Latest Arctic Report As Of 31/3/06

[Cloudburst]

I think we've strayed from the point. It is 7C at the moment in the Bering sea - a full 6C above the norm. That's an astonishing and deeply disturning anomaly which is not the stuff of future nightmares, but happening now.

No it's just an idea. No-one knows if fresh water in that concentration will 1. have much effect and 2. have enough effect to outweigh the other factors. It's pure conjecture.

Lets take the worst case scenerio in that the whole cap melts, the Salt water would soon get dilated, and instead we would have a 'cold water' mix, there is current evdience of the fresh water degrading slightly, areas of the stream. Ofcourse we wont know exactly untill it happens by which time it'll be too late anyway -Sad fact of life. I for one am going for this theory as it seems the most realistic in my view, but i guess that in the next 10 years we will have a better understanding of what dynamics and effects are starting to take place.

Edited April 15, 2006 by ¤CloudBurst¤

[kold weather]

In our postion of the earth, it really doesn't matter that much what global temps do, for example 1998 globally was the warmest, and while it was still very above average, it wasn't as warm as quite a few years in the last 2 decades.

What really matters for the UK's temps is atlantic SST's, and prehaps more importantly the distrubtion of those anomalies, course temps to our north and south will make the difference but its the SSTA to our west that dictate our weather way more then anything else.

so I suspect its a little unwise to judge global warming on just our little patch of land because we are open to the highly variable atlantic.

The thing you must remember with global warming is that all it means there is less cold to go round. So while so and so might have temps 6c above average, somewhere else may have temps several C below, but as sea ice becomes less then you also get less Albedo and higher temps.

when talking about global warming, you need to see the bigger picture, and the bigger picture is that we are having warm year after warm year globally.

(ps, 7C rise in western Europe is perfectly reasonable, simply because we seem to be heating at roughly twice the rate as global warming due to the atlantic.)

[Devonian]

7C wont happen, it is invented by the doomongers at greenpeace and the likes to scare everyone. Does nobody remember that the earth has gone through warming and cooling periods before and we are still technically in an ice age.

Err, you seem to have missed the really rather important fact that it was Cloudburst who suggested the figure as, he later explained, a 'if this happens, therefore this would result', example. Nowt to do with 'doomongers' or Greenpeace, nowt at all...

But, hey, never mind, you got your jibe in eh?

Edited April 15, 2006 by Devonian

[frozen_north]

Err, you seem to have missed the really rather important fact that it was Cloudburst who suggested the figure as, he later explained, a 'if this happens, therefore this would result', example. Nowt to do with 'doomongers' or Greenpeace, nowt at all...

But, hey, never mind, you got your jibe in eh?

I was saying that it is highly improbable that the average surface temperature of the earth would rise by 7C. This means it would rise to 22C from its current 15C. This isnt going to happen in the next 100 years. For if it happened the consequences would be unbelievable. Ices caps melting, glaciers melting, animals becoming extinct because they cannot adapt to the climate, large forest fires destroying vegetation releasing more CO2, deserts becoming larger, life unberable between the tropics with daily maxes averaging 45C. To use the phrase life wouldnt exist as we know it. Also with the temperatures rising the vast quantities of methane at the bottom of our oceans would start to boil as the temperature rises realeasing millions,billions of tons of methane which is a far more stronger greenhouse gas than CO2. The earth would just boil away and the greenhouse effect would run away getting faster and faster. Venus here we come.

But then again it probably wont happen. A rise in temperatures of between 2-3C is more realistic.

Edited April 19, 2006 by frozen_north