Antarctica ice cap growing, another sign of warming

[DoYouEverWonder]

Friday, May 20, 2005

As glaciers from Greenland to Kilimanjaro recede at record rates, the central ice cap of Antarctica has steadily grown for the past 11 years, partially offsetting rising seas due to the melt waters of global warming, researchers said Thursday.

The vast East Antarctic Ice Sheet — a 2-mile-thick wasteland of ice larger than Australia, drier than the Sahara and as cold as a Martian spring — increased in mass every year between 1992 and 2003 because of additional annual snowfall, an analysis of satellite radar measurements showed.

"It is an effect that has been predicted as a likely result of climate change," said David Vaughan, an independent expert on the ice sheets at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, England.

In a region known for the lowest temperatures recorded on Earth, it normally is too cold to snow across the 2.7 million squares miles of the ice sheet. Any additional annual snowfall in East Antarctica, therefore, is almost certainly due to warmer temperatures, four experts on Antarctica said.

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/world/epaper/2005/05/20/a17a_icecap_0520.html

[viva la resistance]

1. Repukes don't care they'll be dead before the big changes.

They must eat their young or just not give a shit about them.
Can only be one of the two. Thanks for the link.

Respect

[WhiteTara]

13. in every sense of the word

children are raped, beaten, stolen, forced into slavery and shuttled off into bad schools and given poison to eat (even to the point of wanting to intentionally poison them for "science". The great lie that has been perpetrated for the past two thousand years is that we were thrown out of Eden. The lie was told so that men of great greed and evil could destroy it.

[paparush]

15. They will be floating to heaven on golden sunbeams

To walk the gold-paved streets of Christ's glorious WASPish eternal cocktail party.

[DoYouEverWonder]

2. Mother Earth

is working hard to balance herself out. This is what is going on here. The water has to go somewhere and fortunately the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is acting like a sponge and absorbing a fair amount of it. Otherwise out coast lines would already be under water. Amazing.

[bemildred]

3. The Gaia Hypothesis.

If one accepts the Gaia Hypothesis, that the global ecology
is a equilibrium system, then one would expect it the react to
disturbances, to act to restore the equilibrium state, to remove
the disturbing agent.

[DoYouEverWonder]

4. But Gaia is getting angry

she's got too much energy pent up and I lived through three of her hurricanes last year and this year is already off to good start. Loads of fun. So it goes...

[bemildred]

5. Gaia has not begun to get pissed off yet. nt

[aneerkoinos]

6. Gaia don't get angry

We are organic part of her, how could she get angry against herself?

It's utter hubris to think wo could destroy Gaia, or that Gaia would get angry at humanity. All humanity is capable is evolutionary failure, which is suicide because we are consciouss species with more or less the knowledge that survival requires is allready available to us.

[bemildred]

7. A better way to look at it.

It's more like an immune reaction to an unruly infectious agent.

[aneerkoinos]

9. Yup

To quote U.G Krishnamurti, there are no actions, only reactions.

[htuttle]

16. Not so much an infectious agent

...that implies the threat comes from 'outside'. We're not from outside. We're as natural a part of the biosphere as trout and slime mold.

No, it's more like a normal colony of cells that decide one day they are going to grow without bounds without any regard for the health of the larger 'host' organism of which they are an integral part.

Hmm..what do you call something like that? Cancer.

Let's hope we go into remission before it's too late.

[bemildred]

17. That works too, probably better.

All analogies have their limits. It's the unregulated
and unbounded growth that is the problem in both cases,
that eventually destroys the equilibrium of the larger
system.

We are 5-10% "infectious agents" even when healthy, but
they stay in their place most of the time.

[alarimer]

20. parasites

I think that if the planet acts as an organism, then the human species is a parasite (like a tapeworm for example) sucking the life out of the planet. Of course a parasite normally does not want to kill its host or it will die also.

[M155Y_A1CH]

11. Sorry, Earth is not omnipotent

We could very well destroy our planet so that it would be uninhabitable for any life at all. I think there is more at stake than you seem to acknowledge. Earth does not have the magic ability to overcome all challenges.

The more we understand our world, the more able we are to alter it.
We could potentialy set evolution back to the big bang by taking all earthly life with us when we go.

[aneerkoinos]

12. Well

I'm not saying Gaia is omnipotent. But neither are we. It is simply untrue that we "could destroy our planet so that it vould be uninhabitable for any life at all" with our current technology. We don't have planet buster techonology of Star War's Empire.

>>>We could potentialy set evolution back to the big bang by taking all earthly life with us when we go.<<<

Sorry, I don't see any coherent meaning in that sentence.

[Baclava]

14. Sorry, humans are not omnipotent

The Earth will shake off her fleas when they get too annoying.

Humans are incapable of understanding anything bigger than their egos.

[M155Y_A1CH]

18. As far as I can tell

...nothing is omnipotent. Do you think that we can use and abuse Earth any way we want and it will somehow always be able to heal itself?

[DoYouEverWonder]

19. In all likelihood

we will not be missed.

[rodeodance]

8. so, the 'distubing' agent in this case would be man (Bushies)

[bemildred]

10. Technological civilization would be how I would put it.

Power entails responsibility, and we have been acting more
like teens with the keys to the car, pedal to the metal.
All human civilizations so far have had issues with sustainablity.

I don't see any sign that large human aggregations are much
smarter than ant colonies, although some individual humans have
given modern technical cultures powers far beyond that.

Some hunter-gatherer and village cultures on the other hand have
had admirable records of sustainability.

Sustainability is generally not even on the political agenda,
and the consequence is the obvious one, eventual catastrophe in
the sense chaos theory uses the word. Eventually you going to
run in the ditch if you refuse to steer.

We ar,e on the other hand, breeding up some rock-hard varieties of
humans out there in the third world, and I expect that there is
a good chance the species will survive, though much diminished.