UN Climate Report Fails To Capture Arctic Ice: MIT

An anonymous reader writes "The United Nations' most recent global climate report 'fails to capture trends in Arctic sea-ice thinning and drift, and in some cases substantially underestimates these trends,' says a new research from MIT. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, released in 2007, forecasts an ice-free Arctic summer by the year 2100. However, the Arctic sea ice may be thinning four times faster than predicted, according to Pierre Rampal and his research team of MIT's Department of Earth, Atmosphere, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS)."

Politics?

[DreadfulGrape]

Interesting that /. has categorized this article as "Politics" instead of "Science."

Not that I'm complaining, necessarily.

Terrible Headline

[jmac_the_man]

The way the headline reads, it looks like MIT is accusing the UN of not taking Arctic ice into account in their global warming calculation, i.e. MIT says there should be less global warming because the UN forgot to calculate a cold thing.

That is the OPPOSITE MESSAGE from what the story actually says. Does slashdot even have editors anymore?

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[camperslo]

Even though the waves from the tsunami following the recent 9.0 Japan earthquake were not very large when hitting Antarctica, about 50 square miles of ice broke off.
Some of the many factors are not linear, so a simple loss multiplier or even one based on monotonically increasing loss will have limited accuracy. That's no excuse for denial, as what's happening is quite clear.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=51665&src=eorss-nh [nasa.gov]

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[khallow]

We don't want to base world economic policy on "it's not doing any harm lets keep going" when it's clearly doing harm, it's a matter of degree.

How about "It's doing less harm than the fix would do. Let's keep going." Does that work for you?

Global warming is a tricky problem, it's not really an individual problem, so we can't mandate individual responsibility for it, it doesn't manifest itself equally everywhere, and if someone else doesn't do there part, the people who do are forced to do more.

So what if some people have to "do more"? Let's keep in mind that the proposed fix, reverting to 1990s levels or less, also forces some people to "do more" than other people. We also need to keep in mind that there's no mechanism in place that can keep those who would suffer under a climate control regime from complying. Currently, the future CO2 producers will be the US and the bigger emerging countries such as China and India. None of them have shown the inclination to damage their economies in order to reduce the effects of global warming. And they all have sufficient power to avoid being forced to accept a climate deal that is detrimental to their interests.

For me the kicker is that I don't see a reason to mitigate global warming effects. Land is not that scarce. People and societies can and do move, particularly on the time scales that global warming acts. For example, there's enough people moving in the US that effectively the entire population moves every six or so years.

Most buildings have a life of around 20-50 years. So any problem that's on a longer time scale mostly will involve real estate that hasn't yet been built.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Jmc23]

Energy isn't everything. Unless you're completely idiotic you must realize that everything that consumes energy requires resources to construct of which we have a finite amount. Regardless of how much energy is contained in the sun the fact is that we cannot tap into it at this point in time, nor in the foreseeable future. We can't even reliably tap into the over abundant energy from the sun that falls on the earth.

The western way of living requires taking resources from other countries. Grow up, you are not the only country on earth, you are not the only society entitled to the bounty that the world has to offer.

Right. The science is settled.

[tp1024]

There can be no doubt about the science, when so many experts agree. What's the point anyway in their childish insistence that predictions must be accurate. After all, this is a complex system those scientists are dealing with. I mean, hell, we don't even really understand how the ice ages came about or what exactly happened to the Sahara in the last couple of thousand years. We don't even know what the weather will be like next Sunday.

You can't really expect those scientists to get everything exactly right the first time, they are scientists, they can't do miracles. And besides, science is changing all the time - it's nothing unusual.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[mjwx]

they would be advocating wildly for Nuclear power in whatever form.

We are.

But these complete dingbats who keep trying to label us alarmists and have to liken science to a region because they have no clue as to the science involved are drowning the voice of reason out with pointless, inaccurate and completely idiotic rants.

You dont understand the science behind it, you dont want to understand it or the arguments recommending what we should do, you just want to whine because you don't understand it. The fact you think Al Gore has anything to do with actual science proves how much you want to learn, the only people who listen to him are his detractors.

So leave this discussion to people who have a clue and go back to listening to Fox News, the comforting blanket of ignorance.