Gas tanker Ob River attempts first winter Arctic crossing

[Jimbuna]

Gas is now going east and not only west and at a 40% saving in transportation costs mainly because of the melting ice and the emergence of shale gas in the US.


A large tanker carrying liquified natural gas (LNG) is set to become the first ship of its type to sail across the Arctic.
The carrier, Ob River, left Norway in November and has sailed north of Russia on its way to Japan.
The specially equipped tanker is due to arrive in early December and will shave 20 days off the regular journey.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20454757

[Betonov]

Can't say I'm happy about it. The fact that these routes are suddenly practicly navigable somehow proves environmental changes :hmmm:

[Catfish]

^This.

And isn't it funny that the first signs and results of those changes are just being used to even burn more fossil fuels/gases ? :nope:

"An inconvenient truth", isn't it ? Anyone remember this from 2006 ?
http://vimeo.com/16335777

The wind velocity has increased, the calciumcarbonate buffers of the oceans are filled up, Greenland is indeed becoming green again and no one even signs the ridiculously Kyoto protocol - not that those who signed it do anything either.

Now with at least one major storm every year alone at the US coast, with glaciers melting worldwide and intracontinental temperatures of more than 60 degrees Celsius we see what is going on, and no one can say he did not know it.

[Jimbuna]

Can't say I'm happy about it. The fact that these routes are suddenly practicly navigable somehow proves environmental changes :hmmm:

That goes without saying but if the ice is melting then why not take advantage of the fact, especially if it will mean cheaper fuel...but not simply greater profits for the companies involved.

I suppose that will be a future debate regarding the matter.

[Gerald]

Interesting, I'm running on gas ... so if this works, maybe the future looks brighter with greater accessibility to gas stations,:hmmm:

[Stealhead]

Geologists say that they see strong evidence that the earth cycles between ice ages every 10,000 to 20,000 years so if this is the natural cycle of things before any of our negative effects then even if we added nothing the climate change would occur anyway.

Before the start of each ice age according to geologists there is a time period of sudden increase in global temperatures before things become colder.

In my humble opinion there is much about the universe that we can not control the climate is one of them can we have an effect on it sure can be make it do what we want no.

We do not truly know enough to know if what we do has an effect or not on the grand scale or not and like I said if the there is an ice age cycle there will always be one the only effect the creatures living on the earth at given time span is perhaps a slowing or increase in the change and by how much we can not say for certain.

the dinosaurs where around for 100 million years before they bit it not to sound harsh but an ice age would do us more good than bad it would reduce the population and that is something that mankind seems unable to to himself collectively.Most likely that is why the universe is the way it is it balances itself out in way that we humans will never grasp.

Under Yosemite National park there is a massive volcanic caldera called Yellowstone Caldera that will erupt and it will block out the sun for several years with ash. When will this happen?
In 10 minutes or perhaps 10,000 years no one can say and there is nothing to stop it.that is just one caldera there is another one just as large in Italy and also in Indonesia.

I say do not have the illusion that we humans have control over what happens because we don't not over naturally occurring events.And even man made you cant control people die everyday in an accident they did not plan on having when they walked out the door.

[Catfish]

Geologists say that they see strong evidence that the earth cycles between ice ages every 10,000 to 20,000 years so if this is the natural cycle of things before any of our negative effects then even if we added nothing the climate change would occur anyway.

Geologists say all kinds of things, but some are unfortunately all else but neutral. Especially if they work for certain organisations or lobbies telling you how safe we are, and e.g how safe the deposit of radioactive waste is. Or, that we only have a warmer phase due to a) sun cycles, b) natural changes, c) whatever but human influence, and that it will go away by itself.
I will try to tell why it will not just 'go away'.


It is true we have not only "ice ages" and "normal" conditions, but we also have warmer and cooler intervals as well, not being considered as ice ages or its counterparts.
The last real ice age (the Wuerm one) began to end about 15000 years before Christ - 10,000 years b.C. the first human civilizations we know of emerged, along with stories of being forced to leave a pleasant and habitable place due to heavy flooding, around the black sea.
There is no civilisation (!) older than that when it comes to buildings or written text, we have no sagas, caves with carvings, buildings or other written evidence from Lucy, when she walked around in Africa long before that time, some 3.2 million years ago.

However we indeed have drilling probes from layers deposited some hundred million years ago, and the rock and fossil records tells us about the conditions in which e.g. sediments were deposited back then, depending on atmosphere and temperature. Rust, Calcium depositing and all other kinds of hints can be extracted and measured, especially carbon storage. So, down to Carbon/Perm some hundreds of million years ago and deeper, we indeed have the average temperatures and CO2 content of the atmosphere of those times.

When CO2 levels go up for whatever reasons (also volcanic action, meteoric impacts), the sea and plants serve as a buffer for using up a lot of that gas, binding Carbonate with Calcium, and the plants depositing it in their tissues.

When plants die they give it all back into the atmosphere, UNLESS they decay without oxygen (like being buried by other material, in euxinic conditions etc.) - in that case they cannot give back the CO2 into the atmosphere, but begin to rot away into oil, and coal.

So some plants where buried in such a way that there was not enough oxygen to convert their sugars back into Carbon Dioxide - again, any organic plant matter exposed to the atmosphere, will not longer store CO2, but give it back into the atmosphere. They oxidise.

The oxygen surplus in comparison to CO2 we have in the atmosphere, comes form rotting land plants and algae that were not able to give the CO2 back.
Now think about what happens, if we extract that stuff and burn those fossil fuels. The relation of Oxygen to CO2 in the atmosphere will shift.

At some point those CO2 buffers are full though (also - since we cut down so many trees, parts of the buffer system does not work anyway). This is what most probably happened at the end on the Carbon era, only that the earth was covered with plants of all kinds - not what we have now.


Which is why i posted the link to the "inconvenient truth" vid. It is not global warming alone, but especially the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere. We are measuring the CO2 content of the atmosphere since 1958 (indeed we did earlier, but not worldwide and not comparable).
VIdeo at 19:50, look at the graph. You can discuss and interprete, but those are just data - make up your own picture.

There is that graph that shows the CO2 content of the atmosphere is now ten times high, as in the time of the 'Perm' era happening.
It is a peak ranging out of the usual back and forth we find in the fossil record, and it never was that high since the last 2 billion years.

The change happens not fast though, it will probably take centuries, but it gains momentum since the changing atmosphere can also store more heat than before. What we see by the temperature only going up by a tenth of one degree Celsius should make us aware of things to come.


After all it does not matter whether we die from natural or self-made causes as long as the outcome is the same. But you have to be blind not to see any connection.

Thanks,
Catfish