The Ice Caps

This is scary, scary stuff:

Following two recent studies on changes to Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, NASA is touting a survey that it says confirms “climate warming is changing how much water remains locked in Earth’s largest storehouses of ice and snow.”

In a press release for the survey, NASA directly tied the changes to warming and described the survey as “the most comprehensive” ever in both regions.That stand can in part be explained by lead author Jay Zwally’s warning....

“We’re seeing the early signs of changes in the ice sheets,” he added. “The climate warming from greenhouse gases has really just started.”

As much as I talk about Iraq and national security, those things are small beans compared with the administration's failure to acknowledge let alone confront global warming.  (Not that the White House is alone in fiddle-faddling.) GW, after all, is going to affect the world far more than Iraq--and I suspect it will affect the world far quicker than most of us think. Why? Feedback loops, such as, say, the icesheets melting.

Comments

[mat]

I can suggest an excellent news blog on this subject for those interested at http://www.warmplanet.org

[Paul Guinnessy]

I also recommend http://realclimate.org. They critque news reports that get details wrong (or applaud them when they get them right), on climate change.

[Zathras]

What could be done about global warming at this point that would alter the course of climate change?

I'm not arguing, I'm asking. I know enough about what it takes to makes icefields at both poles recede as much as they have in recent years to guess that even halting the process would mean taking every car in the world off the road for the next ten years. Do we have a desired outcome here, or have we the idea that things that have already happened can be made to unhappen?

[Eric Umansky]

Zathras, my understanding is that, yes, actually reversing global warming would mean pretty radical changes (every car off the road, though, I dunno). But the uncertainties cuts both ways, and given the likely impact of global warming, it strikes me that we should make every effort to do as much as we can as quickly as we can even if there's a solid chance it won't be enough. Obviously there needs to be a balance--we can't just order all cars off the roads and start imposing embargoes on those countries that don't follow along. But there are a helluva lot of steps between that and just throwing our hands up and saying all is lost.

[Zathras]

Well, Eric, this is why I was asking. The whole reason President Bush and Congress both stalled on addressing climate change was because doing so would mean seriously unpopular restrictions on energy use.

That hasn't changed. As far as I can tell there is no "balanced," "moderate" or anything other than seriously unpopular way to actually do something to halt climate change -- and even the radical, politically unfeasible options can't be shown to be effective. As in, there is no evidence whatever that they would be effective in our lifetimes.

As a rule, I'm a fan of "doing as much as we can as soon as we can" about serious problems; politics is the art of the possible, and all that. But if I thought government programs that only existed to make people feel that something was being done made sense, I'd be a Democrat. We still need to figure out what is attainable with respect to climate change, and how. Calls to action that promise no results and don't even convey an idea of where we are trying to go won't get us anywhere.

[Auros]

Zath, the easy/popular things are stuff like _actually_ investing in alt-energy (like Bush said he wanted to, and then cut money from alt-energy research). We could also raise gas-milage requirements -- last time we did that, the industry screamed and moaned about how it would raise costs, and yet here we are, decades on, with cheaper, better-efficiency vehicles. We could raise efficiency requirements on other powered goods, as well -- I believe A/C is another one, like cars, where past hikes in efficiency have never actually come at a cost to consumers.

A lot of these industries CAN produce better products; they just DON'T, until we force them to.

[SqueakyRat]

The fact is that any reduction in greenhouse gas emissions will in fact pay off in a reduction in global warming, but perhaps not for a long time. There are two kinds of people in the world: the ones who think the medium-distant future is worth doing something about, and the ones who don't. It appears the latter kind are the ones making our policies.

[Piers]

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