levels,” said Isabella Velicogna, a glaciologist at the University of California at Irvine, commenting on the new study. “The speed-up increases damage, a positive feedback which is not good news.”

If a similar process plays out in the Amundsen Sea of West Antarctica, where Pine Island and Thwaites are, the sea-level consequences could be enormous.

Lhermitte provided calculations showing that over the past six years, the western and central parts of the Pine Island ice shelf have shrunk by about 30 percent, from about 1,500 square miles down to closer to 1,000 square miles. In other words, an area about the size of Los Angeles has been lost.

“This shear margin is so damaged we think it preconditions this ice shelf for destabilization on the longer term,” Lhermitte said. “These are the first signs we see that Pine Island ice shelf is disappearing. This damage is difficult to heal.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/09/14/glaciers-breaking-antarctica-pine-island-thwaites/

I don't see stating reality as being a Debbie Downer, H2M.  The biggest Debbie Downers are the climate change deniers. 

"he American public, in general, could care two shits about this happening."  

I would guess that if you took a survey, you would find the majority- a slim majority perhaps- of Americans (and First World people in general) actually are concerned about climate change and environmental issues. What you won't find is a majority willing to make the sacrifices necessary to make the needed changes.  Recycling cans and bottles is not enough.  We need to also be willing to consume fewer products, buy things that are durable, practice re-use more often, commute fewer miles in cars, live in smaller houses, use less heat and air conditioning, eat less red meat, travel and fly less often, support environmental groups like Sea Shepherds, Natural Resources Defense Committee, Wildlands Network- organizations that do less fund raising and take more action, reproduce in smaller numbers, and be a more active voice for defending wildlife and the planet.  The average First World person is weak in most of these actions.

brianlux said:

Halifax2TheMax said:

This is why we cant have nice things:

And boy did they play the part on Tuesday. In a moment that started out with a bit of journalistic meaning, Kilmeade asked Trump how to react to climate change without trashing the economy. Trump said this:

TRUMP: Well look, Brian, you have forests all over the world. You don’t have fires like you do in California, you know. In Europe, they have forest cities. You look at — you look at countries — Austria. You look at so many countries, they live in the forest. They’re considered forest cities — so many of them. And they don’t have fires like this and they have more explosive trees. They have trees that will catch easier. But they maintain their fire. They have an expression, they thin the fuel. The fuel is what’s on the ground — the leaves.

DOOCY: Right.

TRUMP: The trees that fall, they’re dry. They’re like — they’re like a matchstick, you know, after 18 months. If they’re on the ground longer than 18 months, they’re very explosive. And they have to get rid of that stuff and they have to manage their — they have to manage their fires.

The “Fox & Friends” crew didn’t ask Trump to cite a few examples of these “forest cities.” Twitter, of course, filled in the gaps.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/15/how-desperate-is-trump-he-wants-do-weekly-fox-friends-stints/

The crux of the joke here is "The fuel is what’s on the ground — the leaves."

Tree leaves:

Evergreen needles:

Most of what is burning in the west:

brianlux said:

jeffbr said:

brianlux said:

Halifax2TheMax said:

Not to be a Debbie Downer but t

Remember, 1/3 of repub voters, maybe more, think its all a hoax. Until they become engaged and care, our politicians, from both parties, cant/wont do shit. Because, freedumb.

Two Antarctic glaciers that have long kept scientists awake at night are breaking free from the restraints that have hemmed them in, increasing the threat of large-scale sea-level rise.

Located along the coast of the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica, the enormous Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers already contribute around 5 percent of global sea-level rise. The survival of Thwaites has been deemed so critical that the United States and Britain have launched a targeted multimillion-dollar research mission to the glacier. The loss of the glacier could trigger the broader collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which contains enough ice to eventually raise seas by about 10 feet.

The new findings, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, come from analysis of satellite images. They show that a naturally occurring buffer system that prevents the glaciers from flowing outward rapidly is breaking down, potentially unleashing far more ice into the sea in coming years.

The glaciers’ “shear margins,” where their floating ice shelves encounter high levels of friction that constrain the natural flow of ice, are progressively weakening and in some cases breaking into pieces.

“The stresses that slow down the glacier, they are no longer in place, so the glacier is speeding up,” said Stef Lhermitte, a satellite expert at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands who led the new research along with colleagues from NASA and other research institutions in France, Belgium, Austria and the Netherlands.

While many of the images have been seen before, the new analysis suggests that they are a sign of further disintegration to come.

“We already knew that these were glaciers that might matter in the future, but these images to me indicate that these ice shelves are in a very bad state,” Lhermitte said.

It’s just the latest in a flurry of bad news about the planet’s ice.

Arctic sea ice is very close to — but likely to not quite reach — a record low for this time of year. Last month, Canada lost a large portion of its last major Arctic ice shelf.

And in Greenland, the largest still-intact ice shelf in the Northern Hemisphere, sometimes known as 79 North because of its latitude (its full name is Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden), just lost a large chunk of ice, equivalent in size to roughly two Manhattan islands, according to the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. Experts there blamed the fracture on a strong general warming trend and temperatures that have been “incredibly” high in the northeast of Greenland in recent years.

Ice shelves are vast floating platforms that extend across the surface of the ocean at the outer edge of marine-based glaciers. As they flow over the water, these shelves freeze onto mountainsides and islands and anchor themselves to bumps in the seafloor. In this way, the shelves provide a braking mechanism on the natural outward flow of ice.

The buttressing effect occurs in the shear margins, where faster-flowing ice meets ice that is more static and stable, often because it is moored to some part of the landscape. In these places, the ice frequently crumples and contorts, a visible indication of the powerful stresses that it is under.

But when those stresses become too much, ice breaks. That’s what’s now happening in West Antarctica, the new research argues, suggesting that warm ocean water has thinned the ice shelves out enough from below that they became brittle.

At the same time, and for the same reason, the glaciers themselves began to flow outward faster. The resulting forces led the shear-margin ice to break into pieces — which means that the glacier, less constrained, will now be able to add ice to the ocean even faster.

For the Pine Island Glacier, the new study finds that while the cracking and fraying at the shear margin dates to 1999, it accelerated in 2016. Here’s a video based on images from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel satellite, showing the changes in the past four years:

Even more concerning is the Thwaites Glacier. Here, again, the breakdown of the shear margin has increased in recent years:

“This is important work,” Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Pennsylvania State University, said of the new study.

Alley noted that the processes playing out in Antarctica appear to have already reached their completion in parts of Greenland, where one of the largest glaciers, Jakobshavn, no longer has any significant ice shelf at all. When it lost that shelf around the year 2000, Jakobshavn’s rate of ice loss steeply increased.

The 79 North glacier still has a major ice shelf, as do some of Greenland’s other northernmost glaciers, but many of these have lost considerable size in recent decades.

“The new paper shows that the Amundsen Sea Embayment ice shelves have gone through most, but not all, of the Jakobshavn steps,” Alley said in an email. “[A] warming ocean thinned the ice shelves, this reduced buttressing, this let the non-floating ice move faster, contributing some to sea-level rise and also starting to break the sides of the ice shelves, but additional acceleration could occur if the rest of the steps (further fracture and ice-shelf loss) should occur.”

Multiple ice-shelf collapses have already been seen in Canada, Greenland and the warmer Antarctic Peninsula, where the onetime Larsen A and Larsen B ice shelves fractured and, today, no longer exist.

“When the ice shelves are damaged by climate change, as we saw in the Antarctic Peninsula in the last several decades, their buttressing effect is reduced and the ice streams speed up and raise sea levels,” said Isabella Velicogna, a glaciologist at the University of California at Irvine, commenting on the new study. “The speed-up increases damage, a positive feedback which is not good news.”

If a similar process plays out in the Amundsen Sea of West Antarctica, where Pine Island and Thwaites are, the sea-level consequences could be enormous.

Lhermitte provided calculations showing that over the past six years, the western and central parts of the Pine Island ice shelf have shrunk by about 30 percent, from about 1,500 square miles down to closer to 1,000 square miles. In other words, an area about the size of Los Angeles has been lost.

“This shear margin is so damaged we think it preconditions this ice shelf for destabilization on the longer term,” Lhermitte said. “These are the first signs we see that Pine Island ice shelf is disappearing. This damage is difficult to heal.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/09/14/glaciers-breaking-antarctica-pine-island-thwaites/

I don't see stating reality as being a Debbie Downer, H2M.  The biggest Debbie Downers are the climate change deniers. 

"he American public, in general, could care two shits about this happening."  

I would guess that if you took a survey, you would find the majority- a slim majority perhaps- of Americans (and First World people in general) actually are concerned about climate change and environmental issues. What you won't find is a majority willing to make the sacrifices necessary to make the needed changes.  Recycling cans and bottles is not enough.  We need to also be willing to consume fewer products, buy things that are durable, practice re-use more often, commute fewer miles in cars, live in smaller houses, use less heat and air conditioning, eat less red meat, travel and fly less often, support environmental groups like Sea Shepherds, Natural Resources Defense Committee, Wildlands Network- organizations that do less fund raising and take more action, reproduce in smaller numbers, and be a more active voice for defending wildlife and the planet.  The average First World person is weak in most of these actions.

Yeah, I'm reading a book right now about an expedition in 2013 to traverse the Northwest Passage in a 4 person row boat. The author stopped in an arctic village and an elder was talking to him about how things have changed for him in the last 50 years, and talked about warming. The author wondered if climate deniers would claim that the elder had an agenda and then rhetorically wondered what agenda the climate deniers have. This elder obviously had no agenda, because he has little contact with the the modern world, and was merely observing how his isolated life had changed. He didn't need science, news or an agenda to inform him - he was living it. The science confirms it though, and made the expedition possible. This expedition wouldn't have even been attempted years ago due to ice.

Sounds like a good book, Jeff. I might want to read it.  Is it this one?

HughFreakingDillon said:

jeffbr said:

brianlux said:

Halifax2TheMax said:

Not to be a Debbie Downer but t

Remember, 1/3 of repub voters, maybe more, think its all a hoax. Until they become engaged and care, our politicians, from both parties, cant/wont do shit. Because, freedumb.

Two Antarctic glaciers that have long kept scientists awake at night are breaking free from the restraints that have hemmed them in, increasing the threat of large-scale sea-level rise.

Located along the coast of the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica, the enormous Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers already contribute around 5 percent of global sea-level rise. The survival of Thwaites has been deemed so critical that the United States and Britain have launched a targeted multimillion-dollar research mission to the glacier. The loss of the glacier could trigger the broader collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which contains enough ice to eventually raise seas by about 10 feet.

The new findings, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, come from analysis of satellite images. They show that a naturally occurring buffer system that prevents the glaciers from flowing outward rapidly is breaking down, potentially unleashing far more ice into the sea in coming years.

The glaciers’ “shear margins,” where their floating ice shelves encounter high levels of friction that constrain the natural flow of ice, are progressively weakening and in some cases breaking into pieces.

“The stresses that slow down the glacier, they are no longer in place, so the glacier is speeding up,” said Stef Lhermitte, a satellite expert at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands who led the new research along with colleagues from NASA and other research institutions in France, Belgium, Austria and the Netherlands.

While many of the images have been seen before, the new analysis suggests that they are a sign of further disintegration to come.

“We already knew that these were glaciers that might matter in the future, but these images to me indicate that these ice shelves are in a very bad state,” Lhermitte said.

It’s just the latest in a flurry of bad news about the planet’s ice.

Arctic sea ice is very close to — but likely to not quite reach — a record low for this time of year. Last month, Canada lost a large portion of its last major Arctic ice shelf.

And in Greenland, the largest still-intact ice shelf in the Northern Hemisphere, sometimes known as 79 North because of its latitude (its full name is Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden), just lost a large chunk of ice, equivalent in size to roughly two Manhattan islands, according to the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. Experts there blamed the fracture on a strong general warming trend and temperatures that have been “incredibly” high in the northeast of Greenland in recent years.

Ice shelves are vast floating platforms that extend across the surface of the ocean at the outer edge of marine-based glaciers. As they flow over the water, these shelves freeze onto mountainsides and islands and anchor themselves to bumps in the seafloor. In this way, the shelves provide a braking mechanism on the natural outward flow of ice.

The buttressing effect occurs in the shear margins, where faster-flowing ice meets ice that is more static and stable, often because it is moored to some part of the landscape. In these places, the ice frequently crumples and contorts, a visible indication of the powerful stresses that it is under.

But when those stresses become too much, ice breaks. That’s what’s now happening in West Antarctica, the new research argues, suggesting that warm ocean water has thinned the ice shelves out enough from below that they became brittle.

At the same time, and for the same reason, the glaciers themselves began to flow outward faster. The resulting forces led the shear-margin ice to break into pieces — which means that the glacier, less constrained, will now be able to add ice to the ocean even faster.

For the Pine Island Glacier, the new study finds that while the cracking and fraying at the shear margin dates to 1999, it accelerated in 2016. Here’s a video based on images from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel satellite, showing the changes in the past four years:

Even more concerning is the Thwaites Glacier. Here, again, the breakdown of the shear margin has increased in recent years:

“This is important work,” Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Pennsylvania State University, said of the new study.

Alley noted that the processes playing out in Antarctica appear to have already reached their completion in parts of Greenland, where one of the largest glaciers, Jakobshavn, no longer has any significant ice shelf at all. When it lost that shelf around the year 2000, Jakobshavn’s rate of ice loss steeply increased.

The 79 North glacier still has a major ice shelf, as do some of Greenland’s other northernmost glaciers, but many of these have lost considerable size in recent decades.

“The new paper shows that the Amundsen Sea Embayment ice shelves have gone through most, but not all, of the Jakobshavn steps,” Alley said in an email. “[A] warming ocean thinned the ice shelves, this reduced buttressing, this let the non-floating ice move faster, contributing some to sea-level rise and also starting to break the sides of the ice shelves, but additional acceleration could occur if the rest of the steps (further fracture and ice-shelf loss) should occur.”

Multiple ice-shelf collapses have already been seen in Canada, Greenland and the warmer Antarctic Peninsula, where the onetime Larsen A and Larsen B ice shelves fractured and, today, no longer exist.

“When the ice shelves are damaged by climate change, as we saw in the Antarctic Peninsula in the last several decades, their buttressing effect is reduced and the ice streams speed up and raise sea levels,” said Isabella Velicogna, a glaciologist at the University of California at Irvine, commenting on the new study. “The speed-up increases damage, a positive feedback which is not good news.”

If a similar process plays out in the Amundsen Sea of West Antarctica, where Pine Island and Thwaites are, the sea-level consequences could be enormous.

Lhermitte provided calculations showing that over the past six years, the western and central parts of the Pine Island ice shelf have shrunk by about 30 percent, from about 1,500 square miles down to closer to 1,000 square miles. In other words, an area about the size of Los Angeles has been lost.

“This shear margin is so damaged we think it preconditions this ice shelf for destabilization on the longer term,” Lhermitte said. “These are the first signs we see that Pine Island ice shelf is disappearing. This damage is difficult to heal.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/09/14/glaciers-breaking-antarctica-pine-island-thwaites/

I don't see stating reality as being a Debbie Downer, H2M.  The biggest Debbie Downers are the climate change deniers. 

"he American public, in general, could care two shits about this happening."  

I would guess that if you took a survey, you would find the majority- a slim majority perhaps- of Americans (and First World people in general) actually are concerned about climate change and environmental issues. What you won't find is a majority willing to make the sacrifices necessary to make the needed changes.  Recycling cans and bottles is not enough.  We need to also be willing to consume fewer products, buy things that are durable, practice re-use more often, commute fewer miles in cars, live in smaller houses, use less heat and air conditioning, eat less red meat, travel and fly less often, support environmental groups like Sea Shepherds, Natural Resources Defense Committee, Wildlands Network- organizations that do less fund raising and take more action, reproduce in smaller numbers, and be a more active voice for defending wildlife and the planet.  The average First World person is weak in most of these actions.

Yeah, I'm reading a book right now about an expedition in 2013 to traverse the Northwest Passage in a 4 person row boat. The author stopped in an arctic village and an elder was talking to him about how things have changed for him in the last 50 years, and talked about warming. The author wondered if climate deniers would claim that the elder had an agenda and then rhetorically wondered what agenda the climate deniers have. This elder obviously had no agenda, because he has little contact with the the modern world, and was merely observing how his isolated life had changed. He didn't need science, news or an agenda to inform him - he was living it. The science confirms it though, and made the expedition possible. This expedition wouldn't have even been attempted years ago due to ice.

the problem though, with climate change deniers, is two fold; you tell them the planet's climate is changing in dramatic fashion, they say "no it's not". you show them data, they shift to "climate is cyclical; there's no way to prove it won't revert back like it always does". 

there is no convincing them. 

brianlux said:

Just ran across this earlier today.  Yet another example of epic fail on the part of liberal democrat who talks the talk but doesn't walk it.  I most like Newsom, but this doesn't cut it for me.

https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/new-permits-newsom-ramps-fracking-california-2020-07-06/

July 6, 2020

                                                             With New Permits, Newsom Ramps Up Fracking in California

360 New Fracking Events Approved So Far This Year

SACRAMENTO, Calif.— Gov. Gavin Newsom’s oil and gas regulatory agency has approved 12 new permits for Chevron to conduct hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in the Lost Hills Oil Field in Kern County.

The authorizations — issued late Thursday afternoon, just before the holiday weekend — will allow Chevron to frack these wells 168 times.

“It’s outrageous that Gov. Newsom is handing out fracking permits during a pandemic that disproportionately harms polluted communities,” said Hollin Kretzmann, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The governor needs to stop recklessly approving fracking and new oil and gas drilling. Instead of restarting fracking in areas already suffering from dirty air, Newsom should direct oil companies to start plugging these dangerous wells to create jobs and move us away from polluting fossil fuels.”