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North Carolina Sea Levels Rising Three Times Faster Than In Previous 500 Years
"http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/tre59s3lt-us-climate-canada-arctic/"

An international team of environmental scientists led by the University of Pennsylvania has shown that sea-level rise, at least in North Carolina, is accelerating. Researchers found 20th-century sea-level rise to be three times higher than the rate of sea-level rise during the last 500 years.

In addition, this jump appears to occur between 1879 and 1915, a time of industrial change that may provide a direct link to human-induced climate change.

The research team studied two North Carolina salt marshes that form continuous accumulations of organic sediment, a natural archive that provides scientists with an accurate way to reconstruct relative sea levels using radiometric isotopes and stratigraphic age markers. The research provided a record of relative sea-level change since the year 1500 at the Sand Point and Tump Point salt marshes in the Albemarle-Pamlico estuarine system of North Carolina.

Comparison with 20th-century tide-gauge records validates the use of this approach and suggests that salt-marsh records with decadal and decimeter resolution can supplement tide-gauge records by extending record length and compensating for the strong spatial bias in the global distribution of longer instrumental records.

Multiyear Arctic ice is effectively gone
"http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091028192617.htm"

The multiyear ice covering the Arctic Ocean has effectively vanished, a startling development that will make it easier to open up polar shipping routes, an Arctic expert said on Thursday.

David Barber, Canada's Research Chair in Arctic System Science at the University of Manitoba, said the ice was melting at an extraordinarily fast rate. "We are almost out of multiyear sea ice in the northern hemisphere," he said in a presentation in Parliament.

Barber spoke shortly after returning from an expedition that sought -- and largely failed to find -- a huge multiyear ice pack that should have been in the Beaufort Sea off the Canadian coastal town of Tuktoyaktuk.

Instead, his ice breaker found hundreds of miles of what he called "rotten ice" -- 50-cm (20-inch) thin layers of fresh ice covering small chunks of older ice. "I've never seen anything like this in my 30 years of working in the high Arctic ... it was very dramatic," he said.

"From a practical perspective, if you want to ship across the pole, you're concerned about multiyear sea ice. You're not concerned about this rotten stuff we were doing 13 knots through. It's easy to navigate through."

An increasing number of experts feel the North Pole will be ice free in summer by 2030 at the latest, for the first time in a million years.

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Question: which corner will conservatism be in?

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Originally posted by KoRnAdvocate:

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Question: which corner will conservatism be in?

I'll give you just one guess.

• a "can't win by military force alone" war,
• a d*mn tough globalizing economy, and
• a disastrously warming planetary ecology.

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Originally posted by usmc_family:
Scientists are confident that news like these two stories will continue to appear---pretty much every week---for at least the next 100 years.

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Originally posted by FlankerFlyer:
Im still wondering how they are going to implement carbon caps on the other mammals in the world who dont go along with this farce?
I can see it now, the envirowhackos get together with the PETA whackos and come up with a humane way to kill off cattle, pigs and other polluting animals.

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A tax on meat would penalise the poor and have little effect on climate change.

THIS week British economist Lord Stern called for the world to get off beef and on to broccoli: go vegetarian for the planet. Methane - burped, belched and otherwise released by cows in impressive amounts - is around 20 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

So the author of the influential 2006 Stern Review into global warming told Britain's Times newspaper that the climate change meeting in Copenhagen would only be a success if it led to skyrocketing meat prices. Otherwise, Stern predicts, climate change will turn southern Europe into a desert and there will be ''severe global conflict''.

Stern isn't alone. Also this week, Peter Singer called for a 50 per cent tax on all meat. According to the Australian vegetarian philosopher, cows are pretty much like cigarettes: they're bad for you and smelly. They should be taxed accordingly.

<more>

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/vegetarians-meat-tax-plan-just-a-load-of-hot-air-20091031-hqqs.html

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Originally posted by FlankerFlyer:
Im still wondering how they are going to implement carbon caps on the other mammals in the world who dont go along with this farce?
I can see it now, the envirowhackos get together with the PETA whackos and come up with a humane way to kill off cattle, pigs and other polluting animals.

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THIS week British economist Lord Stern called for the world to get off beef and on to broccoli: go vegetarian for the planet. Methane - burped, belched and otherwise released by cows in impressive amounts - is around 20 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

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Stern isn't alone. Also this week, Peter Singer called for a 50 per cent tax on all meat. According to the Australian vegetarian philosopher, cows are pretty much like cigarettes: they're bad for you and smelly. They should be taxed accordingly.

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Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel Robert M. Cassidy,
Battalion Commander, 3d US Army/CFLCC, Special Troops Battalion.

Collapse is essentially a sequel to Jared Diamond’s previous Pulitzer-Prize winning Guns, Germs, and Steel. In Guns, Diamond created a masterful narrative of the historical evolution of human civilization, synthesizing anthropology, geography, geology, and sociology into one lucid book.

Collapse is its logical successor, and it draws from the work in Guns to explain how past civilizations collapsed, applying the factors that helped precipitate those collapses, including the current challenges engendered by globalization, finite resources, and population growth.

Collapse offers testimony to how cultural values and preferences can catastrophically influence the decisions and behavior of nations facing the challenges of climatic change, population growth, fragile environments, and changes in warfare.

Diamond also asserts that religious values often contribute to disastrous behavior because they are so deeply held and slow to change. The Norse civilization on Greenland, as an example, failed in part because its embedded cultural and religious predilections did not make it amenable to adaptation and innovation within the context of the harsh arctic environment.

The chapter on China is extremely relevant because it offers insight on the behavior and sustainability of our only emerging peer, a potential military adversary, and a rapidly increasing competitor for finite global resources.

A final caveat in this book is that globalization now essentially makes it impossible for any society to collapse in isolation. Afghanistan and Somalia offer glaring examples, and for the first time in history, the possibility of a global decline exists.

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Originally posted by usmc_family:
Science alone is powerful ... history alone is powerful .. science and history together are 100X potent.

That's why Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, makes a compelling case.[QUOTE]Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel Robert M. Cassidy,
Battalion Commander, 3d US Army/CFLCC, Special Troops Battalion.

Collapse is essentially a sequel to Jared Diamond’s previous Pulitzer-Prize winning Guns, Germs, and Steel. In Guns, Diamond created a masterful narrative of the historical evolution of human civilization, synthesizing anthropology, geography, geology, and sociology into one lucid book.

Collapse is its logical successor, and it draws from the work in Guns to explain how past civilizations collapsed, applying the factors that helped precipitate those collapses, including the current challenges engendered by globalization, finite resources, and population growth.

Collapse offers testimony to how cultural values and preferences can catastrophically influence the decisions and behavior of nations facing the challenges of climatic change, population growth, fragile environments, and changes in warfare.

Diamond also asserts that religious values often contribute to disastrous behavior because they are so deeply held and slow to change. The Norse civilization on Greenland, as an example, failed in part because its embedded cultural and religious predilections did not make it amenable to adaptation and innovation within the context of the harsh arctic environment.

The chapter on China is extremely relevant because it offers insight on the behavior and sustainability of our only emerging peer, a potential military adversary, and a rapidly increasing competitor for finite global resources.

A final caveat in this book is that globalization now essentially makes it impossible for any society to collapse in isolation. Afghanistan and Somalia offer glaring examples, and for the first time in history, the possibility of a global decline exists.

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Originally posted by usmc_family:
usmc_family is a moron for posting Cassidy's review ...

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Global warming opens new Arctic shipping lane
"http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/1015/p11s01-wogi.html"

Two German freighters have slipped quietly into Rotterdam Harbor after completing a historic month-long journey from Vladivostok, in Russia's Pacific far east, through the once-impassable Arctic route.

The Bremen-based company that operates the two specially reinforced cargo ships, the Beluga Fraternity and the Beluga Foresight, that made the journey said that taking the new route saved 10 days and $300,000 per ship over the usual 11,000 nautical-mile voyage through the Indian Ocean, the Suez Canal, and the Mediterranean in order to reach the North Atlantic.

"We are all very proud and delighted to be the first Western shipping company which has successfully transited the legendary Northeast Passage," the Beluga company said in a statement. It plans to begin using the route on a regular basis.

The bad news, scientists say, is that the feat only became possible because the Arctic icecap is retreating at an alarming rate.

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We are all very proud and delighted to be the first Western shipping company which has successfully transited the legendary Northeast Passage

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Originally posted by FlankerFlyer:

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We are all very proud and delighted to be the first Western shipping company which has successfully transited the legendary Northeast Passage

it wouldnt be legendary if people hadnt already done it before many, many years ago! Say, like the *LAST* time it was open back between 1000-1300 during the last global warming period commonly referred to as the Medieval *Warm* Period. It was open as well during the last *inter-glacial* period 120,000 years ago but then there were no people screaming about global warming when CO2 levels were 6 times as high as now and arctic temperatures were 3 degrees Centigrade *HIGHER* than they are now. They were probably glad they didnt need modern HVAC! But hey Family, dont let those annoying *FACTS* get in the way of a good global warming hysteria rant.

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All who care to fact-check the above post, can do so here:

Ice and History
"http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/sci;311/5768/1673"