[catmando]

Originally Posted by wdrzal

Under water Polar volcano's have been documented under the polar ice. Could it be possible this is the cause of loss of polar ice, Not Global Warming.


look at date of Link, there are actually photo's on the web now confirming this,can't recall where.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/...be_due_to.html

What about the Antarctic melt? Are volcanos responsible for that? Greenland? Iceland?

[brian eiland]

This was a rather 'chilly message' I just received

[Ju52]

Hi Brian

we have seen this pics here last winter ..??
and are taken in Switzerland two ore januar 2007

The REAL source is there http://www.pbase.com/scherrer/january_2005_ice_storm

have a NICE new year!

[Rene GER]

Originally Posted by brian eiland

This was a rather 'chilly message' I just received

Hmmm...if I remember right, the pics where posted 2 years ago.

But, thanks for new posting. Didn't find that.

EDIT: Found! http://www.yachtforums.com/forums/ya...1-got-ice.html

[brian eiland]

I recall seeing them previously myself. But I thought they elicited such a 'cold feeling' I couldn't resist posting them here

[catmando]

Hmm, ice cubes in whatever will not change the level when melting. Same as sea ice. Only land based ice can add to the sea level. AMG


Quite right, I got confused. In any case, the Arctic ice pack is melting faster earlier than it ever has since we've been keeping records. The South Sea Islands are slowly being submerged. The western Antarctic glaciers are calving off giants at record speeds. Last year parts of the Amazon jungle equaling the state of Rhode Island were burned and converted to pasture and croplands which will supply beef and corn to the United States, the latter of which will go into biodiesel fuel.

We are "fouling our own nest" and there will be devastating consequences.

[AMG]

Which South Sea Islands are being submerged? If this was the case, wouldn´t the media report?

The Brown Clouds over many of the developing countries, especially in Asia has been observed as heating more than cooling the land surface:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6926597.stm

Now a team has found out that as much as two thirds of the particles are from burning biomass, with just one third from cars, coal power and industry.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articl...23/2472921.htm

It contributes to half of the warming earlier said to come from CO2, and probably a quarter of the last centurys total global warming. The good thing is that the brown clouds can be reduced in a couple of weeks if all burning stops while the CO2 will remain for many years.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/conten...i;323/5913/495

This puts the CO2 debate a little in a new perspective. If we have had 0.7°C warming, (some say it is just half of that due to suburban heat islands), but anyway, about half was contributed to CO2 (0.35°C) and now half of that is from brown clouds so about 0.17°C may be from CO2. This is what we now are supposed to reduce by carbon taxes and what have you, at great costs for all of our societies....

Don´t trust my figures, it can be even half again, only science will tell. Remember this is not politics, oil dependence is.

[catmando]

Had not heard of this island before, but there are reports about other islands also;

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...ad-841409.html


Paradise lost: climate change forces South Sea islanders to seek sanctuary abroad

By Kathy Marks, Asia-Pacific Correspondent
Friday, 6 June 2008

After years of fruitless appeals for decisive action on climate change, the tiny South Pacific nation of Kiribati has concluded that it is doomed. Yesterday its President, Anote Tong, used World Environment Day to request international help to evacuate his country before it disappears.

Water supplies are being contaminated by the encroaching salt water, Mr Tong said, and crops destroyed. Beachside communities have been moved inland. But Kiribati – 33 coral atolls sprinkled across two million square miles of ocean – has limited scope to adapt. Its highest land is barely 6 feet above sea level.

Speaking in New Zealand, Mr Tong said i-Kiribati, as his countrymen are known, had no option but to leave. "We may be beyond redemption," he said. "We may be at the point of no return, where the emissions in the atmosphere will carry on contributing to climate change, to produce a sea level change so in time our small, low-lying islands will be submerged."

President Tong, a London School of Economics graduate, said emigration needed to start immediately: "We don't want to believe this, and our people don't want to believe this. It gives us a deep sense of frustration. What do we do?"

Kiribati – a former British colony called the Gilbert Islands – is home to 97,000 people, most of them squeezed into the densely populated main atoll, Tarawa, a chain of islets surrounding a central lagoon. Along with other low-lying Pacific island nations such as Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands and Vanuatu, it is regarded as one of the places most vulnerable to climate change.

Erosion, caused partly by flooding and storms, is a serious problem in Kiribati, which straddles the Equator and International Dateline. Most of the land is as flat as a table. "We have to find the next highest spot," said Mr Tong. "At the moment there's only the coconut trees." But even the coconut trees are dying – casualties of an unprecedented drought. The country has had next to no rain for the past three years and meanwhile the freshwater table is being poisoned.

Mr Tong was in New Zealand – which was chosen to host the UN's World Environment Day after committing itself to becoming carbon neutral – for talks with Helen Clark, the Prime Minister, whom he hopes to persuade to resettle many of his people. But he also appealed to other countries to help relocate i-Kiribati.

Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, said of Kiribati's plight: "It's a humbling prospect when a nation has to begin talking about its own demise, not because of some inevitable natural disaster... but because of what we are doing on this planet." The world must find the "collective purpose" to combat climate change, Mr Steiner said. "Unless everyone... on this planet takes their responsibility seriously, we will simply not make a difference."

New Zealand already has a substantial population of Pacific Islanders, but absorbing another 97,000 would strain its generosity. Besides, that is just Kiribati. A report by Australian government scientists in 2006 warned of a flood of environmental refugees across the Asia-Pacific region. New Zealand is already experiencing significantly increased levels of migration from affected countries.

President Tong said he was accustomed to hearing national leaders argue that measures to combat climate change would jeopardise their economic development. But he pointed out that for Kiribati "it's not an issue of economic growth, it's an issue of human survival". And while scientists were still debating the degree to which the seas were rising, and the cause of it, he said, the changes were obvious in his country. "I am not a scientist, but what I know is that things are happening we did not experience in the past... Every second week, when we get the high tides, there's always reports of erosion." Villages that had occupied the same spot for up to a century had had to be relocated. "We're doing it now... it's that urgent," he said. "Where they have been living over the past few decades is no longer there. It is being eroded."

The worst case scenario suggested that Kiribati would become uninhabitable within 50 to 60 years, Mr Tong said. "I've appealed to the international community that we need to address this challenge. It's a challenge for the whole global community."

Leading industrialised nations pledged last month to cut their carbon emissions by half by 2050. But they stopped short of setting firm targets for 2020, which many scientists argue is crucial if the planet is to be saved. For Kiribati, it may already be too late.

Interesting? Click here to explore further

[catmando]

http://www.twnside.org.sg/title/levels.htm

South Pacific: Rising sea levels already hurting islands

by Kalinga Seneviratne

Singapore, 15 Feb 2001 (IPS) -- Last week, high tides drowned many causeways linking villages in the tiny South Pacific island of Kiribati, forcing cars, buses and trucks to drive through seawater in its capital Tarawa.

This is the latest in a series of such flooding across the South Pacific in recent months, an occurrence that experts say is caused by rising sea levels due to global warming.

Kiribati is among a number of Pacific island nations that could drown during this century, if ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions by industrialized countries are not dramatically reduced in the next few years.

High tides and stormy seas have also caused problems recently in the Marshall Islands, Cook Island, Tuvalu and low-lying islands of Papua New Guinea (PNG).

In mid-January, high tides and strong winds caused seawater to flood parts of the low-lying areas of the Marshall Islands capital, Majuro. Some families were forced to move from their homes into government buildings during the height of the flooding.

Earlier this month, landowners in PNG’s East New Britain province agreed to allow Duke of York islanders threatened by rising sea levels to move to the mainland. About 2,000 people living in Bougainville’s atoll island of Cateret have also asked to be moved to higher ground in the mainland, but lack of government funds have prevented this movement.

Cateret Island’s administrative secretary, Francis Kabano, told the ‘New Zealand Herald’ last month that people there are actually constantly being forced to move with the rising sea levels.

A report released earlier this month by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) warns that global warming could cost the world billions of dollars a year, unless industrialised countries take immediate steps to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases produced from the burning of fossil fuel - all linked with the warming of the Earth.

The report said that in low-lying states such as the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia in the South Pacific, the losses due to climatic change could, within the next 50 years, exceed 10% of their national wealth or the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

The report, done by UNEP’s insurers, estimates that losses worldwide linked to climate change could annually cost $304 billion by this time.

In the same report, UNEP Executive Director Klaus Topfer called on the world “to act now”. He said that countries should restart the climate change talks, which were stalled in The Hague, Netherlands at the end of last year when the developed countries refused to make any concrete commitments towards reducing their greenhouse gas emissions.

“We must help vulnerable areas of the world, primarily in the developing countries, to adapt to the consequences of global warming. We have a moral responsibility to our fellow men and women to protect them and their families from food shortages to devastating floods,” he argued.

Patrina Dumaru, assistant director for environment of the Fiji-based Pacific Concerns and Resource Centre, has perhaps heard all these before.

“For us in the Pacific, a grim reality was realised,” he said, referring to the climate change talks that collapsed in the Netherlands. “The over-consumptive lifestyle of the rich world was not negotiable - even if it cost us our land, peoples and culture.”

“For years Pacific and other small island states have pleaded with the industrialised world, to take action so that the islands may be saved. Facts and figures considered alarming and unjust toward us was of no significance at this meeting,” he pointed out.

“Although we contributed the least to global greenhouse gas emission— just 0.06% -- we will be the most vulnerable to the effects of global warming and sea-level rise,” he added.

Writing for the Pacific News Bulletin monthly, Dumaru says that while countries debate about what steps to take against global warming and negotiate international agreements, small islets have already been swallowed by the ocean in Tuvalu, Kiribati and Bougainville.

In addition, warmer temperatures have led to the bleaching of the Pacific Island’s main source of survival - the coral reefs.

Bleaching occurs when reef-building corals, reacting to stress such as warmer waters, loosen the algae that help feed them. Because the algae give them colour, the starved corals look pale, thus the term “bleaching”. Continued bleaching ultimately kills corals.

Last year, scientists reported that in Fiji, coral bleaching had reached levels that are the worst in 30 years. They attribute this to abnormally high water temperatures there in recent years. There have also been similar reports from the Solomon Islands, Cook Islands, Tonga and Palau.

At least one third of Palau’s coral reefs were destroyed during the El Nino weather phenomenon in the mid-1990s, as a consequence of which its fish food sources were reduced. Under a cooperation agreement between Palau, Japan and the United States, an International Coral Reef Centre was set up in Palau in 1995 to help repair the damage.

As a prelude to The Hague conference last year, the World Bank released a report warning of dire consequences to the Pacific Island states from climate changes in the world.

It said that among the impacts of global warming would be the loss of low-lying coastal areas, more intense cyclones and droughts, failure of subsistence crops and coastal fisheries, losses in coral reefs, and the spread of diseases like malaria and dengue fever.

It estimated that by 2050, Fiji would suffer annual damages to the tune of 2-4% of its GDP and Kiribati between 17-34% of its GDP.

The Bank argued that for the Pacific, climatic change should be considered one of the most important challenges of the 21st century and a priority area for immediate action.

Reflecting on the failed conference at The Hague, Dumaru says that one thing was clear - money talks. “Rich countries don’t really care whether our islands sink, float or fly. That’s our little problem,” he observed.

“Of course, we can expect adaptation funds from them. After all, it’s a cheaper way of dealing with a problem of their making,” added Dumaru.

He argues that the challenge facing people’s organisations in the Pacific, such as his, is to make the impact of climate change on Pacific Island communities an international human rights issue. Said Dumaru: “Still recovering from the aftermath of the nuclear bomb (testing in the Pacific), we must now prepare ourselves for the climactic bomb.”

[AMG]

Thanks Catmando, this I have heard before and this is not about rising sea levels due to AGW and melting polar caps. It is mainly about (bad) politics. Anyone interested will find more on the net why I don´t post it here.

[StarDecky]

All this fuss and the technology to produce minus emissions is proven (meaning cleaner air out the exhaust than the air intake) So Yacht's that use internal combustion engines could be and will be air cleaners rather than air polluters. Just ask me how, go ahead ! Or maybe you already know and can support my statement !!

[OutMyWindow]

Originally Posted by StarDecky

So Yacht's that use internal combustion engines could be and will be air cleaners rather than air polluters.

Just AdBlue

[OutMyWindow]

Here's some more Satellite radar data stuff....
http://geology.com/nasa/antarctic-ic...-melting.shtml

[AMG]

Originally Posted by outmywindow

Here's some more Satellite radar data stuff....
http://geology.com/nasa/antarctic-ic...-melting.shtml

Just for the balance of articles like this, during the last 50 years, East Antarctica Ice Sheets has grown about twice as much as the loss of ice from the West Antarctica and Peninsula Ice Sheets...

[OutMyWindow]

Originally Posted by AMG

Just for the balance of articles like this, during the last 50 years, East Antarctica Ice Sheets has grown about twice as much as the loss of ice from the West Antarctica and Peninsula Ice Sheets...

That's pretty convincing, but I think I will go with NASA and all those World Science types.
Besides every guy knows that things shrink when it's cold anyway.
__________________________________

To construct the new 50-year temperature record, the team applied a statistical technique to estimate temperatures missing from ground-based observations. They calculated the relationship between overlapping satellite and ground-station measurements over the past 26 years. Next, they applied that correlation to ground measurements from 1957 to 1981 and calculated what the satellites would have observed.

The new analysis shows that Antarctic surface temperatures increased an average of 0.22°F (0.12°C) per decade between 1957 and 2006. That's a rise of more than 1°F (0.5°C) in the last half century. West Antarctica warmed at a higher rate, rising 0.31°F (0.17°C) per decade. The results, published Jan. 22 in Nature, confirm earlier findings based on limited weather station data and ice cores.

While some areas of East Antarctica have been cooling in recent decades, the longer 50-year trend depicts that, on average, temperatures are rising across the continent.

West Antarctica is particularly vulnerable to climate changes because its ice sheet is grounded below sea level and surrounded by floating ice shelves. If the West Antarctic ice sheet completely melted, global sea level would rise by 16 to 20 feet (5 to 6 meters).