> In 2016, a group of scientists evaluated the environmental impact and estimated that due to changing weather patterns over the next few decades, melt water could release the nuclear waste, 200,000 liters of diesel fuel, a nontrivial quantity of PCBs, and 24 million liters of untreated sewage into the environment as early as the year 2090. Transition in ice sheet surface mass balance at Camp Century from net accumulation to net ablation is plausible within the next 75 years under one climate model, and after another 44 to 88 years the buried wastes could be exposed between 2135 and 2179.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Century#Residual_environm...
A concern and one we should fix, but a time bomb?
- So, Sir David, what's worries you most?
- The Greenland Ice Sheet. If it melts human civilisation is finished.
- oh. And err is it melting?
- Yes, and accelerating.
- Oh.
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.5.020563/fu...
Besides it's climate impact and heat transfer mechanism it will likely disturb the other ocean currents that are import for a stable climate as well.
Yes, an Antarctic melt would be worse, but it's far less likely.
I'm going to choose to worry about other things.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/new-climate-models-suggest-faste...
Those of you downvoting me to banish your anxiety should find a healthier outlet for your issues.
That carbonbrief article links to the underlying paper at : https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20011-8
The paper reports on an update of previous studies, and the results are reported mainly as changes from the previous material to reflect the impact that changes in the modelling decisions.
I can't tell where the 2.1 cm to 5 cm numbers come from (searching the paper for "2.1" is interesting).
Here is a table from the paper reported as total sea level impact estimates and 1 stddev range, rather than deltas : https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20011-8/tables/1
It reports the expected 2100 see level rise from Greenland ice melt of 6 different scenarios, in two methodologies. The low, low stddev at 3.7 cm, and the high, high stddev at 25.6 cm.
And of course sea level may also be rising from other sources, that just isn't covered in the paper you mention.
You get to pick your personal items to worry about based on your individual assumptions and interests, but if your opinion is based in part on that specific paper you might want to reread it.
The only related thing I could find in your linked report was to estimate contributions up by 2.6cm/2.8 cm/5cm (different scenarios) from CMIP5 to CMIP6, not in total. Maybe I missed something?
By and large, we really don't need more resources to mine, but to use what we have more efficiently.
I'm sure there are a few edge cases, but the attitude that we should look for more and more to exploit is what leads to deforestation, the biggest loss of species diversity since the last ice age, global warming and a serious toll on the health of today's people.
I think it really captures what the the problem is, rather then making it some concept that seems abstract and immovable to the average person. Lots of people deny climate change, almost no one denies that humans pollute a lot.
Just so that you have the ability to fully ruin your day
Submitted URL was https://thehackposts.com/news/greenlands-ice-sheet-is-releas....
By the way, for anyone interested, an easy way to bust these is simply to pick a likely-unique string from the article you suspect of being a ripoff and google it with quotes around it. If there's a more original source, it will probably come up:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22It+is+a+region+that+conta...
Sometimes I have to do this a few times before hitting the jackpot, but in my experience: if content looks copied, it probably is.
There's also a subtype that deliberately circumvents this trick. There is a type of ad fraudster that rips off of, e.g. native German-speaking writers, runs their work through machine translation, and publishes the English output as original.
I encountered several examples on some technical subs on Reddit (not yet on HN). It took a disproportionate amount of effort to unmask even one -- the method that ended up succeeding was to guess which technical terms could be idempotent under translation, and (&&) some together until the result set is small enough. (It's harder to reverse translate, because unless you're an expert translator, you probably don't know what the source language was).
I've only seen a handful of these, but because of how difficult it is to detect, I'd speculate there could be a sizeable population in the wild. The writing is technically correct and non-suspicious, because it's written by a human expert in another language. It strongly resists reverse Google searches. And it resists social unmasking, because social groups who speak different languages tend to have distance between them.
It's a clever evil.
