"It's not as bad as we said before, but we are still DOOMED!"


More everchanging news from the everchanging environment
Oops! The story changed. Emphasis added.

The vast sheet of ice that covers Greenland is shrinking fast, but still not as fast as previous research indicated, NASA scientists said on Thursday.

Greenland's low coastal regions lost 155 gigatons (41 cubic miles) of ice each year between 2003 and 2005 from excess melting and icebergs, the scientists said in a statement.

The high-elevation interior gained 54 gigatons (14 cubic miles) annually from excess snowfall, they said.

This is a change from the 1990s, when ice gains approximately equaled losses, said Scott Luthcke of NASA's Planetary Geodynamics Laboratory outside Washington.

"That situation has now changed significantly, with an annual net loss of ice equal to nearly six years of average water flow from the Colorado River," Luthcke said.

Luthcke and his team reported their findings in Science Express, the advance edition of the journal Science.

The ice mass loss in this study is less than half that reported in other recent research, NASA said in a statement, but it still shows that Greenland is losing 20 percent more mass than it gets in new snowfall each year.

I keep telling people this is a natural cycle, and periods as small as a decade really don't indicate much. Truthfully a thousand years makes a better baseline, and ten thousand better still.

But with a baseline that long, humans cease being the villains in the global warming drama because there isn't a global warming cycle that is all that different from history,

That does mean that we humans do inflict environmental change, just as does every other species. Whether it is damage or not still remains to be seen. Rats, cockroaches, and pigeons, for example, love humans because our numbers increase their numbers.

I do not believe that the planet can be irreparably harmed by human action. Life adapts. Nor do I believe that global warming is caused by human action.

I do believe, but as a Pagan and a libertarian, that we have been given a trust to make the planet a better place than we found it.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Fri - October 20, 2006 at 04:38 AM  Tag


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