Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum Greenland's Glaciers race towards the Ocean

"The Big Thaw" 22nd nov: '05 http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article328217.ece

Greenland's glaciers have begun to race towards the ocean, leading scientists to predict that the vast island's ice cap is approaching irreversible meltdown, Their complete disappearance would raise the levels of the world's seas by 20 feet, spelling inundation for London and other coastal cities around the globe
Professor Slawek Tulaczyk, of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told the IoS that the giant Helheim Glacier had dropped 100 feet this summer.
On the opposite side of Greenland: the giant Jakobshavn Glacier - at four miles wide and 1,000 feet thick the biggest on the landmass - is now moving towards the sea at a rate of 113 feet a year; the normal annual speed of this glacier is just one foot.
Scientists had shortened to evens, the odds on the Gulf Stream failing this century. When it failed before, 12,700 years ago, Britain was covered in permafrost for 1,300 years.
This week World goverments will meet in Montreal for the first formal talks on whether there should be a new international treaty on cutting the pollution that causes climate change, after the Kyoto protocol expires in seven years' time.
But little progress is expected, largely because of continued obstruction from President George Bush.

http://www.terradaily.com/news/iceage-05r.html

Nice find, Mike, thanks for posting it.

How is this linked to George Bush ?

Through the Kyoto treaty:- President George Bush stated over 4 years ago that the US would never sign up to it.
Hopefully Bush will sign up before 2008, when 39 of the worlds industrialised nations agreed to cut greenhouse gases by over 5% below their 1990
levels. If he dos'nt, he will incurr the wrath of the world, since the US is the worlds biggest polluter. Producing 36% of carbon emissions.

China has pulled ahead, but China - being an Official Third World nation - is exempt from all Enviro-whiner terrorism. Chia has Freon refrigerators and uses DDT. China does not scrub alkaline fly ash from power plant chimneys, so China has no acid rain from unscrubbed sulfur dioxide. China does not respect copyrights or patents. China, etc... but that's all OK.

So morality in a world that follows Uncle Al would be on in which we all behave as poorly as the worst among us.

What does China's lack of responsibility have to do with us? Should we dump the Constitution and the Bill of Rights because China doesn't follow them? Perhaps we too should start wholesale pollution and copyright and patent infringement too?

Thanks for the lesson in lowering our standards to the lowest common denominator.

In the UK, and most of the rest of the world, we look to America (as the first nation) to take a lead with this problem. When it does not and until it does, we may legitimately fear that humanity will not manage to deal effectively with this issue. If America, with it's combined knowledge, influence, technology and financial weight does not throw itself into this and start to set the right example then we are in trouble. How can we apply pressure to places like China and soon to follow India, when they can just point to the US.

I have detected a growing amount of anti-US sentiment in the US-loving UK related to this issue, and with web-ambassadors like Uncle Al, with his appalling comments, it will get worse.

Let us be thankful that you can't vote Bush in again.

Blacknad.

You'd better get a grip on yourself Backnad.

Haven't you noticed the US education system in the toilet? Haven't you noticed the near brain-dead morons we've been voting into office as our leaders lately? Spiro Agnew, Ronald Alzheimers Reagan, Dan Quayle, George W Bush?

There is a growing anti-US sentiment among many of us here. Many of us embarrassed to be associated with a country in which we made fun of Bill Clinton for asking someone to define the word "is" while taking seriously our current leader's inability to define the word "torture".

I'd suggest you get a grip on reality. Put away the vision of America as it once was and deal with what is now is. Learn to speak Chinese.

How is it not linked to George Bush or anyone?

As my father recently said, "Would somebody give this guy a {content deleted} already, so we can impeach him?"