Pamela Gray (15:03:16) :

I am now an AGWer. I just found out that if the Arctic melts, the blob will come back to get us. Steve McQueen said so in 1958!

Didn’t they drop it in the Antarctic?

Agreed. Radical change is the single biggest threat to nature.

Sensible minds advocating balance will prevail.

“Radical change leads to instability.”

And that’s the biggest problem with the AGW crowd, they want radical change. They think that they will profit from it, but the golden goose is the free market, and when it’s dead, all their fantasies will come crumbling down around them, and us.

The system has been corrupted by the “shortage” of funding.

I put “shortage” in quotes because in my experience most of the money goes to fat union wages for unproductive university employees. For every one person who has a job at a university, there could easily be 3 if we did not tolerate such outrageous waste (which is rapidly destroying our society). It’s ridiculous – you get people making $25/hour or more to do tasks that you could easily get people to do for $10/hour.

If careful planning starts now, it will take 4 decades or more to fix the system …and a lot can happen in 40 years that might complicate things further.

Clarification: I’m not calling for radical change. Radical change leads to instability.

Go here and scroll down to the section “Earth’s Icehouse History.”
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/global_warming.html

Note the gif of the last 18,000 years of glacier loss in North America.

14,000 years ago, Canada was a solid block of ice. And these clowns want us to believe that when an icecube melts today, it’s unprecedented?! It may be premature to say that science is dead, but it’s far from healthy.

Perhaps it is unwise to underestimate the resilience of determined religion?

30 years from now new disciples, guided by old “sages” who kept the myths alive, will be “rediscovering” the “classics” [from the era when checks & balances were conveniently out-of-order].

This could be a war of attrition that drags on for generations. I hope powerful key players are planning the investments properly, rather than foolishly thinking this battle will blow-over in a favorable manner by some fluke without the need for strategic investment in troops, equipment, & information. It is time for less mouthing and more investment if the resistance is to become more intently serious about succeeding. Support our troops [with more than lip service].

Sorry for the second post,but I found a photo
http://www.themercury.com.au/article/2009/11/07/108371_tasmania-news.html

Wow! The visible part of the iceberg is a rectangular prism. Can anybody explain how that happens?

However, this iceberg is not considered a result of global warming and it is believed to be “part of a normal process in which the ice sheet maintains a balance between constant growth and periodic losses.”

http://ecology.com/featuresarchive/largesticeberg/

Larry

Noelene (17:58:31) :

I don’t know if this relevant,but it’s interesting.I would have liked to see some photos.
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/national/iceberg-a-big-surprise-for-aussie-scientist/story-e6freuzr-1225795243959
A HUGE iceberg has been spotted off Macquarie Island, halfway between Antarctica and Australia.

The iceberg, estimated to be 500m long and 50m high, was spotted about 8km north-west of the island by Australian Antarctic Division expeditioners this week.

When you compare it to the largest ice bergs from the Antarctic that is a trivial sliver of ice, and of absolutely no consequence.

The largest ice berg ever observed (there may have been much larger in the past but we simply have no reports) in the Antarctic was observed in 1955 by the U.S.S. Glacier, 150 miles west of Scott Island inside the Antarctic Circle. It measured 60 miles wide by 208 miles long, or about 12,000 square miles (31,000 square kilometers).

The B-15 ice berg that calved from Antarctic’s Ross Ice Shelf around March 20, 2000, measured 183 miles long (295 kilometers) and about 25 miles wide (37 kilometers). It extended about 900 feet below the surface and rises about 120 feet (30 meters) above the ocean.

If the media put these sort of events into historical perspective two things would happen. First they would realize it was a non-event and not bother to report it, and if they did need to use it as a filler article, the readers would have a clue that an antarctic ice berg of that size is not all that interesting, except for the locals who have not seen one of the large slab icebergs before.

Larry

When the ice block melts we see floating, it will displace no more water.

“Our work suggests that while West Antarctica is still losing significant amounts of ice, the loss appears to be slightly slower than some recent estimates,” said Ian Dalziel, lead principal investigator for WAGN. “So the take home message is that Antarctica is contributing to rising sea levels. It is the rate that is unclear.”

Geodetic measurements of vertical crustal velocity in West Antarctica and the implications for ice mass balance

Received 20 May 2009; accepted 28 August 2009; published 13 October 2009.

Citation: Bevis, M., et al. (2009), Geodetic measurements of vertical crustal velocity in West Antarctica and the implications for ice mass balance, Geochem. Geophys. Geosyst., 10, Q10005, doi:10.1029/2009GC002642.

“We present preliminary geodetic estimates for vertical bedrock velocity at twelve survey GPS stations in the West Antarctic GPS Network, an additional survey station in the northern Antarctic Peninsula, and eleven continuous GPS stations distributed across the continent. The spatial pattern of these velocities is not consistent with any postglacial rebound (PGR) model known to us. Four leading PGR models appear to be overpredicting uplift rates in the Transantarctic Mountains and West Antarctica and underpredicting them in the peninsula north of 65°. This discrepancy cannot be explained in terms of an elastic response to modern ice loss (except, perhaps, in part of the peninsula). Therefore, our initial geodetic results suggest that most GRACE ice mass rate estimates, which are critically dependent on a PGR correction, are systematically biased and are overpredicting ice loss for the continent as a whole.”

And, observational periods of less than 10 years is of course too little to reach any firm conclusions.

And speaking of the polar opposite:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/NEWIMAGES/arctic.seaice.color.000.png

Who wants to write the new book “Late Interglacials for Dummies”?