We will most likely always have shore lines from which to fish from- or launch boats from.

We also have the know-how and technology to prevent desertification by alleviating the pressure on those tributaries.

And by doing that we (could) feed the world.

Better yet my property will be close to the new shore-line. So I say let it melt and please make it sooner rather than later!

Lower than it is now. (Or will be within a few decades.)

Of course, granted, it has been both much warmer and much colder in the distant past. We’ve had periods where ice sheets came down to Missouri and the coast of Florida was hundreds of miles outward from now, and also periods where warm blooded reptiles found the polar regions nice and warm and not a flake of snow probably fell anywhere south of the Arctic circle.

But now, as with other kinds of articles, the one you referenced is a fool’s errand when it comes to predictions that far out. I would cede that point.

Global warming ‘irreversible’ for next 1000 years

I haven’t read the PNAS article yet.

I was referring to the exact mathematical quantification of the mass=energy relationship.

Olinto de Pretto certaintly had some insights generally regarded as ahead of his time.

(But then, so did Karl Marx for that matter.)

He was certainly onto something but was neither the first to come up with his notions nor the only one at the time of publication. This is not to say his ideas have no merit. They do. But, when it comes to the quantification of mass and energy at the extremes, and how one relates to another under a duress not commonly seen by the human eye and general experience, Hasenohrl gets the billing. His is a more direct linkage.

The probloem is that Hasenohrl, like de Pretto long before, did not make a connection to HOW this might come about. Einstein DID, clerical duties aside.

Eventually.

In fact, Einstein did not make ALL the connections right away either. His first paper made no mention of the term Relativity. He HATED the very term.

Said first draft being called “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.”

But today, we can, if getting past all this bruha about windmills and chicken manure advocacy from the radical enviros, use nuclear energy, as well as, say, maybe even sending Little Adolf over in Iran straight to the Stratosphere. If need be….

PS:

If we really want to get picky, we can trace the REAL heritage of all this squarely back to Galileo, who also made early notes on relativistic behaviors among objects, though the energy/mass dichotomy was not something he hit on. Galileo noticed that objects behaved the same on a moving ship the same as standing on solid ground. And YET, from shore the object’s motion, say, a ball being tossed, appears to arc in a parabola-but NOT to the man tossing it. So it went.

There’s all kinds of data on soot (black carbon) on the web. It’s listed as a significant forcing factor in the 2007 IPCC technical report. It’s shown to be about half of what CO2 contributes but some studies say it’s at least equal to CO2 forcing and some say it’s greater. There are also studies showing the earth’s albedo has been decreasing. This is a difficult measurement and the study, done by measuring the brightness of the moon when it is illuminated only by light reflected from the earth has only been going on since 2002 or so IIRC. The study measured a 1% decrease in reflected light during that time. It’s not possible to separate out different things that contribute to it either. Cloud cover, snow cover, soot, land use changes, all contribute to overall albedo. The biggest factor right now appears to be the cosmic ray hypothesis which generates more or less high altitude clouds which reflect more or less sunlight. The sun’s magnetic field throttles the intensity of cosmic rays. Extreme solar minimums line up quite well with historical cold periods. The sun has been unusually quiet for the past year, a one hundred year low, and sure enough we’re having one of the coldest winters in decades. It snowed yesterday or the day before somewhere in the Middle East for only the second time in recorded history. If the sun stays quiet we’ll get a hard lesson in what global cooling is like and it’s a LOT worse than warming. The primary producers in the food chain don’t produce much on frozen ground. Wherego the primary producers go the rest of the food chain including us.

Oh–I meant to add that physicist’s name who hit upon E=MC2 was Friedrich Hasenohrl.

Olinto de Pretto

So what is the DATA that demonstrates that man-made CO2 is the cause of the warming?

Until we know what temp range the earth should be we really don’t have a clue as to any warming. Warming would be just a relative thing.

As for Dave’s point, there was a show on climate change either on the History or Discovery channel.

One scientists was trying to show how snow reflects sunlight and the lack of snow would absorb it. This was to demonstyrate what happens once the Arctic ice-pack is very instrumental in keeping this planet from getting too warm. No white snow and the remaining water would be free to heat up.

To do this he put two pieces of colored cardbord on the snow. The temp was well below freezing. On piece of cardboard was white and the other was black.

After only a couple of minutes the white piece measured pretty much what the putside temp was. However the black piece was reading above 90 degrees F!!!

If that doesn’t confirm what Dave posted nothing will.

As to the very last part about ideological tendencies, I also meant to add that while we’re on the topic of hypocrisy and other well-noted political gamesmanship, it should be worth mentioning that like the tobacco internal documents now known to contain phrases such as “doubt is our product”, likewise the AGW denialists have this as their main tactic.

I used to be in the category of the AGW denialists.

No, science is NOT done by consensus; however, the consensus AMONG peers, and even accounting for “peer pressure”, has far more meaning than the opinions of those far outside the main field.

We do not say that consensus is the reason the earth is round and that other star systems actually exist rather than a fixed Ptolemaic place in the Cosmos and flat earthiness or thinking that Orion is really a hunter who stalks prey across the sky. Consensus was REACHED on these issues bit by bit as the data accumulated to the point of being utterly overwhelming.

Albert Einstein’s work for the Swiss patent office as a clerk was neither his main profession nor his only profession–nor what his life goal via his education. In-between avoidance of getting caught looking idle he would hurriedly make notes of his latest ideas. Ideas from a first rate mind, not a “mere” patent office clerk. Right?

Nor was Einstein the only one to hit upon certain ideas (again, known by consensus LATER, even if not immediately then).

His famous equation E=mc2 was hit upon and published by Austrian physicist (not a clerk) one year before Einstein worked it out. Never heard of this guy? Einstein, however, gets the Physics “Street Cred” on this one for connecting the dots that lead to a relation to relativity. Verdammit!

His ideas have been tested and tested and tested, starting with the now famous Arthur Eddington experiment in 1911 and culminating today with predictions of why gold looks yellow rather than the usual silver for most metals (relativistic effects in the electron cloud) and where particles in the Hadron collider will fall if not boosted fast enough, black holes effects on surrounding objects, particle/wave duality issues, etc, etc. I take it as given that in most real-life encounters, journalists, economists, and veterinarians, no matter how saintly, generally step outside their main professions when making statements on AGW.

The Relativity denialists, then, as now, were cranks. They proposed all manner of theories to account for the observations; objects for some reason alter in the direction of acceleration, alleged mathematical trickery, etc. Experiments confirmed matters, and THIS fact led to consensus, not the other way around.

The last possible stand for today’s AGW denialists, minus the hundreds of computer models and experiments showing how carbon does build up heat and that even slight increases have a corresponding heat signature, would be the work of Dr. High Ellsaesser, who claims that for a variety of reasons Co2 from Man is just not significant next to background (ambient) levels from natural processes of plant and animal respiration.

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Dave, I have not seen anything from Scientific American or Real Climate regarding soot and other sources (other than ice melt, naturally) that would contribute significantly to the reduction in albedo, or reflectivity. One guesses, however, that while your idea might have some merit and is probably in possession of a kernel of truth in principle, in the years since the various Clean Air acts here and in Europe, we’d have to go back to Dicksonian levels of soot belching and ten million factories across the lands to do what you suggest.

Even if ice had an albedo close to that of the MOON (fresh black asphalt, at that) it would reflect quite a bit of sunlight. Imagine if the moon were made of ice or silver rather than something most people would say looks like light colored TAR up close! I would need to see some reference to this notion that thousands of miles away the remainder of industrial output is altering ice albedo to the point where it is melting regardless of temps at the surface. The loss of albedo WOULD do what you suggest, as seawater would retain heat far better than any area previously melted away that used to be ice.

But I need more info on that. This is the first I’ve heard of what you suggest.

Antarctica HAS had more snowfall in recent years, and that WOULD make for two situations the denialists MIGHT be able to crow about:

Long term it could extend Antarctica’s “micro-climate” effect for THAT region. Second, it would temporarily forestall any significant rise in sea levels; the costs of which would make the recent TRILLION-something bailout seems like a couple of spare dimes.

A recent glance at reams of stats provided by Scientific American, however, purports to show that overall Antarctica is beginning to THAW out at the edges at least. Now granted, the ARCTIC doing the same thing is not as dire. The pressure applied by the icecap in this context makes up for any sea level rise. In other words, this is like the old trick of asking someone at a cocktail party where the level in their glass will be once the ice all melts (answer: the same, of course).

But for Antarctica, the situation is different due to her caps being anchored above land.

Yes, it has been noticed by economists like Robert Samuelson among others the hypocrisy regarding Kyoto and other efforts at managing carbon. Yes, there does seem to be an ideological and political agenda among our alleged betters and elites to use AGW as the anvil to hammer away at the sins of capitalism. Politicians and journalists and other deep thinky-think types are buzzards and maggots feasting on opportunities they themselves are powerless to create. However, the unfortunate fact that the “same” kinds of people who were once involved in anti-industrial activities do seem to join the coattails for semi-socialisti notions due to “saving the Planet” (what a slogan!) is another issue.

We have to separate the issues out.