Tom Toles for February 08, 2017

Melt off on land is the more serious at sea rise. But that’s one heck of a shelf about to break off!

Trump will save us. Republicans will save us. God will save us. The mythical trifecta.

When our self created apocalypse comes to fruition, then tell me about your “Alternative Facts”.

Unfortunately, we’ll be falling off the cliff with them.

NPR story yesterday said this will maybe add a millimeter to sea rise, as it’s already floating ice. The REAL concern is the land based glaciers this will free up to move faster toward the ocean.

Why would a piece of ice breaking off be attributed to global warming? How far would you think that glacier would extend before breaking off if there was no global warming..

Glaciers extending into the ocean have two choices, either melt or break off.. Global warming has little to do with it..

@Alberta oil

It’s important because it is an inland crack. For more information, see:

https://phys.org/news/2016-11-west-antarctic-ice-shelf.html

And it’s not THIS ice shelf that’s the problem, but the freeing of the on-land glaciers behind, that now can move faster toward the ocean.

Well, it’s good that a patriotic multinational oil corporation now owns the American foreign policy, so it’ll be easy to overcome all them science-y hoaxes.

I was so very apprehensive when Marco Polio said he might vote against it.

some more political cartoonist fake climate warming

Don’t worry Republicans are in charge now. They’ll just make this kind of thing illegal.

There can’t be global warming; it’s winter and snowing. The last three consecutive years have be warmer than the previous. This is average temperature: high, low, and all hourly readings in between, and it is still getting warmer. It isn’t the scientists who are ignoring their senses, nor their vast collection of records.

From the web sight Marten gave us:

In 2015, a 225-square-mile iceberg broke off of the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica, and researchers at The Ohio State University have discovered that the event was no ordinary breakup. The culprit: a deep subsurface rift that cracked through the …more

“Rifts usually form at the margins of an ice shelf, where the ice is thin and subject to shearing that rips it apart,” he explained. “However, this latest event in the Pine Island Glacier was due to a rift that originated from the center of the ice shelf and propagated out to the margins. This implies that something weakened the center of the ice shelf, with the most likely explanation being a crevasse melted out at the bedrock level by a warming ocean.”

Another clue: The rift opened in the bottom of a “valley” in the ice shelf where the ice had thinned compared to the surrounding ice shelf.

The valley is likely a sign of something researchers have long suspected: Because the bottom of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet lies below sea level, ocean water can intrude far inland and remain unseen. New valleys forming on the surface would be one outward sign that ice was melting away far below.

Cripes, I am tired of right-wingers mindlessly spouting the same old lies over and over AND OVER again. I’ve seen these same statements about a thousand times, countered them with FACTS and SCIENCE and WEBSITES many, many times. They simply don’t care.

And I shouldn’t be surprised. Science in general — and scientists in particular — require the ability to process information, learn, and develop new thoughts. Hence they do NOT repeat the same lies over and over again.

I’m not even going to bother to respond this time. Those of us who live in reality will try to do what we can to save our vaunted civilization. This is just a brief cri de coeur.

@MDavis4183: Sayin’ it don’t make it so. Human-caused climate change is fact.