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luckydog1 -> RE: "Scientists: Antarctic ice sheet thinning" (4/4/2007 9:52:58 AM)
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Here's my 2 cents worth. First glacier behavior is localised. So comparing the Artic and Antartic is pretty useless. Here in Alaska we have rapidly shrinking glaciers within 30 miles of rapidly growing ones. Every glacier in existance is melting on the edges, even when they are growing. They always have been. There is always water running out of them, even in the winter.
Also Glaciers have been melting for a long damn time. For instance when the Pyramids were built there were Glaciers in north Africa (and other mountains across the continent, and the North Coast was lush. Now the only one left was Killimanjaro, which is now basically gone. There are underwater Bronze age and older cities being found all over the globe. The oceans have risen over 70 ft since man started building cities( which was yesterday geologically). We evolved in the tail of a mini Ice age, with in the context of an ending of a major ice age(technically we are still in an ice age, just an interglacial period). And there was a known c250 year cold snap(caused by a volcano in Indonesia, early American colonists experienced what they called a year with no summer) that ended right around the time the that the Data says the temps started shooting up. That it will keep getting warmer(long term) is as sure a bet that the sun will appear to rise tomorow, if every human died of a superflu tomorow it still would.
So we do have to deal with it, but the question is how. That the scientists support Kyoto to me is an example that they do not consider it a huge problem. If they really thought it was, they would not support a document like Kyoto which by exempting large parts of the globe, garuntees that CO2 will continue to go up. Also if they cared about CO2 impact, Carbon capture would also be factored into the equation. We can easily see the political and economic motivations of those who support Kyoto, but its hard to see how Kyoto would actually effect Global CO2 output, except by increasing it.
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