NASA: Strange and Sudden Massive Melt in Greenland

[GliderGuider]

NASA: Strange and Sudden Massive Melt in Greenland

Nearly all of Greenland's massive ice sheet suddenly started melting a bit this month, a freak event that surprised scientists.

Three satellites show what NASA calls unprecedented melting of the ice sheet that blankets the island, starting on July 8 and lasting four days. Most of the thick ice remains. While some ice usually melts during the summer, what was unusual was that the melting happened in a flash and over a widespread area.

The ice melt area went from 40 percent of the ice sheet to 97 percent in four days, according to NASA. Until now, the most extensive melt seen by satellites in the past three decades was about 55 percent.

"When we see melt in places that we haven't seen before, at least in a long period of time, it makes you sit up and ask what's happening?" NASA chief scientist Waleed Abdalati said. It's a big signal, the meaning of which we're going to sort out for years to come."

Things that make you say "Hmmmmm...."

[Fridays Child]

1. Do you suppose that the fascists will tell the truth about human-caused climate change...

...when Manhattan is under water?

[Gregorian]

2. Right now China is building 100 new airports. A billion people are going to begin to travel.

And already we've seen that all of America's corn crops are affected by the high temperatures. That means, everything you eat is also in jeopardy.

No one is going to make the change needed to alter this course.


I think it's over.

[XemaSab]

3. Dare I say?

[joshcryer]

4. Related DU threads:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/112720516

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021015669

[GliderGuider]

5. Thanks. I haven't been following along as closely as usual these days. nt

[joshcryer]

7. No worries GG, wanted to highlight the other dicussions.

I've been participating in them because this is just madness.

[pscot]

8. I just read through those 2 threads

Alarm seems to be growing. There's more interest in this stuff than there used to be.

[GliderGuider]

9. I noticed that too.

More people are saying, "OK enough with the 'one-robin-doesn't-make-a-spring' bullshit. Things are not all right."

Problem with a system this big is, by the time you can see its out-of-whackitude with the naked eye, you've already been in the ditch for fifty years.

[truebrit71]

14. ^^^ That is the proverbial hammer making contact with the proverbial nail...

People that talk in terms of not knowing when we're going to reach the 'tipping point' need simply to look over their shoulders to see it....

We no longer need to worry about how to prevent GW or GCC, we need to figure out how to survive on a planet that is radically different than the one we were born on..

As I became aware of the whole GW/CC concept I always felt guilty that my grandchildren would have to bear the brunt of the changes...I now think, as a 48 year-old adult, that I will see most of those unpleasant changes take place in MY lifetime..never mind my kid, or grand-kid's...

As ridiculous and over-the-top as 'Day after tomorrow' was, the one thing I believe they got 100% right was the speed with which things will go downhill when it all goes pear-shaped...

[GliderGuider]

15. You might want to look into the concept of "dragon-kings"

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0907/0907.4290.pdf

We're seeing a lot of these guys lately...

ETA: Hat-tip to joshcryer for pointing me at the paper above.

[truebrit71]

16. Is there an "idiot's" guide to it?

I think I grasp the concept, but the charts and graphs confuse the crap out of me as my brain has atrophied since my college days..

[GliderGuider]

17. Speaking as an idiot myself...

The concept is very new, and it's just making its way down to steerage, where presumably someone will translate it into idiotese. Here's my stab at it, starting with excepts from the paper:

Systems with a large number of mutually interacting parts, often open to their environment, self-organize their internal structure and their dynamics with novel and sometimes surprising macroscopic (“emergent”) properties.

One of the most remarkable emergent properties of natural and social sciences is that they are punctuated by rare large events, which often dominate their organization and lead to huge losses. We introduce the concept of dragon-kings to refer to the existence of transient organization into extreme events that are statistically and mechanistically different from the rest of their smaller siblings. This realization opens the way for a systematic theory of predictability of catastrophes, which is outlined here and illustrated.

Often, dragon-kings are associated with the occurrence of a phase transition, bifurcation, catastrophe, tipping point, whose emergent organization produces useful precursors.

As I understand it, a dragon-king is like a black swan event in that it's unexpected and severe, but it's different in that it arises from a convergence of events within the system rather than from events outside the system like the black swan. IOW, a dragon-king is an extreme endogenous event, while a black swan is exogenous.

Theoretically, the detection of dragon-kings can give us insights into the behaviour of the system, while black swan can't. Dragon-kings can occur because different aspects of system behaviour that aren't normally correlated suddenly start to synchronize and become mutually amplifying.

With a system as complex as the interaction between human activity, population levels, technology and the climate, there are endless opportunities for problems to begin singing in harmony, and to create new and fearful tunes as a result. I think of dragon kings as being like foreshocks in an earthquake zone. They signal that events are approaching a phase shift or tipping point.

[truebrit71]

18. OKay, from one idiot to another, that's sort of what I had been able to glean from it as well...

...thanks for your input!! (the other alternative for me is to what for the 'Dick and Jane' version - or the Muppet Baby one...)

Cheers!

[kurtyboy]

19. My take

On first reading of this paper, my interpretation and application of its findings are that dragon-kings are not outliers in the statistical sense--they ought not to be discarded from consideration when evaluating trends. That is, these events are and ought to be considered part of an "expected" course of events within a given system. Expanding further, wider consideration should be given to the interaction between systems: we have, as scientists, become victims of our own dedication to specialization (and our perception that such specialization will enable us to better understand individual systems, however defined).

In short, we truly have blinded ourselves with the trees (and the fungi growing on the trees...) while the forest's advances and declines remain understudied. The paper's examination of two (seemingly) unrelated phenomena (earthquakes and epilepsy) subtextually speaks to this downside of specialization in the sciences.

I think this is an important paper for most fields of inquiry, not the least of which is statistical analysis.

[GliderGuider]

20. I think they only look like outliers to someone wedded to the power law.

IMO, if they were true statistical outliers (i.e. uncorrelated with the system's operation) they'd be Black Swans.

Understanding inter-system interactions is going to be crucial as the whole array of human and natural systems we depend on for Life As We Know It become more interlinked, correlated and stressed.

I agree about the importance. I think it shows even more scientific promise than the concept of Black Swans.

OTOH, maybe all it will do is help us correctly identify the "Click!" and say, "Oh dear, I'm pretty sure we just stepped on a land mine...."

[joshcryer]

10. Sadly, Gen X and Y, while more educated about AGW, appear to not care.

They just have their heads in the sand with the newfangled gadgets and aren't as concerned, as a whole, as they should be. This despite that the effects are going to hit them and their children (and certainly their grandchildren) very hard.

[pscot]

11. THE world is too much with us;

late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not

I don't guess the kids are any better at seeing around a corner than the rest of us. It's our nature. The cortex preens itself and talks big, but below the surface are the primitive layers that respond on a level the radio brain barely perceives. Eat, sleep, fuck, survive. The rest is just gaudy patter we use to fool the marks, i.e., us. We aren't nearly as special as we'd like to believe.

[GliderGuider]

13. +1

[OKIsItJustMe]

6. NASA Release

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/greenland-melt.html

[pscot]

12. Interestingly, they showed that image on Rachel's show tonight

And completely screwed up the explanation of what it meant. Demned dilettantes.