Discussion on:

Why the next hot spot isn't Asia but the Arctic

We rape the planet and destroy the climate and melt the poles and all the greedy bast@rds of the world can think about is raping the newly exposed land and trashing the world even more???

This world will either fall due to the greedy and stupid morons of the world, or the smart people will band together and kill all the greedy and stupid morons of the world before they get the chance to kill us all. Unfortunately that would be a horrendous amount of killing, so much that I just don't see it happening. I think that whacko on the street with the sign that read "the end is near" was a little more correct than anyone thought.

it's been coming for a long time: now that the arctic passage is mostly open and there's money to be made, more powerful richer and greedier interests will have their way. If someone found a sure and harmless and even cheap or free way to reverse Global Warming / Climate Change and was daft enough to announce it to the world, he'd be dead in a month. We're f***ed , mate. Kiss the bears and the harp seals goodbye for me.

I guess you would prefer living like a cave man. You want cell phones? You need rare earths. You want a roof over your head, you need timber. You want a car or even a bicycle, you need steel. You want food you need factory farms (at least if you want enough food for 7 billion people). In short, you have a choice, you can live with the problems, that modern life creates, or you can live with the Indians in the Amazon, live with virtually no environmental impact, live 35 years if you survive childhood, and live not a whole lot better than the animals that surround you.

PS. If you want to see real environmental devastation, go to the former Soviet Union and other countries behind the Iron Curtain. No "greedy bast@rds" there!!!

"This world will either fall due to the greedy and stupid morons of the world, or the smart people will band together and kill all the greedy and stupid morons of the world before they get the chance to kill us all."

Question: You know who has profited even more than the "greedy bast@rds" you so lament?

Answer: You have. The fact that you have the spare time and resources to post the above nonsense instead of toiling in some field for 14 hours a day and then retiring to a rented shack is proof of that.

So go ahead and kill the "greedy bast@rds". In addition to committing murder, you'll be committing suicide.

We know we can have all the things we already have and more, without causing global warming. It's called renewable energy; wind, wave and solar power. It's a bit late, granted, but we could do that if we simply decided to. I live atop a hill, and I'll be fine if the sea rises by a few metres on average (which means many metres during storms). Will you?

There's evidence from Arctic ocean sediments that during the last interglacial period (roughly 80,000 to 130,000 years ago) of the current Ice Age, the amount of sea ice fluctuated wildly and at times was greatly reduced (see, for example, http://www.tos.org/oceanography/archive/24-3_polyak.pdf ). This was long before humans dumped a lot of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. To quote the paper, "During some interglacial periods, climatic conditions were warmer than at present. These intervals are not yet sufficiently investigated, but some data, such as the abundance of paleobiota, especially the presence of subarctic species, indicate the possibility of considerably reduced sea ice cover."

While the authors point out that this time period was not exactly the same as today, based upon scientific evidence the popular idea that only greenhouse gases can be responsible for the current warming has yet to be proved. Whatever caused the warming 130,000 years ago could be happening now, and until climate scientists have eliminated this possibility, heroic efforts to reduce greenhouse gases may be in vain.

You don't have to go back nearly that far to see dramatic differences in climate. Around 1000 AD, they were successfully farming in Greenland, and were for several hundred years. Obviously it was significantly warmer then. And around 1600 we had what has been called the Little Ice Age, and it has been slowly warming up ever since.

Somehow we think that since the Arctic Ocean has been melting more than it has in the past 30 or so years, that it never melted that much before.

that the climate record shows pretty extreme natural fluctuations back and forth from hotter to colder, but human beings seem to be responsible for this one. If we are, as it looks, approaching a critical tipping point where climate change is rapid, life may be about to get much more interesting, and painful.

around 100,000 years ago sea levels were 20-30 feet higher than they are now.

What is interesting about the current temperature rise is that all known natural factors since the Holocene Climatic Optimum about 8,000 years ago indicate a slight cooling trend, and that's what was seen in the long term records until the recent uptick in greenhouse gases.

Oh the irony. Melt the ice to get more oil to burn more oil to melt more ice to get more oil...and so on.

It's only 'irony' if your hypothesis, that man-made heat and environmental pollutants are the ONLY causes of Arctic and Antartic ice melting, is correct!
You, like most of the "global-warming", (AKA "The sky is falling, the SKY is fallling!") nuts, are totally disregarding the FACT that the ice has melted and re-frozen several times, with absolutely NO HELP from mankind! Many of the so-called 'pollutants' being blamed are, in fact, produced by the earth naturally, such as by volcanoes, at the edges of those plate techtonics (pardon my spelling efforts)!

If you think anyone is saying the heat from human activities directly causes the global temperature to rise you really need to educate yourself. The amount of heat humans produce directly is just a rounding error compared to the heat energy we receive from the Sun. On the short human time scale we're talking about volcanic heat and emissions are also just a rounding error.

We have a chance to reconsider our actions, to think again on a better and more sustainable form of energy, to reconsider our part in the ecosystem... and then again eyes of the powered are seeking the way to the old source of energy, oil. It really is dificult to understand how blind we are. How short is our eyes mind.

...as an illustration for this story. As these glaciers recede, anthropologists are having marvelous field days exploring the human habitation that existed before the glaciers covered them up.

1 positive is the presence of the Arctic Council, especially compared to the ongoing mess in the South China Sea.

Since all these news are happening more and more often, here's a question... is it savable? Can the environment be saved with our efforts?

"Climate change is melting the glaciers more rapidly than scientists and climate models predicted. If the melting continues at this rate, Arctic waters could be ice-free by 2020."

The Antarctic glaciers have been in a melt phase for the past 600 years. The Arctic has also warmed (Vikings colonized a forest covered Greenland for several hundred years. grew crops and raised sheep) and it refroze up until recently. This should tell most of us who haven't invested our capital or our souls in either side of the climate change debate - that climate change has always been an on going process and our ability to sort our own affects from natural cycles is sadly inadequate - regarding where the climate might be heading and when. That said, I think it's safe to say that with in a few decades we will find significant investments in Arctic resource exploitation - frozen solid and practically inaccessible again. In the mean time perhaps we should focus on the absolute and main cause of anthropogenic climate affects - too many humans compared to the planetary resources available. What? Are we always going to rely on war, disease and famine to manage our species, or are we finally intelligent enough to accept the responsibility and accomplish population management in a positive and reasonable way in the generations to come?

"(Vikings colonized a forest covered Greenland for several hundred years. grew crops and raised sheep)"

I wish people would get over this silly notion that Greenland was ice free in Viking times. If that were true how can they drill ice cores there that go back 100,000 years? At best the last time Greenland was largely ice free was during the previous interglacial around 100,000 years ago when sea level was 20-30 feet higher than now. It's possible that there was marginally less ice during the Viking times than there is now but it's absurd to think that Greenland was even 25% ice free back then. The fact that sea level was not significantly higher then is proof of that.

Also, do you have a cite for your statement that the Antarctic glaciers have been in a melt phase for the past 600 years? I've never heard that before.

NO ONE SAID THAT GREENLAND WAS ICE FREE!!! What was said by several posters, including myself that they were farming successfully in Greenland about 1000 years ago. Something they have NOT been able to do in the past 700 years or so. They were farming on southern costal areas, not in the northern areas which I am sure were still ice covered.

"The Vikings stripped the land of trees in order to clear land for pasture. The amount of hay needed to maintain livestock herds over the long winter took up most of the available farmland."

"Trees, which dendrochronologists (those who study tree rings) could use to reconstruct climate are virtually nonexistent from the Viking time period due to the cutting-down of the available trees for survival purposes. What we know is that climate fluctuates over time, and Greenland is no exception."

http://www.iupui.edu/~geni/documents/Vikings_in_Greenland-An_Overview.doc

Ever seen what happens to colonies of bacteria when they run out of space and nutrients on an agar plate? They all die at once. Is this where we are headed or will we as humans have the sense to end the non sustainable habits we have? God told us to be fruitful and multiply but not to breed ourselves and all creation to death. If you are an atheist or agnostic take it as a metaphor. We will all pay for our mistakes.