Global warming poll

Now don't go misunderstanding me here folks. I'm new here so be gentle yeah?

"I agree global warming is happening." Thats got that out of the way!

What I disagree with is the explanations coming from the scientific bodies. There are so many lies, some of them quite huge, coming from the western governments that I find it impossible to believe anything until I have researched and found arguments from the pro's and anti's, then come to my own rational conclusions.
I do hope my questions will be answered sensibly and not just shot down as dribble coming from an idiot....we aint all rocket scientists!!

Let me start by asking about a very confusing issue, to me anyway.
There's a reporter from an American news crew on tv recently telling us about the ice shelf behind him which is breaking off. The guy has ice on his eyelashes and around his mouth and is wearing a jacket 6 inches thick. I asked a scientist how the ice shelf could possibly be melting and breaking off when the temperatures in that region are minus 30 for 8 months of the year. He replied that melted water seeps down through the ice causing cracks over a very long time period.
Now what I can't understand is: 1/ Where does the melt water come from? If its on the surface then how does it manage to seep anywhere as it would instantly freeze as soon as it left the surface, so how can it retain its heat for long enough or until its seeped to a level where it can continue to form a crack? This same argument does not appear to apply to the glaciers around Mt Everest where daytime temperatures far exceed anything recorded in the Arctic\Antarctic but where the ice remains frozen.

Pack ice is pack ice because its impenetrable due to the lack of air bubbles. It takes a lot of melting, thats why icebergs can float around in the warmer ocean currents for months if not years before melting.
I can understand how the cracks could appear over time if there were volcanic activity underneath the ice but the scientists would spot this from satellite and seismology data wouldn't they? Fault lines? Someone would spot this!
I have a theory that stray microwaves are being caught up in the earths magnetic field and pulled down onto the poles where they are acting like a huge microwave oven and internally melting the ice sheets. Sound ridiculous? Why not? The fastest warming has been in the last 25 years, since mobile phones and microwave ovens etc., have been in use?? It would explain how the ice could melt internally to cause cracks in such a short space of time without the need for an external melt-water source! Lets face it stray microwaves are not in short supply as any radio astronomer will tell you!

2/ Very rarely do I see water vapour mentioned in arguments about global warming. Considering it accounts for 95% of all greanhouse gasses surely it should be included in analysis?? Don't forget that if it were not for the water vapour in the atmos' the earth would be a far cooler place to live due to its heat trapping capabilities which can be witnessed on cloudy and clear nights in winter when the difference in temperature can be significant.

There now. That was painless. Its the little details I need explaining before I commit myself to one camp or the other. At the moment I'm securely nailed to the fence! Too many contradictions!

Its pointless handing out equations and talking trillions of cubic metres blah di blah when the simple science going on outside your kitchen window seems to contradict what we are being told.

[Paul Ward]

You have some very valid point Funky, let me try to help with a few of them:

Let me start by asking about a very confusing issue, to me anyway..... Now what I can't understand is: 1/ Where does the melt water come from? If its on the surface then how does it manage to seep anywhere as it would instantly freeze as soon as it left the surface, so how can it retain its heat for long enough or until its seeped to a level where it can continue to form a crack? This same argument does not appear to apply to the glaciers around Mt Everest where daytime temperatures far exceed anything recorded in the Arctic\Antarctic but where the ice remains frozen.

Melt water can seep a long way before becoming frozen again, it does form on the surface and does drip down into crevasses. If the ice is at nearly freezing, it requires little extra energy to melt it. In the summer in Antarctica, many glacier crevasses have a pool of near-freezing water at the bottom - it used to scare me to death thinking about it when walking across a glacier. A n icy lake at the bottom of a crevasse seems a lot worse to me than a dry crevasse. The same applies whereever the glacier is.

How crevassed an ice-berg is depends on where it came from and how it was formed. Some glaciers meet the sea at an angle that causes much crevassing, it is this and the terrain they flowed over that determines how many cracks they have and how deep they go.

Many Antarctic icebergs however come from iceshelves. Here the ice from the land meets the sea at a shallow angle, the land-sea boundary can come 10's even 100's of miles from the edge of the ice-shelf. Again depending on circumstances, the ice of the iceshelf will become compressed and consolidated again, so ice-shelf berg may not be so crevassed and readily broken up.

You have to appreciate that it's not always the average temperature that is the key factor to melting ice, but how many days the temperature is above freezing. An annual average of 5 below freezing with no days ever above freezing will mean no melt. An annual average of 10 below freezing with 10 days per year above freezing means a lot of melt.

"Back-yard science" - imagine you build a snow-man, it stays at 2 degrees below freezing for a month - snow-man lasts a month, but just one day with temperatures 5-10 above freezing which is perfectly possible before temps go back to -2, means at least a partly melted snow-man, if not a puddle.

The incident you refer to of water seeping into cracks in the Larsen B iceshelf is an example of a "tilting point". For thousands of years, there wasn't enough summer melt to cause the ice-shelf disintigration, but just like a tilting see-saw, eventually it tipped to the other position. While the underlying cause is a very small change, the effect is enormous because of exactly where it happened.

What you say about water vapour is true, it is rarely mentioned as its influence is very complicated. The fact is though that global temperatures are rising despite the effect of water vapour. The main difficulty I think is in understanding this is how a small overall planetry temperature of a degree or so can have such a large effect when we see daily and yearly temperatures fluctuate by far more than this.

The changes are seen at the "edges" first, like the nearly melted snow-man. If it's always -30 and goes to -28, that glacier overhanging your house is irrelevant. If it's always -1 and goes to +1, that glacier changes its character.

Thanks for the prompt reply Paul. Yep, I think I missed one critical point in my analysis. The fact that pack ice is around 1.8?C due to the salinity of the water and, as you say, doesn't take much to melt it. Hmmm! Back to the drawing board!
I do hope some scientist type can comment on my idea that some melting could be caused by stray microwaves. I think the idea has some credance due to the fact that the radar hotspots in the Arctic seem to be inline with North America and Northern Europe longitudinally directly under the magnetic field lines. Maybe this localisation is only due to trade winds blowing warm air northwards or something but I'll tell you what, ice melts pretty damn quick in a microwave oven!!

[Pirates Armada]

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2...7-04-02-10.asp

[Antarctic Kiddo]

Sorry for "reviving" this discussion, I just wanted to have a say in this. I think that global warming in Antarctica has not been discussed, only in a documentary named "Europe's next Ice Age" which I unfortuantly missed. The United Nations have to stand up and start talking about Antarctica. If they can, all animals and the ice itself will be saved. They managed to help tsunami survivors etc. so whatever is the reason they save Antarctica?