Thursday, April 17, 2008

Climate change: Losing Greenland and dumb things smart people say about saving the earth

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080416/full/452798a.html

Are we looking the wrong way? A rise of seven metres would effectively take out a significant portion of our landmass. Should we be worried?

Greenland is losing 150 billion tons of ice into water every year! That is enough water to feed how many Singapores? This amount of water loss is increasing. When the water salinity changes, we are going to lose our climate. When that much of water is turned from ice below freezing temperature to room temperature water, guess how much heat is removed in this short period of time? Thermodynamics recap: specific heat capacity =4180J/kg, heat of fusion = 333 550 J/kg. Q=mcT, and Q = mL. yea, we are going to have a lower global temperature, at the expense of a significant part of land. Will we only be satisfied when that happens?

Looks like 5 degrees can change the world. We are losing our home! Unless NASA has a plan to colonize every planet out there, this is where humanity was born and where it will fall. We need something to fall on damn it!

Some Americans have really interesting ideas on how to reduce global warming, half of them really pissing me off because of the sheer impracticality or the short-sightedness of it all.

Their methods all have something to do with reducing the effect of the sun on us. Is that a good idea? One thinks that the best way would be to send trillions of 1 feet radius "sunshades" into space to deflect or absorb the sun's rays. With the reduced intensity of the radiation on earth, it can reduce global warming. Yea right, like that's gonna work. Something of that scale would just deplete our planet's resources yea? Another thinks that cloud seeding would help reflect more light away from the earth. Good idea, except what's the big idea doing that in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean? The surface of the sea reflects 60-90% of the sun's rays back into space, absorbing the rest into its massive heat container, and at the same time, providing the temperate countries with warm air. What do you think would happen when we disrupt this? Also, assuming I accept such a short-sighted idea, seeding by spraying the air with a fine mist of sea water is just plain stupid. That would just get salt crystals into the air and cause the creation of massive sized clouds that would just head toward land and fling tones of salty water onto land, killing all land plants, causing freshwater animals to die out. Also, with 70% of the world's oxygen being produced by the phytoplankton in the sea, how do you think that would affect our oxygen factories? The last idea I heard before going nuts and changing channel to a show on devoted catholic Filipinos was even worse. He said that the Mt. Pinatubo eruption released so much sulfur into the air that the next year recorded a drop in global temperature of 0.6 degrees. So he wants to emulate a volcano. -.- That's not even the bad part. He wants to do that by sending many rockets into space, and when it reaches the stratosphere, it would start burning hydrogen sulfide. Is that the worst idea I had ever heard off? Not only does that, should it go massively wrong, send us into the next stone age, except that the surviving species would be the cyanobacteria since they are the only ones that can survive in a hydrogen sulfide atmosphere, it's just gonna block the sun from reaching the plants, cutting off our oxygen, it's gonna rain sulfuric acid on them to add salt to wounds. Now how bad can that get? We only lose whatever that remains of our rice plantations, dooming the rest of humanity. Is this where millions of dollars worth of research funds go to every year? So much for America being the land of innovation eh? While you're at it, why don't you just set off a massive EMP burst that fries electronic equipment globally, forcing us into the stone age and thus halting carbon dioxide emission and letting the earth heal itself? Can't bear to do that eh? We need to do more damage to the earth so that we can "save it" since we're too arrogant to let go of technology, is that it? What about simple things like reducing waste or reducing the use of carbon dioxide emitting processes? Looks like this is the price of being too stuck up to move with the environment instead of moving it yea?

Side note, today, volcanic eruption in Indonesia.

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