[Taxacom] NASA on global warming

[Kenneth Kinman]

Dear All,
      I was recently ragging on astronomers (including NASA) wasting too
much money.  However, this is certainly not uniformly so.  Some of their
researchers recently announced that their research showed that melting
in the polar regions is actually accelerating even faster than forecast
just a few years ago.  Of course, this news got buried under all the
news about disasters in Japan and the Middle East uprisings.  This
probably made its easier for the Merchants of Doubt to just ignore such
findings.    
       The trouble is that the resulting sea level rise will only be
dramatic enough to directly affect certain low-lying areas of the world,
like Bangladesh and other such flat coastal areas, as well as low-lying
islands, mostly inhabited by relative poor people (which advertizers and
news organizations don't pay much attention to). It is also a relatively
slow-motion disaster.    But what is often overlooked are the indirect
effects of such redistribution of water from the poles to the tropics
which will affect a much broader segment of the world's population and
often at a faster rate.  
      For instance, isostatic rebound (which has been going on for many
thousands of years) could re-acclerate, thus destabilizing any number of
tectonic plates in ways we simply do not understand.  Thus severe
earthquakes (as well as tsunamis in some cases), could continue to
devastate many areas long before sea level rise takes its toll.  And, of
course, that is just in addition to greater extremes in weather (floods
here, droughts there, bigger tornado outbreaks, massive hurricanes).   
       Frankly I am most concerned about the effects from Antarctica.
Critics of global warming often cite data showing more snowfall in parts
of Antarctica, but fail to take into consideration massive melting on
the other side of that continent.  That is likely to make the Antarctic
plate less stable, and an increasing, continental weight shift is likely
to transmit stresses to other major tectonic plates (especially those
which directly abut it).  
      The Pacific plate is particularly vulnerable, as it is affected
not only by the Antarctic plate, but also other plates getting stressed
by polar melting in the north.  This all makes earthquake prediction
increasingly difficult along the Ring of Fire.  So the major earthquakes
off the coasts of Sumatra, Chile, and Japan may be just a taste of what
it to come (not to mention New Zealand and Haiti).  
      And the interior of North America isn't immune to such stresses.
Places like Nashville could be virtually levelled by earthquakes, and
the St. Lawrence River valley of eastern Canada should not forget the
massive earthquakes of 1663 with violent aftershocks that lasted for
many months.
        How much of the stress being placed on the Earth's crust which
is directly manmade is perhaps up for debate by those who are prone to
believe the "merchants of doubt".  But just as many of them were totally
wrong about tobacco or DDT (and severely attacked Rachel Carson for
challenging them), too many of them are still trying to delay taking
action and thus simply kicking the can down the road and making it eve
more difficult for our children and grandchildren. 
     But it seems to me that the earth's crust is now in an increasing
state of flux and mankind's activities are certainly NOT helping, but
most likely making things much worse.  My sympathies in advance to
populations in California who are likely to be the victims of the next
big earthquake.  Too bad we can not  predict in what part of California
it will next occur.   For those of you worried about nuclear power
plants in California, that is likely to be the least of your worries.
As in the last really big one in San Francisco, fire is likely to be a
bigger problem, not to mention structural collapse.  
         ----------Ken Kinman

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-09/ice-loss-accelerates-in-greenland-antarctica-nasa-study-finds.html