It explains about how climatic changes are inducing natural disaster. It contains a series of climatic changes, which ultimately results in disasters. Enjoy the facts and info.
It explains about how climatic changes are inducing natural disaster. It contains a series of climatic changes, which ultimately results in disasters. Enjoy the facts and info.
Horizontal Distribution & Differences of Temperature
If the Earth was a homogeneous body without the present land/ocean distribution, its temperature distribution would be strictly latitudinal. However, the Earth is more complex than this, being composed of a mosaic of land and water. This mosaic causes latitudinal (horizontal) zonation of temperature to be disrupted spatially.
Dan Miller, an engineer and investor, has become an active campaigner for action on climate change. He provided this briefing paper, written for a representative in Congress, to Andrew Revkin of The Times blog Dot Earth. More: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/
Horizontal Distribution & Differences of Temperature
If the Earth was a homogeneous body without the present land/ocean distribution, its temperature distribution would be strictly latitudinal. However, the Earth is more complex than this, being composed of a mosaic of land and water. This mosaic causes latitudinal (horizontal) zonation of temperature to be disrupted spatially.
Dan Miller, an engineer and investor, has become an active campaigner for action on climate change. He provided this briefing paper, written for a representative in Congress, to Andrew Revkin of The Times blog Dot Earth. More: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/
The National Middle School Association (NMSA) sponsored this presentation for middle school science teachers. Topics include Earth’s energy budget and climate change; Albedo; Regional temperature and sea ice changes; NSES Standards and Misconceptions; Resources to Enhance Your Content Knowledge; and Science Lessons and Activities.
Are ‘little ice ages’ and ‘megadroughts’ possible?
Scientists are investigating whether changes in ocean circu- lation may have played a role in causing or amplifying the “Little Ice Age” between 1300 and 1850. This period of abruptly shift- ing climate regimes and more severe winters had profound agri- cultural, economic, and political impacts in Europe and North America and changed the course of history.
Are we overlooking potential abrupt climate shifts?
Most of the studies and debates on potential climate change, along with its ecological and economic impacts, have focused on the ongoing buildup of industrial greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and a gradual increase in global tempera- tures. This line of thinking, however, fails to consider another potentially disruptive climate scenario. It ignores recent and rapidly advancing evidence that Earth’s climate repeatedly has shifted abruptly and dramatically in the past, and is capable of doing so in the future.
Fossil evidence clearly demonstrates that Earth’s climate can shift gears within a decade, establishing new and different patterns that can persist for decades to centuries. In addition, these climate shifts do not necessarily have universal, global effects. They can generate a counterintuitive scenario: Even as the earth as a whole continues to warm gradually, large regions may experience a precipitous and disruptive shift into colder climates.
This new paradigm of abrupt climate change has been well established over the last decade by research of ocean, earth
The global ocean circulation system, often called the Ocean Conveyor, transports heat worldwide. White sections represent warm surface cur- rents. Purple sections represent cold deep currents.
and atmosphere scientists at many institutions worldwide. But the concept remains little known and scarcely appreciated in the wider community of scientists, economists, policy mak- ers, and world political and business leaders. Thus, world lead- ers may be planning for climate scenarios of global warming that are opposite to what might actually occur.1
It is important to clarify that we are not contemplating a situation of either abrupt cooling or global warming. Rather, abrupt regional cooling and gradual global warming can un- fold simultaneously. Indeed, greenhouse warming is a desta- bilizing factor that makes abrupt climate change more prob- able. A 2002 report by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) said, “available evidence suggests that abrupt climate changes are not only possible but likely in the future, poten- tially with large impacts on ecosystems and societies.”2
The timing of any abrupt regional cooling in the future also has critical policy implications. An abrupt cooling that hap- pens within the next two decades would produce different climate effects than one that occurs after another century of continuing greenhouse warming.
Caldeira, Ken. The Great Climate Experiment. Scientific Am.docxRAHUL126667
Caldeira, Ken. "
The Great Climate Experiment
."
Scientific American
(2012): 78
-83.
Academic
Search Premier
. Web. 1 Feb. 2013.
Section:
BEYOND LIMITS: WHERE WE'RE HEADED
ECOLOGY
How far can we push the planet?
BUSINESS, GOVERNMENT OR TECHNOLOGY forecasts usually look five or 10 years out, 50 years at most. Among climate scientists, there is some talk of century's end. In reality, carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere today will affect Earth hundreds of thousands of years hence.
How will greenhouse gases change the far future? No one can say for sure exactly how Earth will respond, but climate scientists -- using mathematical models built from knowledge of past climate systems, as well as the complex web of processes that impact climate and the laws of physics and chemistry -- can make predictions about what Earth will look like.
Already we are witnessing the future envisioned by many of these models take shape. As predicted, there has been more warming over land than over the oceans, more at the poles than near the equator, more in winter than in summer and more at night than in the day. Extreme downpours have become more common. In the Arctic, ice and snow cover less area, and methane-rich permafrost soils are beginning to melt. Weather is getting weirder, with storms fueled by the additional heat.
What are the ultimate limits of the change that we are causing? The best historical example comes from the 100-million-year-old climate of the Cretaceous period, when moist, hot air enveloped dinosaurs' leathery skin, crocodilelike creatures swam in the Arctic and teeming plant life flourished in the CO2-rich air. The greenhouse that is forming now will have consequences that last for hundreds of thousands of years or more. But first, it will profoundly affect much of life on the planet -- especially us.
A DESERT IN ITALY
ONE OF THE GREATEST uncertainties in climate prediction is the amount of CO2 that will ultimately be released into the atmosphere. In this article, I will assume industrial civilization will continue to do what it has been doing for the past 200 years -- namely, burn fossil fuels at an accelerating rate until we can no longer afford to pull them out of the ground.
Just how much CO2 could we put into the atmosphere? All told, there are about one quadrillion metric tons (1021 grams) of organic carbon locked up in Earth's sedimentary shell in one form or another. So far we have burned only one twentieth of 1 percent of this carbon, or roughly 2,000 billion metric tons of CO2.
With all the carbon locked in Earth's crust, we will never run out of fossil fuels. We are now extracting oil from tar sands and natural gas from water-fractured shale -- both resources once thought to be technologically and economically inaccessible. No one can confidently predict just how far ingenuity can take us. Yet eventually the cost of extraction and processing will become so high that fossil fuels will become more expensive than alternativ ...
El 12 de noviembre de 2015 dedicamos una jornada en la Fundación Ramón Areces a analizar la actual situación del Ártico. El Simposio Internacional se ocupó de las oportunidades y riesgos derivados del cambio climático. En este encuentro participaron expertos de Canadá, Estados Unidos, Finlandia, Noruega, Suecia, Alemania, Portugal y España.
Climate: Climatic Change - Evidence, Cycles and The Futuregeomillie
A PowerPoint used in class to cover the key forms of evidence you need to know for the Exam. Key Questions are likely to be focused on how we can gain information of past climatic change, and how it can be used to predict future, and I would expect you to be able to comment on the usefulness of the different types. For instance, Ice cores are highly accurate and quantifiable evidence, but gaining them is expensive, and only gives a climatic record for the site at which the snow formed. However, they do provide the longest record of change.
Search and Society: Reimagining Information Access for Radical FuturesBhaskar Mitra
The field of Information retrieval (IR) is currently undergoing a transformative shift, at least partly due to the emerging applications of generative AI to information access. In this talk, we will deliberate on the sociotechnical implications of generative AI for information access. We will argue that there is both a critical necessity and an exciting opportunity for the IR community to re-center our research agendas on societal needs while dismantling the artificial separation between the work on fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics in IR and the rest of IR research. Instead of adopting a reactionary strategy of trying to mitigate potential social harms from emerging technologies, the community should aim to proactively set the research agenda for the kinds of systems we should build inspired by diverse explicitly stated sociotechnical imaginaries. The sociotechnical imaginaries that underpin the design and development of information access technologies needs to be explicitly articulated, and we need to develop theories of change in context of these diverse perspectives. Our guiding future imaginaries must be informed by other academic fields, such as democratic theory and critical theory, and should be co-developed with social science scholars, legal scholars, civil rights and social justice activists, and artists, among others.
Epistemic Interaction - tuning interfaces to provide information for AI supportAlan Dix
Paper presented at SYNERGY workshop at AVI 2024, Genoa, Italy. 3rd June 2024
https://alandix.com/academic/papers/synergy2024-epistemic/
As machine learning integrates deeper into human-computer interactions, the concept of epistemic interaction emerges, aiming to refine these interactions to enhance system adaptability. This approach encourages minor, intentional adjustments in user behaviour to enrich the data available for system learning. This paper introduces epistemic interaction within the context of human-system communication, illustrating how deliberate interaction design can improve system understanding and adaptation. Through concrete examples, we demonstrate the potential of epistemic interaction to significantly advance human-computer interaction by leveraging intuitive human communication strategies to inform system design and functionality, offering a novel pathway for enriching user-system engagements.
Kubernetes & AI - Beauty and the Beast !?! @KCD Istanbul 2024Tobias Schneck
As AI technology is pushing into IT I was wondering myself, as an “infrastructure container kubernetes guy”, how get this fancy AI technology get managed from an infrastructure operational view? Is it possible to apply our lovely cloud native principals as well? What benefit’s both technologies could bring to each other?
Let me take this questions and provide you a short journey through existing deployment models and use cases for AI software. On practical examples, we discuss what cloud/on-premise strategy we may need for applying it to our own infrastructure to get it to work from an enterprise perspective. I want to give an overview about infrastructure requirements and technologies, what could be beneficial or limiting your AI use cases in an enterprise environment. An interactive Demo will give you some insides, what approaches I got already working for real.
Transcript: Selling digital books in 2024: Insights from industry leaders - T...BookNet Canada
The publishing industry has been selling digital audiobooks and ebooks for over a decade and has found its groove. What’s changed? What has stayed the same? Where do we go from here? Join a group of leading sales peers from across the industry for a conversation about the lessons learned since the popularization of digital books, best practices, digital book supply chain management, and more.
Link to video recording: https://bnctechforum.ca/sessions/selling-digital-books-in-2024-insights-from-industry-leaders/
Presented by BookNet Canada on May 28, 2024, with support from the Department of Canadian Heritage.
"Impact of front-end architecture on development cost", Viktor TurskyiFwdays
I have heard many times that architecture is not important for the front-end. Also, many times I have seen how developers implement features on the front-end just following the standard rules for a framework and think that this is enough to successfully launch the project, and then the project fails. How to prevent this and what approach to choose? I have launched dozens of complex projects and during the talk we will analyze which approaches have worked for me and which have not.
Builder.ai Founder Sachin Dev Duggal's Strategic Approach to Create an Innova...Ramesh Iyer
In today's fast-changing business world, Companies that adapt and embrace new ideas often need help to keep up with the competition. However, fostering a culture of innovation takes much work. It takes vision, leadership and willingness to take risks in the right proportion. Sachin Dev Duggal, co-founder of Builder.ai, has perfected the art of this balance, creating a company culture where creativity and growth are nurtured at each stage.
State of ICS and IoT Cyber Threat Landscape Report 2024 previewPrayukth K V
The IoT and OT threat landscape report has been prepared by the Threat Research Team at Sectrio using data from Sectrio, cyber threat intelligence farming facilities spread across over 85 cities around the world. In addition, Sectrio also runs AI-based advanced threat and payload engagement facilities that serve as sinks to attract and engage sophisticated threat actors, and newer malware including new variants and latent threats that are at an earlier stage of development.
The latest edition of the OT/ICS and IoT security Threat Landscape Report 2024 also covers:
State of global ICS asset and network exposure
Sectoral targets and attacks as well as the cost of ransom
Global APT activity, AI usage, actor and tactic profiles, and implications
Rise in volumes of AI-powered cyberattacks
Major cyber events in 2024
Malware and malicious payload trends
Cyberattack types and targets
Vulnerability exploit attempts on CVEs
Attacks on counties – USA
Expansion of bot farms – how, where, and why
In-depth analysis of the cyber threat landscape across North America, South America, Europe, APAC, and the Middle East
Why are attacks on smart factories rising?
Cyber risk predictions
Axis of attacks – Europe
Systemic attacks in the Middle East
Download the full report from here:
https://sectrio.com/resources/ot-threat-landscape-reports/sectrio-releases-ot-ics-and-iot-security-threat-landscape-report-2024/
The Art of the Pitch: WordPress Relationships and SalesLaura Byrne
Clients don’t know what they don’t know. What web solutions are right for them? How does WordPress come into the picture? How do you make sure you understand scope and timeline? What do you do if sometime changes?
All these questions and more will be explored as we talk about matching clients’ needs with what your agency offers without pulling teeth or pulling your hair out. Practical tips, and strategies for successful relationship building that leads to closing the deal.
Dev Dives: Train smarter, not harder – active learning and UiPath LLMs for do...UiPathCommunity
💥 Speed, accuracy, and scaling – discover the superpowers of GenAI in action with UiPath Document Understanding and Communications Mining™:
See how to accelerate model training and optimize model performance with active learning
Learn about the latest enhancements to out-of-the-box document processing – with little to no training required
Get an exclusive demo of the new family of UiPath LLMs – GenAI models specialized for processing different types of documents and messages
This is a hands-on session specifically designed for automation developers and AI enthusiasts seeking to enhance their knowledge in leveraging the latest intelligent document processing capabilities offered by UiPath.
Speakers:
👨🏫 Andras Palfi, Senior Product Manager, UiPath
👩🏫 Lenka Dulovicova, Product Program Manager, UiPath
Essentials of Automations: Optimizing FME Workflows with ParametersSafe Software
Are you looking to streamline your workflows and boost your projects’ efficiency? Do you find yourself searching for ways to add flexibility and control over your FME workflows? If so, you’re in the right place.
Join us for an insightful dive into the world of FME parameters, a critical element in optimizing workflow efficiency. This webinar marks the beginning of our three-part “Essentials of Automation” series. This first webinar is designed to equip you with the knowledge and skills to utilize parameters effectively: enhancing the flexibility, maintainability, and user control of your FME projects.
Here’s what you’ll gain:
- Essentials of FME Parameters: Understand the pivotal role of parameters, including Reader/Writer, Transformer, User, and FME Flow categories. Discover how they are the key to unlocking automation and optimization within your workflows.
- Practical Applications in FME Form: Delve into key user parameter types including choice, connections, and file URLs. Allow users to control how a workflow runs, making your workflows more reusable. Learn to import values and deliver the best user experience for your workflows while enhancing accuracy.
- Optimization Strategies in FME Flow: Explore the creation and strategic deployment of parameters in FME Flow, including the use of deployment and geometry parameters, to maximize workflow efficiency.
- Pro Tips for Success: Gain insights on parameterizing connections and leveraging new features like Conditional Visibility for clarity and simplicity.
We’ll wrap up with a glimpse into future webinars, followed by a Q&A session to address your specific questions surrounding this topic.
Don’t miss this opportunity to elevate your FME expertise and drive your projects to new heights of efficiency.
GDG Cloud Southlake #33: Boule & Rebala: Effective AppSec in SDLC using Deplo...James Anderson
Effective Application Security in Software Delivery lifecycle using Deployment Firewall and DBOM
The modern software delivery process (or the CI/CD process) includes many tools, distributed teams, open-source code, and cloud platforms. Constant focus on speed to release software to market, along with the traditional slow and manual security checks has caused gaps in continuous security as an important piece in the software supply chain. Today organizations feel more susceptible to external and internal cyber threats due to the vast attack surface in their applications supply chain and the lack of end-to-end governance and risk management.
The software team must secure its software delivery process to avoid vulnerability and security breaches. This needs to be achieved with existing tool chains and without extensive rework of the delivery processes. This talk will present strategies and techniques for providing visibility into the true risk of the existing vulnerabilities, preventing the introduction of security issues in the software, resolving vulnerabilities in production environments quickly, and capturing the deployment bill of materials (DBOM).
Speakers:
Bob Boule
Robert Boule is a technology enthusiast with PASSION for technology and making things work along with a knack for helping others understand how things work. He comes with around 20 years of solution engineering experience in application security, software continuous delivery, and SaaS platforms. He is known for his dynamic presentations in CI/CD and application security integrated in software delivery lifecycle.
Gopinath Rebala
Gopinath Rebala is the CTO of OpsMx, where he has overall responsibility for the machine learning and data processing architectures for Secure Software Delivery. Gopi also has a strong connection with our customers, leading design and architecture for strategic implementations. Gopi is a frequent speaker and well-known leader in continuous delivery and integrating security into software delivery.
Accelerate your Kubernetes clusters with Varnish CachingThijs Feryn
A presentation about the usage and availability of Varnish on Kubernetes. This talk explores the capabilities of Varnish caching and shows how to use the Varnish Helm chart to deploy it to Kubernetes.
This presentation was delivered at K8SUG Singapore. See https://feryn.eu/presentations/accelerate-your-kubernetes-clusters-with-varnish-caching-k8sug-singapore-28-2024 for more details.
3. Where we are going this morning
1. What (almost) everyone has heard about
2. Water vapor and clouds
3. Rejecting Sunlight (albedo)
4. Arctic warming and mid-latitude winds
5. Sea-level rise
6. Averages can be dangerous to your health
7. Erring on the side of “minimal drama”
5. 5
• The overheating is not uniform and that is the major cause of
damage, not the globally-averaged warming.
• The continents have been heating up twice as fast as the ocean
surface*, so hot-summer-afternoon monsoons* are stronger
and penetrate the continent more deeply.
• The increased temperature contrast over the coastlines can
also rearrange the winds, affecting the delivery of ocean
evaporation as domestic rainfall and snow.
• Regional climates can change drastically. With a new path for
the winds, one region may dry out while a neighboring region
gets floods. Deluge and drought is the result, even though
average rainfall over the continent may not change.
6. Major reduction in summer sea
ice since 1936
• North shore of North America
and Siberia
• East shore of Greenland
1936
2012
9. "Overall, the Arctic has lost about 40%
of its sea ice cover since 1980.
Most scientists believe the Arctic
could be entirely ice-free in the
summers by the middle of the century –
if not sooner.“
Dr. Julienne Stroeve from the U.S.
National Snow and Ice Data Center
(NSIDC), 2013
11. Global Mean Annual Temperature
Hold thermometer in the air, 1 meter above the surface,
and average over globe (70% ocean). So excludes ocean
temperature increases. The interior of continents run a
fever about twice that of coastal margins. So for a global
fever of 2°C, think 4°C for the interior (about 7°F).
With such a 2° fever, we lose all of the
mountain glaciers, all of the coral reefs,
and create enough climate refugees to trigger
resource wars and genocides.
A 1.6° fever will take Greenland into the local
summer temperature range that produced a 6 m
rise in sea level 125,000 years ago.
13
University of Chicago Press 2008
12. 14
Mountain glaciers gone
by 2050
William H. Calvin
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington USA
What the ice is telling us.
13. Where we are going this morning
1. What (almost) everyone has heard about
2. Water vapor and clouds
3. Rejecting Sunlight (albedo)
4. Arctic warming and mid-latitude winds
5. Sea-level rise
6. Averages can be dangerous to your health
7. Erring on the side of “minimal drama”
14. Floating paper clip
Still, some water
molecules are moving
fast enough to escape.
Called “evaporation.”
Takes energy out of
the water, felt as
“evaporative cooling.” 20
16. 22
Water vapor without the other air molecules
Water in Air
1/3 increase
for 5°C warming
Warmer oceans put much
more water vapor into the
air more rain & snow.
17. 40% of the world’s population depends on
the Himalayan watershed for water
Indus River
Yellow River
Yangtze River
Brahmaputra River
Ganges River
Salween River
Mekong River
Courtesy of Map Resources
20. Fires Are Increasing World-Wide
Source: Westerling et al. 2006
Western US area burned
21. Where we are going this morning
1. What (almost) everyone has heard about
2. Water vapor and clouds
3. Rejecting Sunlight (albedo)
4. Arctic warming and mid-latitude winds
5. Sea-level rise
6. Averages can be dangerous to your health
7. Erring on the side of “minimal drama”
22. Colorado snow with Utah dust
Utah dust blown onto Colorado’s Rocky Mountains
can double the heat absorbed.
29
Fresh snow reflects 90% back to space.
After surface melt, only 70% reflects.
Therefore the snow absorbs 3x
as much heat the next day.
The same thing happens with dust and soot.
Albedo
23. Albedo measures how much of the incoming
sunlight is reflected back out into space
before it can warm up things.
• Powder snow reflects about 90%.
• First afternoon above freezing, 70%. 3X↑
• Slush, being gray, only reflects about half.
• Water, being dark, only reflects about 10%.
So when floating ice melts, go from
reflecting 90% to absorbing 90%.
24. The viscous cycle
of ice-albedo
feedback
↑Warms
↑ Dark water
Warms ↑↑
↑↑↑ dark ocean
25. This grayscale, plunging over time,
constitutes an automatic mechanism for
warming things up even more.
A little bump up in temperature may
start an entire self-destructive cascade
of events, even if you withdraw the
original cause, just like you cannot “take
back” what started an avalanche.
26. The viscous cycle of
ice-albedo feedback
also applies to
tundra
↑Warms
↑ greener tundra
Warms ↑↑
↑↑↑ green tundra
27. Where we are going this morning
1. What (almost) everyone has heard about
2. Water vapor and clouds
3. Rejecting Sunlight (albedo)
4. Arctic warming and mid-latitude winds
5. Sea-level rise
6. Averages can be dangerous to your health
7. Erring on the side of “minimal drama”
30. The atmosphere’s
general circulation is
organized into three
circumferential cells
in
each
hemisphere,
accounting for
the trade winds
and the westerlies,
separated by the
subtropical highs
that create dry
deserts.
At equator,
24,000 miles
in 24 hours
= 1,000 mph
to the east.
At 60N,
12,000 miles
in 24 hours
= 500 mph
to the east.
If NB air moving 600 mph eastward arrives
where the local air is only moving 590 mph, it
continues at 600 mph, as if it were a 10+ mph
wind from the SW. The Coriolis effect is just
conservation of momentum. From the surface,
the wind appears to “turn right” in the NH.
The “General Circulation”
32. Land temperature has risen twice as fast as
global average temps.
42
IPCC AR5 2013
33. Equator Arctic
The research has indeed found a correlation between
500hPa height autumnal windspeeds and Arctic sea
ice annual minima - both have gone down, as the
following graph shows:
above: how the drop in high-altitude winds in autumn
over the past 30 years (solid line) has closely tracked
the decline in Arctic sea ice (dashed line).
Francis, J. A. and S. J. Vavrus, 2012: Evidence Linking
Arctic Amplification to Extreme Weather in Mid-
Latitudes, Geophys. Res. Lett., Vol. 39, L06801,
doi:10.1029/2012GL051000 PDF
Weaker winds
Evidence Linking the Arctic Amplification of Overheating to the Extreme Weather in Mid-Latitudes
35. Atmospheric Rossby waves are giant meanders in
high-altitude winds that are a major influence
on weather.
Rossby waves are easy to observe as 4-6 large-
scale meanders of the jet stream, drifting
eastward.
When these deviations become very pronounced, they
detach the masses of cold, or warm, air that become
cyclones and anticyclones and are responsible for day-
to-day weather patterns at mid-latitudes.
37. European summer
land temperatures
from 1500 to 2010
Lots of new highs
recently.
The hottest year 2010
jumped far off the
usual curve.
This is no longer
gradual overheating.
47
Barriopedro, D. et al.
The hot summer of 2010: Redrawing the temperature record
map of Europe. Science 332, 220–224 (2011).
39. 49
500 hPa vertical velocity (Pa/S) in July from ERA-40 reanalysis, 1979-2001 average
Rising air near
equator
Falling air over
Mediterranean
July averaged pattern of Rise and Fall
USA
SAHARA
EQUATOR
CHINA
EQUATOR
40. Where we are going this morning
1. What (almost) everyone has heard about
2. Water vapor and clouds
3. Rejecting Sunlight (albedo)
4. Arctic warming and mid-latitude winds
5. Sea-level rise
6. Averages can be dangerous to your health
7. Erring on the side of “minimal drama”
41.
42.
43. Saltwater can get beneath ice shelves and
unstick them from the bottom, exposing
them to the tides every day, and
eventually breaking them up. While this
doesn’t raise sea level directly, it is like
uncorking a bottle. The ice streams uphill
now meet less resistance and speed up.
More of the ice sheet is pushed into the
sea, instantly raising sea level. (Image
adapted from NASA’s “A Tour of the
Cyrosphere.”)
49. The common
assumption is
that glaciers
decline in the
manner of
winter snow,
running off in
creeks.
Sometimes
they do.
Photograph by Wing-
Chi Poon of the toe
of the Athabasca
glacier in the
Columbia Icefield,
Canada. This glacier
has retreated ~1500
m since the late 19th
century.
50. Looking north at the shoulder
of the Greenland ice cap
Notice all of the blue
ponds between the
coastline and the
central ice mass.
Notice there are no
rivers draining them.
shoulder
53. Meltwater stream
in Greenland feeds
this mile-high
waterfall to the
base of the ice cap,
creating rotten ice
at the base, plus a
liquid cushion under
the ice that allows
it to slide downhill
more easily.
Photo of moulin thanks to Roger Braithwaite, University of
Manchester (UK).
54. 64
• There is no sea-level rise from melting
floating ice. But tides can whittle away at
tidewater glaciers*, undermine them, and set
them adrift as icebergs*.
• Having to push offshore ice out of the way
slows down a glacier’s downhill journey.
• Relieving the uphill ice from such
obstructionism speeds up pushing ice into the
ocean. And that does produce a rise in sea
level everywhere.
56. The
Tortoise
and the
Hare
Reaction times
• The IPCC reports treat
climate as if it moved in a
stately manner like a
tortoise.
• They all assume that the
Hare conveniently takes
a long nap.
• That is not a safe
assumption.
66
57. The people who study the abrupt climate
shifts of the past have an aphorism:
Climate is like a drunk:
Left alone, it sits.
Forced to move, it staggers.
67