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| 11/22 |
| 2007/12/12-20 [Science/Space, Science/GlobalWarming] UID:48793 Activity:moderate |
12/12 "Ominous Arctic melt worries experts"
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071212/ap_on_sc/arctic_melt
\_ Global warming is a liberal lie.
\_ Isn't the antarctic ice growing?
\_ You mean like how the area of the antarctic ice shelf
has radically shrunk and huge icebergs have broken off?
\_ Yes, the edges have shrunk (hint, it's summer in Antarctica
now), but the center has grown colder and thicker, hence a net
increase in ice.
\_ Sorry, are you suggesting that icebergs of similar size
break off Antarctica every summer?
\_ Yep, every spring, big icebergs break off of A. And the
central ice /is/ thickiening--total ice in A. is
increasing.
\_ Just another effect of global warming. Some
places get colder and other places get warmer,
but the net result is a warmer planet.
\_ Antarctic net ice mass is decreasing. Please check
your facts before pulling things out of your ass.
http://tinyurl.com/kewgu (washingtpost.com, Mar 2006)
\_ Or not
http://tinyurl.com/2xgdyd (icecap, Sep 2007)
\_ It's hard to take Joe D'Aleo seriously when
he's drawing a check from Exxon via the
Fraser Institute.
\_ Yes, all the people who disagree with you
are in the conspiracy. What about Al Gore
and his carbon credit companies?
\_ If the only people saying that ice is
increasing are all paid by the same
company, doesn't that suggest something
to you?
\_ Ha! Lindzen is an MIT scientist who
has never gotten money from oil
companies. Meanwhile, GE spends more
on lobbying than all oil companies
combined, yet NBC has a "green week"
and no one flinches, even though GE
bought all of the wind farm tech from
Enron. Yah, I've seen the "if you
don't agree you're either stupid or in
on it" argument before. It's a weak
way to ignore evidence.
http://tinyurl.com/2ybkoj (NRO)
reposted here
http://tinyurl.com/2bh5se
\_ Actually it's pretty sensible way
for someone who is not an expert
to evaluate the situation. So you
have ONE MIT scientist who has ONE
study that goes against
overwhelming scientific consensus.
Could he be right? Maybe! That's
the cool thing about the
scientific method, though, yes, it
takes some time to shake out.
But, absent further study (Yes
Virgina, the scientific method
generally likes to repeatedly
check it's result), betting on the
scientific majority is probably
still a good bet. Don't be
disingenuous, it makes you seem
like a dorche. -dans
\_ net ice mass != "ice extent" (exposed surface
ice). Is that the best you can do?
\_ You think a giant area one inch thick is
better than a slightly smaller but still
giant area kilometers thick? No. Net ice
mass is what is important if you want all
that water to not flood the rest of the
inhabited continents. "ice extent" is a
useless metric.
\_ Ice extend, not net ice mass, determines
how much sunlight is reflected back to
space and not absorbed as heat. -- !PP
\_ So what? There was a time when
Antarctica was temperate. The
world didn't come to an end.
\_ Ice mass determines how much water is
free to raise ocean levels by 20 feet.
If ice mass increases, water levels
will not rise. Extent is not a useful
metric.
\_ ^will^does
\_ I prefer to split my hairs the
other way. YMMV. |
| 11/22 |
|
| news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071212/ap_on_sc/arctic_melt AP Ominous Arctic melt worries experts By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer 39 minutes ago WASHINGTON - An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One even speculated that summer sea ice would be gone in five years. impression Greenland's ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer's end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by The Associated Press. "The Arctic is screaming," said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the government's snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colo. Just last year, two top scientists surprised their colleagues by projecting that the Arctic sea ice was melting so rapidly that it could disappear entirely by the summer of 2040. This week, after reviewing his own new data, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: "At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions." So scientists in recent days have been asking themselves these questions: Was the record melt seen all over the Arctic in 2007 a blip amid relentless and steady warming? Or has everything sped up to a new climate cycle that goes beyond the worst case scenarios presented by computer models? "The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming," said Zwally, who as a teenager hauled coal. It is the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels that produces carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, responsible for man-made global warming. For the past several days, government diplomats have been debating in Bali, Indonesia, the outlines of a new climate treaty calling for tougher limits on these gases. What happens in the Arctic has implications for the rest of the world. Faster melting there means eventual sea level rise and more immediate changes in winter weather because of less sea ice. In the United States, a weakened Arctic blast moving south to collide with moist air from the Gulf of Mexico can mean less rain and snow in some areas, including the drought-stricken Southeast, said Michael MacCracken, a former federal climate scientist who now heads the nonprofit Climate Institute. Some regions, like Colorado, would likely get extra rain or snow. More than 18 scientists told the AP that they were surprised by the level of ice melt this year. That's 15 percent more than the annual average summer melt, beating 2005's record. A record amount of surface ice was lost over Greenland this year, 12 percent more than the previous worst year, 2005, according to data the University of Colorado released Monday. That's nearly quadruple the amount that melted just 15 years ago. It's an amount of water that could cover Washington, DC, a half-mile deep, researchers calculated. The surface area of summer sea ice floating in the Arctic Ocean this summer was nearly 23 percent below the previous record. The dwindling sea ice already has affected wildlife, with 6,000 walruses coming ashore in northwest Alaska in October for the first time in recorded history. Another first: the Northwest Passage was open to navigation. Still to be released is NASA data showing the remaining Arctic sea ice to be unusually thin, another record. Combining the shrinking area covered by sea ice with the new thinness of the remaining ice, scientists calculate that the overall volume of ice is half of 2004's total. Alaska's frozen permafrost is warming, not quite thawing yet. But temperature measurements 66 feet deep in the frozen soil rose nearly four-tenths of a degree from 2006 to 2007, according to measurements from the University of Alaska. While that may not sound like much, "it's very significant," said University of Alaska professor Vladimir Romanovsky. If it completely melted -- something key scientists think would likely take centuries, not decades -- it could add more than 22 feet to the world's sea level. However, for nearly the past 30 years, the data pattern of its ice sheet melt has zigzagged. A bad year, like 2005, would be followed by a couple of lesser years. According to that pattern, 2007 shouldn't have been a major melt year, but it was, said Konrad Steffen, of the University of Colorado, which gathered the latest data. Other new data, from a NASA satellite, measures ice volume. NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke, reviewing it and other Greenland numbers, concluded: "We are quite likely entering a new regime." Melting of sea ice and Greenland's ice sheets also alarms scientists because they become part of a troubling spiral. White sea ice reflects about 80 percent of the sun's heat off Earth, NASA's Zwally said. When there is no sea ice, about 90 percent of the heat goes into the ocean which then warms everything else up. "That feedback is the key to why the models predict that the Arctic warming is going to be faster," Zwally said. NASA scientist James Hansen, the lone-wolf researcher often called the godfather of global warming, on Thursday was to tell scientists and others at the American Geophysical Union scientific in San Francisco that in some ways Earth has hit one of his so-called tipping points, based on Greenland melt data. "We have passed that and some other tipping points in the way that I will define them," Hansen said in an e-mail. We can still roll things back in time -- but it is going to require a quick turn in direction." Last year, Cecilia Bitz at the University of Washington and Marika Holland at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado startled their colleagues when they predicted an Arctic free of sea ice in just a few decades. Both say they are surprised by the dramatic melt of 2007. Bitz, unlike others at NASA, believes that "next year we'll be back to normal, but we'll be seeing big anomalies again, occurring more frequently in the future." And that normal, she said, is still a "relentless decline" in ice. An iceberg floats in a bay off Ammassalik Island, Greenland in this July 17, 2007 file photo. A record amount of Greenland's ice sheet melted this summer -- 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark -- US scientists are reporting this week in an ominous new sign of global warming. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. |
| tinyurl.com/kewgu -> www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/02/AR2006030201712.html Science spacer Correction to This Article A March 3 article incorrectly identified a Web site sponsored by Exxon Mobil and other corporations opposed to mandatory limits on greenhouse gases linked to climate change. Juliet Eilperin Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, March 3, 2006; Page A01 The Antarctic ice sheet is losing as much as 36 cubic miles of ice a year in a trend that scientists link to global warming, according to a new paper that provides the first evidence that the sheet's total mass is shrinking significantly. The new findings, which are being published today in the journal Science, suggest that global sea level could rise substantially over the next several centuries. It is one of a slew of scientific papers in recent weeks that have sought to gauge the impact of climate change on the world's oceans and lakes. Just last month two researchers reported that Greenland's glaciers are melting into the sea twice as fast as previously believed, and a separate paper in Science today predicts that by the end of this century lakes and streams on one-fourth of the African continent could be drying up because of higher temperatures. The new Antarctic measurements, using data from two NASA satellites called the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), found that the amount of water pouring annually from the ice sheet into the ocean -- equivalent to the amount of water the United States uses in three months -- is causing global sea level to rise by 04 millimeters a year. The continent holds 90 percent of the world's ice, and the disappearance of even its smaller West Antarctic ice sheet could raise worldwide sea levels by an estimated 20 feet. "The ice sheet is losing mass at a significant rate," said Isabella Velicogna, the study's lead author and a research scientist at Colorado University at Boulder's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. Richard Alley, a Pennsylvania State University glaciologist who has studied the Antarctic ice sheet but was not involved in the new research, said more research is needed to determine if the shrinkage is a long-term trend, because the new report is based on just three years of data. "One person's trend is another person's fluctuation," he said. But Alley called the study significant and "a bit surprising" because a major international scientific panel predicted five years ago that the Antarctic ice sheet would gain mass this century as higher temperatures led to increased snowfall. "It looks like the ice sheets are ahead of schedule" in terms of melting, Alley said. Velicogna acknowledged that it is hard to predict how fast the ice sheet will melt in the future but said, "I don't expect it's going to stop in the next couple of years." Scientists have been debating whether the Antarctic ice sheet is expanding or shrinking overall, because the center of the sheet tends to gain mass through snowfall whereas the coastal regions are more vulnerable to melting. Velicogna and her co-author, University of Colorado at Boulder physics professor John Wahr, based their measurements on data from the two GRACE satellites that circle the world more than a dozen times a day at an altitude of 310 miles. The satellites measure variations in Earth's mass and gravitational pull: Increases or decreases in the Antarctic ice sheet's mass change the distance between the satellites as they fly over the region. "The strength of GRACE is that we were able to assess the entire Antarctic region in one fell swoop to determine if it was gaining or losing mass," Wahr said. Oregon state climatologist George Taylor noted that sea ice in some areas of Antarctica is expanding and part of the region is getting colder, despite computer models that would predict otherwise. "The Antarctic is really a puzzle," said Taylor, who writes for the Web site TSCDaily, which is partly financed by fossil fuel companies that oppose curbs on greenhouse gases linked to climate change. "A lot more research is needed to understand the degree of climate and ice trends in and around the Antarctic." At the other end of the temperature spectrum, two South African researchers are reporting today in Science that their computer models indicate that by 2100 climate change may rob the south and west of Africa and areas in the upper Nile region of a significant portion of their current water supply. Warming may reduce the rainfall needed to replenish up to 25 percent of Africa's surface water, said Maarten de Wit and Jacek Stankiewicz at the University of Cape Town in Rondebosch, South Africa. "Water is essential to human survival," they wrote, "and changes in its supply can potentially have devastating implications, particularly in Africa, where much of the population relies on local rivers for water." The Bush administration opposes such curbs on the grounds that they could hurt the country's economy and has instead invested money on new technology to limit greenhouse emissions and further climate science research. "Climate change is not just someone else's concern but a very real threat to the lives and livelihood of people across the globe," Kerry said. Permission to Republish Post a Comment Comments: (Limit 5,000 characters) Post Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. |
| tinyurl.com/2xgdyd -> icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog/a_new_record_for_antartic_total_ice_extent/ Contact Us / Join Us search icecap join email list Click below to contribute to ICECAP Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure! The Blogosphere Tuesday, September 11, 2007 A New Record for Antarctic Total Ice Extent? The Cryosphere Today, which updated snow and ice extent for both hemispheres daily. The Southern Hemispheric areal coverage is the highest in the satellite record, just beating out 1995, 2001, 2005 and 2006. Since 1979, the trend has been up for the total Antarctic ice extent. image While the Antarctic Peninsula area has warmed in recent years and ice near it diminished during the Southern Hemisphere summer, the interior of Antarctica has been colder and ice elsewhere has been more extensive and longer lasting, which explains the increase in total extent. paper by Ohio State Researcher David Bromwich, who agreed "It's hard to see a global warming signal from the mainland of Antarctica right now. Indeed, according the NASA GISS data, the South Pole winter (June/July/August) has cooled about 1 degree F since 1957 and the coldest year was 2004. image This winter has been an especially harsh one in the Southern Hemisphere with cold and snow records set in Australia, South America and Africa. |
| tinyurl.com/2ybkoj -> nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=NjAxNzZjNTU4OGIyZWYxYTgwMzZhOTFiNmYwZTUyZmU= COVER STORY Scare of the Century The alarms and assertions about global warming have gone reprehensibly too far JASON LEE STEORTS But what, oh what, would the earth do without Time magazine? Suddenly and unexpectedly, Time announced in a recent issue, the crisis is upon us. Time accordingly devoted a special report to saving Mother Gaia. The report is half anti-Republican polemic, half catalogue of global warmings supposed ills and none receives greater emphasis than the melting of polar ice. We see a photograph of a polar bear, standing all by his lonesome at the waters edge, and are told that the poor fellow might drown because polar ice caps are melting faster than ever. Later, we learn that the journal Science published a study suggesting that by the end of the century, the world could be locked in to an eventual rise in sea levels of as much as 20 ft. The issue that Time mentions contains no fewer than eight studies and articles about the ice caps, and begins with a news story warning that startling amounts of ice slipping into the sea have taken glaciologists by surprise; now they fear that this centurys greenhouse emissions could be committing the world to a catastrophic sea-level rise. The policy implications of such reportage are clear, but in case you missed them, Time connects the dots: Curbing global warming may be an order of magnitude harder than, say, eradicating smallpox or putting a man on the moon. What is not moral is to distort the truth for political ends which is precisely what has been done with the ice-caps story. To read this article in full, you need to be logged in as an NR / Digital subscriber. You will be automatically redirected to this article after successfully logging in below. Just enter your account number below and hit the submit button. Account number: Example mailing label (Your mailing label should look similar to the sample shown above. The sample account number is shown highlighted in yellow. |
| tinyurl.com/2bh5se -> www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1635077/posts UnklGene Scare of the Century - The alarms and assertions about global warming have gone reprehensibly too far JASON LEE STEORTS But what, oh what, would the earth do without Time magazine? Time accordingly devoted a special report to saving Mother Gaia. The report is half anti-Republican polemic, half catalogue of global warming's supposed ills -- and none receives greater emphasis than the melting of polar ice. We see a photograph of a polar bear, standing all by his lonesome at the water's edge, and are told that the poor fellow might drown because "polar ice caps are melting faster than ever." Later, we learn that "the journal Science published a study suggesting that by the end of the century, the world could be locked in to an eventual rise in sea levels of as much as 20 ft." The issue that Time mentions contains no fewer than eight studies and articles about the ice caps, and begins with a news story warning that "startling amounts of ice slipping into the sea have taken glaciologists by surprise; now they fear that this century's greenhouse emissions could be committing the world to a catastrophic sea-level rise." The policy implications of such reportage are clear, but in case you missed them, Time connects the dots: "Curbing global warming may be an order of magnitude harder than, say, eradicating smallpox or putting a man on the moon. What is not moral is to distort the truth for political ends -- which is precisely what has been done with the ice-caps story. The world has two major ice sheets, one covering most of Greenland and the other covering most of Antarctica. While melting sea ice has captured its share of attention, it's the land sheets that matter. Sea ice is already in the water, so its melting doesn't raise ocean levels. The Antarctic holds enough ice to raise sea levels more than 215 ft." Those numbers sound impressive, but the chances of the ice caps' fully melting are about as high as the chances of Time's giving you an honest story on global warming. The truth is that there's no solid evidence supporting the conclusion that we've locked the ice caps in to a melting trend. About Antarctica, University of Virginia climate scientist Patrick J Michaels is direct: "What has happened is that Antarctica has been gaining ice." He explains that there has been a cooling trend over most of Antarctica for decades. At the same time, one tiny portion of the continent -- the Antarctic Peninsula -- has been warming, and its ice has been melting. The peninsula constitutes only about 2 percent of Antarctica's total area, but almost every study of melting Antarctic ice you've heard of focuses on it. In 2002, Nature published a study by Peter Doran that looked at Antarctic temperature trends from 1966 to 2000. What it found was that about two-thirds of Antarctica got colder over that period. At the same time, Antarctica has gotten snowier, and as the snow has accumulated the ice sheet has grown. Snowfall is probably rising because water temperatures around Antarctica have gotten slightly -- repeat, slightly -- warmer. As a result, there is more surface evaporation, making for higher humidity and more precipitation. Higher humidity also means more clouds, which might explain the cooler weather. In a 2005 study published in Science, Curt Davis used satellite measurements to calculate changes in the ice sheet's elevation, and found that it gained 45 billion tons of ice per year between 1992 and 2003. Far from flooding the coasts, that's enough to lower sea levels by roughly 012 millimeters annually. This doesn't mean the trend of increasing Antarctic ice will continue forever. Science captured headlines in March when it published a study by Isabella Velicogna arguing that, between 2002 and 2005, Antarctica has been losing ice mass. Velicogna used a pair of satellites to measure the gravitational pull exerted by the Antarctic ice sheet, which in turn allowed her to calculate its mass. Her data suggest that, over the past three years, the sheet has lost about 152 cubic kilometers of ice per year. That would be the equivalent of about 04 millimeters of annual sea-level rise. To begin with, such a short sampling period is a blip in the slow rhythms of climate change. Moreover, 2002 -- the year in which the study began -- was a high-water mark for Antarctic ice, so it's not too surprising to see some decline since then. Alarmism over Velicogna's study is on the order of going to the beach at high tide, drawing a line at the water's edge, and fretting a few hours later that the oceans are drying up. Various studies show that warmer temperatures are causing the ice sheet there to lose mass at the margins. But, as in Antarctica, higher sea temperatures are also causing greater snowfall and building up ice in the interior. As Richard Lindzen of MIT observes, "If you're just going to look at what's falling off the sides and ignore what's collecting on top, that's not exactly kosher." The question is whether the net change is positive or negative. Earlier this year, Eric Rignot and Pannir Kanagaratnam published a study in Science that used satellite measurements to calculate ice loss around Greenland's coasts. They also used models to determine how much ice was vanishing from surface melt, and how much was accumulating from greater snowfall. Adding it all up, they got a decade of deficits: 91 cubic kilometers of ice lost in 1996, rising to 224 cubic kilometers in 2005. That translates to a sea-level rise of 023 millimeters in 1996 and 057 millimeters in 2005. But, as the web publication CO2 Science has pointed out, their model-based estimate of the ice gain in Greenland's interior was implausibly small. In fact, Science had earlier published a study by Ola Johannessen that used satellite measurements to determine how much the ice sheet was growing. Johannessen found that, between 1992 and 2003, it was gaining on average 54 centimeters of elevation per year. Michaels, the University of Virginia professor, calculates that it amounts to about 74 cubic kilometers of ice per year. Rignot and Kanagaratnam could have subtracted that number from their estimate of coastal ice loss, which would have given them a negative total only for the past five years: 17 cubic kilometers lost in 2000, rising to 92 cubic kilometers in 2005. That would be equivalent to only 004 millimeters of sea-level rise in 2000 and 023 millimeters in 2005. Add all the numbers from Greenland and Antarctica up, and you get a rather piddling total. In 2005, Jay Zwally of NASA published a study in the Journal of Glaciology that looked at the ice-mass changes for both Greenland and Antarctica from 1992 to 2002. He concluded that the total ice loss was equivalent to a sea-level rise of just 005 millimeters per year. At that rate, it would take the oceans a millennium to gain 5 centimeters, and a full 20,000 years to rise by a meter. A LONGSTANDING PATTERN Granted, the Zwally study doesn't include the last three years -- years in which, according to some measurements, Antarctica has switched from gaining ice to losing it, and Greenland's rate of loss has accelerated. But you don't need to invoke man-made global warming to explain what's going on. Yes, temperatures there are warmer than they were a decade ago. But many climate scientists think this is the result of a phenomenon called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) -- a pattern of slow, repeating changes in the ocean's surface temperatures. The AMO affects both the Atlantic tropics and the regions farther north. When the AMO is in its positive phase, temperatures rise in both places -- which should cause more Caribbean hurricanes, and increase the speed at which Greenland's glaciers discharge into the sea. "The AMO changed from negative to positive in 1995," Michaels wrote on Tech Central Station. "Since then hurricanes have become very active and glacier output has been accelerating." Models suggest that the AMO has been going on for at least 1,400 years. Maybe things would have turned out differently had Charlemagne signed the Kyoto Protocol, but the odds are against it. In fact, we have temperature records indicating t... |