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Ukraine in "Undeclared War" with Russia says Defense Minister; Mish says "Russia Won’t Invade"
May 13, 2014 0

Ukraine in "Undeclared War" with Russia says Defense Minister; Mish says "Russia Won’t Invade"

By News Desk

The Financial Times reports Renewed Diplomatic Push in Ukraine Crisis A new diplomatic push to resolve the crisis in Ukraine is under way even after two of its regions declared independence and sought to join Russia, with European mediators pushing for “round table†reconciliation talks. German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, spearheading the diplomatic initiative, flew into Ukraine on Tuesday on a visit aimed at narrowing the gap between the interim government and pro-Russia separatists in the east. Berlin has played a central role in promoting a mediating role for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and its current chairman, Swiss president Didier Burkhalter – and securing backing from Moscow for the idea

Something Scary Comes This Way
May 13, 2014 0

Something Scary Comes This Way

By News Desk

Tweet Two papers have appeared today which, in the words of Richard Alley, are the equivalent of the guys over in the corner screaming bloody murder.  Both describe the coming, and in their view, inevitable collapse of the West Antarctic ice shelf at some point in the next 200-900 years.  While the exact time of collapse is not predictable, the inevitability is, and 200 years is not so long in the future. Rignot, Mouginot, Morlighem, Seroussi and Scheuch map the observed retreat of these grounding glaciers, and over the past twenty years, and yes, once they let go, there is nothing holding the ice shelf back from lurching into the Southern Ocean.  They conclude Using two decades of ERS-1/2 data, we document a continuous and rapid retreat of the grounding lines of Pine Island, Thwaites, Haynes, Smith and Kohler glaciers, which drain a large sector of West Antarctica on a retrograde, submarine bed, a configuration deemed unstable by ice sheet numerical models (e.g. Favier et al., 2014, Katz and Worster, 2010; Parizek et al., 2012) unless normal and tangential ice shelf buttressing could increase significantly (Gudmundson, 2013), which is unlikely.