Arctic Meltdown

<font color="0000ff"><u>This can't be good</u></font>

why not ?
might not be too bad for the folks in Alaska, western Canada, and eastern Russia
change isn't always bad,
the ice has melted before.

<font color="0000ff">I don't think my kids will be buying any ocean front property down here. </font>

proly better to wait
until the beach reaches atlanta....

<font color="0000ff">LOL!</font>

yeah a tennessee beachfront would kick ass.

yeah, the appalachian islands would still be a great vacation spot.

<blockquote><hr size=0><!-quote-!><font size=1>quote:</font>

the appalachian islands<!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>

there once was
many years ago
a sea in middle america.
i can climb the bluffs near here
and still find fossil seashells.
and i'm 1,000 feet above current sea levels.

<blockquote><hr size=0><!-quote-!><font size=1>quote:</font>

and still find fossil seashells.
and i'm 1,000 feet above current sea levels.<!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>
You silly boy. Don't you understand those critters simply crawled up there during the great flood/Noah's Ark time?

(Message edited by skyypilot on November 11, 2004)

Tropical fossil plants are routinely found in Antartica. The entire land mass of the world existed as one supercontinent called Gonwandaland several hundred millions of years ago. Many strange reptile creatures once roamed what is now Antarctica.

<blockquote><hr size=0><!-quote-!><font size=1>quote:</font>

Many strange reptile creatures once roamed what is now Antarctica.<!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>
and will again
once all this damn ice melts.

<font color="0000ff">Well there is a whole culture built around the ice and the animals there. The sea ice is already melting. Homes are sinking noticeably into the ground. the people will have to move north to follow the food source. The ice is part of our global a/c. </font>

Global a/c - The warm Air/water currents do flow northward, cool down and then flow back toward the equator. Though global warming is happening, the greenhouse gas being the cause is only theory. As hip said the ice has melted before, the planet has gone through ice ages multiple times, and probably, following logic, has gone through Hot (no ice) Ages. The planet may be trying to cleanse itself...of some sort of.... Parasite?

Our excessive addition of gasses to the atmosphere cannot be helping tho. But Mother Earth will survive you can be sure of that, Shes one tuff mutha

I live in the Rocky Mountains at 10,000 ft above sea level and theres a plethera of fossilized sea creatures all over the peaks from when there was a huge inland sea called Lake Bonneville. You can easily see the water line all along the Range.

It is fact tho that the ice IS melting so whatever the cause the problem is real and the current release of gasses needs very badly to be reduced and eventually stopped - Poor air and acid rain are two other very real problems prolly stemming from the same source.

one thing we should worry about coming from melting ice caps is the released of ancient bacteria and virus's that could easily start a pandemic. viable viral particles and bacterial cells have been found in ice caps mainly in veins of water that somehow form in the ice. but then again a horrible disease could come from many different places so dont live with ducks and pigs.

there are pluses to warming,
not just negatives.
for one thing
green plants grow faster, more prolific.
that means more food, more oxygen, more air scrubbed too.
we should not fear change
just because it's change.

I think it's not change, but the rate of change that has the attention of any scientist not affiliated with or under contract to the government. Cycles are normal as we can see from the fossil evidence. It would be best if we can make sure we're not helping the process along. The rate of change today seems exponentially large compared to previous cycles.

sudden climatic change can be bad especially for agriculture. if areas are getting too much rain or too little rain in areas where the rain used to be ideal for farming that could have dangerous implications for food sources. not to say that such things havent been happeneing to farms all throughout time. but it can get a lot worse especially because of the immense scale in which we do farm. but should we be afraid no we should be figuring out how best to cope and how to not make things any worse.

Bummer for us shredders,
someday there will be
nowhere left to snowboard.
Then again, I like to sail,
so it works out alright.

<blockquote><hr size=0><!-quote-!><font size=1>quote:</font>

The rate of change today seems exponentially large compared to previous cycles.<!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>
that's hard to say with any certainty,
and one must be cautious about generalizing
from the specific.
we know that there have been both
gradual and rapid climate shifts in the past,
and each time
some species were losers and others were winners.
surely mankind's intelligence, civilization and technology gives him an unprecedented edge in surviving, perhaps even thriving, in the new reality unfolding.

things really are changing,
did you know that the earth is very rapidly losing it's magnetic field ?
now i'm not quite sure how to blame that on western civilization yet
but i'm confident someone will.
but in a lot less time that it's going to take to melt the ice caps
the earth's magnetic shield from solar/cosmic radiation will be gone.
or maybe not,
some scientists hypothesize [ based more on wishful thinking than any real evidence]
that what might be happening is the
earth may be getting ready to flip magnetic poles,
reverse magnetic polarity, the north pole would become the south pole magnetically.
we know this has happened a few times before in the history of the earth,
so maybe that is really the cause
but nevertheless
the potential for disaster remains very high,
no one has any idea how long the earth might be unprotected without a magnetic field functioning as a radiation shield,
might be almost instant
or might take decades.
that, friends, is a very real concern
with far more impact in the short run
than a slow rise in global temps over the
next couple centuries,
at the rate our magnetic field is
deteriorating
it could be gone within 40-50 years,
soon enough for most of you to still
be among the living.
if the field collapses
and does not return very quickly
global warming will be very far down
on your worry list.
damn few species could survive the radiation for long.



(Message edited by admin on November 21, 2004)

[pskovinsky]

hmm, thats charming, i think it's time for me to install that lead roofing.. :P

More seriously, does anyone have any data on how much the sea level has risen recently? I ask because it seems like it's already somewhere higher.. or all the beaches in my area sunk at the same time, which is possible i suppose.

Our fault or not, a rapid temp change is going to cause some problems..

I've noticed changes in the weather recently also, this year especialy.
Usually where i live there are two seasons, rainy, and foggy.
Then a month in fall of sun.

This year we had freezing ass cold rainy (also known as a normal winter, but we had those anyway), then warmish rainy (spring, usually very very short, giving way to "summer") Summer, which was HOT and DRY, and NOT foggy. That NEVER happens, i've lived here for 23 years, and we have never had a hot sunny summer before, usually there are about five days spread out where it's not foggy as hell. This year it was reversed, we had maybe 5 days of fog, weirdness.
Then we had a normal fall, still sunnyish, but some fog...
and now it's getting cold again, but not rainy cold like it's supposed to.

In conclusion, something is up!

The single continent is named Panega. And yes, the caps are melting, but not anywhere near past present measures. Mankind is merely expiditing their demise. The Earth has a soul, and fights back agaisnt every destructive human measure. Each new hurrican is merely a release of heat brought on by such warmings. The human race can't possible hope to formulate forces equal to or greater than the sum of the soul of the planet. After all, we are but parts of the whole, and not to be confused with anything greater than the whole. A hole is one is but one shot, whereas, a whole planet shooting back when shot at can only be interpeted as destruction. Think, and free mankind.

<blockquote><hr size=0><!-quote-!><font size=1>quote:</font>

The Earth has a soul, and fights back agaisnt every destructive human measure.<!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>
you really beleve that ?
i don't.

[pskovinsky]

I see it more as an extremely complicated machine, like a huge clock or something, we have (in my opinion) bent a few of the little parts, nothing instantly serious, but calibration has been lost.
Now things are starting to change, and as they change they bend a couple more little parts, and the change starts happening faster.
Eventually, i think we'll have a nice toasty planet, with a hell of a lot of sand.
But eventually it will swing the other way, there won't be much life left producing greenhouse gasses, and there won't be much left but light colored heat-reflecting sand, and things will start to cool down, the ice caps will form again, reflecting more heat, and the tempurature will swing the other way.

All we have done is sped up the process by bending those little parts with our pollution and such.

I'm sure we'll eventually wipe life as we know it off the earth, and i'm pretty sure we (or something) will eventually wipe US off the face of the earth as well. If the human race is lucky we will have gotten off the planet by then, and will have self sustaining colonies somewhere else. Otherwise, R.I.P. Humanity.

i dont think life can be whiped out that easily. not at all. there are plenty of organisms surviving under all types of very extreme conditions. life will always find a way to metabolize some form of matter no matter what we do to it. theve found organisms in thermal vents on space ships hulls that took the bacteria to space and back. you can get organisms to grow in media that the sole source of carbon is a pollutant like dioxin or PCB's. i think the only thing that might really do life in is if the sun goes and thats gonna be a few billion years so we got time. and even then who knows what type of super stable endospore that is capable of intergalatic travel will have evolved who knows. lifes pretty versatile. as far as humans go we are far more complex then many forms of bacteria and the like, which provides us with a disadvantage of required a broader range of nutrition, but it always gives us the advantage of being able to think which gives us a good chance at least some of us a good chance at surviving even something like a nuclear war.

[pskovinsky]

Life as we know it is a fairly generic term.

Had we been around when the dinosaurs were, them dieing would have been the end of life as we know it.

I expect something like that, most of the current large animals dieing from ???? (lack of food, to hot, i donno, something), and a new set taking things over.

I can't see ANYTHING short of our sun going nova that would actually manage to sterilize earth, if stuff can survive 2 hours at 15psi, it can survive some warm weather :P

werd man i hear ya. theres a good chance large mammals will experience major extinction they already are but thats mainly cause of us directly. but yea life is a weird term i mean what the hell is a virus is it life? its just DNA or RNA in a protein? but it can replicate but it needs host to replicate? who knows.

the earth is a giant cake we have colonized when all the nutrients are gone hopefully we will be able to fruit and multiply throughout the galaxy, not that it matters.

I don't know if we're fully colonized yet but pinning has definitely started already.

ok ok... this is slightly off topic...
but what happens when mother earth dies ?
i mean
the sun is a star, all stars either
explode or implode, and none of which i would
want to be around for.
when that happens, and it will.
i hope to not be around
i won't even say "god only knows"
because it's not right.

questions ... comments ....
-jt

i suspect that perhaps the future belong
not to organic lifeforms
but the intelligent machines we will create.
they are the ones who can stand the extremes of space,
live for tens of thousands of years,
etc.
i think our job is to create intelligent machine life, and pass the universe on to them.

oh, well isn't that just fantastic
makes me feel better
wait, kinda like the Virtual Sex Machine?
aliens wouldn't know what to do stumbling up on
one of them


(Message edited by jasontokes on December 04, 2004)

a machine lifeform
could colonize the entire milky way galaxy
using just today's propulsion systems
in a million years easy.
every plantoid would be a source of 'food',
resources to be exploited by factory 'bots.
every star, another source of energy to be harnessed.
they need never die,
just repaired, re-fitted, eternal.
ever growing, learning.
creating a universal network.
we just need to figure out how to create an intelligent computer and give it access to the tools and resources it needs.
maybe hitch a ride
after they go out first to prepare our way,
symbiots, cyborgs.

like the terminator
"come with me if you want to live"

or the Borg
'resistance is futile...'

ack
no good

the tricky part
will be breathing a soul into them...

so, what would YOU do...
i'm off to work so i'll get back
to it in like 4 hours

me ?
i'll be dead &amp; long gone.
so will you...

this is true, just thinking about megreat great great great grand chillens