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The Forum > Article Comments > Reduce greenhouse gas emissions and do it PDQ! > Comments

Reduce greenhouse gas emissions and do it PDQ! : Comments

By Mike Pope, published 28/4/2009

The effect of the increasingly rapid depletion of glaciers around the world has the potential to be disastrous.

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Mike - few points. First off, as is evident for all but one of the centres that track temperatures - Hadley, NOAA, HAH, RSS and Goddard - temperatues have been declining since the turn of the century, not increasing. See the Hadley site http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/climon/data/themi/g17.htm
For more detail on the past 10 years take data from the ASCII files and graph them in a ordinary office EXCCEL. The one hold out centre is Goddard which insists that temperatues are level pegging with a slight decline since a peak in 2005.
This business about glaciers melting faster than expected is, in fact, the last piece of alarmism global warmers can point to, but the interaction between glaciers and melt water may be far more complicated than expected. The apparent acceleration of glaciers in some areas may be temporary.. see New Scientist issues of 19 November 2008 and 03 July 2008 (accessible online) where they discuss meltwater lubricating the base of the glaciers in Antartica and Greenland. It is possible it all may be a delayed reaction to what was an undoubted warming phase up to 2000 or so.
All that is arguable, of course, but you are still left with the problem that, if glaciers are melting faster than expected, sea levels are simply not behaving as they should.
See the University of Colorado site which tracks sea level heights with two satellites http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_ib_ns_global.pdf
Sea levels have been increasing at the rate of 3.1mm a year (0.31 metres over a century) since the mid-90s, not much has changed at all.. if anything there was a recent fall in that trend before it reverted to the mean.. when you see a genuine acceleration in sea level increases then get alarmed. Until then all this stuff about sea level increases counts as speculation based on projections. Forget them.
Posted by Curmudgeon, Tuesday, 28 April 2009 12:20:49 PM
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I accept that it would be a problem if these glaciers were to melt entirely, but given that our chances of stopping CO2 emissions anytime soon are close to zero, if you think there is a problem wouldn't the best solution be to start damming the water courses up near the glaciers now before they melt?

Although, thinking about it, as only a portion of the glacier melts each year, which is probably proportional more or less to the precipitation that falls on it, you could wait quite a while before you needed to do that, as the melt must be an approximation of one year's precipitation.
Posted by GrahamY, Tuesday, 28 April 2009 3:36:57 PM
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Even *if* it were proved that carbon dioxide did cause the warming of the late 20th Century, reducing greenhouse gas emissions "PDQ" would have disastrous effects for the wellbeing of the world's population, and achieve absolutely sod-all.

Better to spend the billions it would cost on new water saving and extraction technology that will actually do some good.

Don't repeat the attractive foolishness of something like the response to the Exxon Valdez disaster, where the clean up caused more environmental damage than the original spill.

As for "Water Wars", the favourite of the doomsayers: as has been said, for the cost of a couple of days of war, you could build desalination plants that would fix the problem much more easily.
Posted by Clownfish, Tuesday, 28 April 2009 4:25:10 PM
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Mike! Stick to relative numbers and forget the abstract.
Posted by Dallas, Tuesday, 28 April 2009 8:41:24 PM
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If we concentrate on the abstract with this issue we all will be here until we die and have nothing resolved. In an issue such as this we must look at the quantifiable evidence and make decisions from there - that way something will actually get done.
Posted by French Wine, Wednesday, 29 April 2009 11:27:29 AM
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The downs of the up and downs of the Hottest Decade on Record are not evidence the Earth is cooling. Besides the fact that global surface air temperatures aren't direct measures of changes in the Earth's energy balance (warming continues but is absorbed by oceans and used melting ice and will show up in the temp graphs over longer periods than a decade)the graph curmudgeon links to shows Every Year Since 2OOO is WARMER than 2000. How can this be interpreted as a decade of cooling? So it dips a bit on 5 year averages, but there have been similar and greater dips only to see temps rise again. Where is the context curmudgeon? Graphs like that one only have meaning in the context of climate processes. Like ENSO. Like PDO. Like GHG forcing and albedo changes. Like climate scientists do.
I'll go on taking the leading scientific institutions interpretations of such graphs over Curmudgeons!
Posted by Ken Fabos, Thursday, 30 April 2009 8:19:49 AM
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