Which of these states is closest to 20,000 square kilometers in area?
UPDATE: USGS has issued a statement, see below.
WUWT reader “DC” points us to this Gore-esque pronouncement from a USGS scientist about “Antarctic ice loss”.
Jane Ferrigno of the U.S. Geological Survey in a National Public Radio interview
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124178690 (Audio clip available)
Ms. FERRIGNO: The fact that the ice shelves are changing on the peninsula is a significant signal that global change, climate warming, is affecting the ice cover of Antarctica. It’s affecting first the area that’s towards the north, that’s slightly warmer, but the effect of the warming has traveled from the northern part of the peninsula to the southern part of the peninsula, where it’s colder.
…
“RAZ: Give us a sense of how much ice [on the Antarctic peninsula] has been lost over the past, say, 10 years.
Ms. FERRIGNO: I think I’ll go back 20 years, and in the last 20 years, I would say at least 20,000 square kilometers of ice has been lost, and that’s comparable to an area somewhere between the state of Texas and the state of Alaska.
RAZ: So about the size of the state of Texas in terms of ice has been lost in the past 20 years. ”
It gets better.
Ms. FERRIGNO: Well, this is a fairly small amount of ice when you consider the whole Antarctic continent consists of about 13 million square kilometers of ice.
RAZ: I mean, it sounds so dramatic, the size of Texas, right?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. FERRIGNO: It is. It is very dramatic, and it is larger than the size of Texas, but when you consider the entire Antarctic ice sheet, it’s still a fairly minimal amount. But the thing that we’re really interested in seeing is that this is a sort of a red flag because if the warming continues, if the retreat continues, if the amount of ice on the continent starts to flow into the water, then there will be substantial impact to the sea level.
RAZ: That’s Jane Ferrigno. She is a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
Jane Ferrigno, thanks for coming in.
Ms. FERRIGNO: Thank you.
Ms. Ferrigno might do well to have a look at this map of the USA and Antarctica compared at Texas A&M University’s Polar Science program to get a sense of scale.
Here’s the story on all the Southern hemisphere sea ice, which includes all Antarctic sea ice, from Cryosphere today:
Maybe Ms. Ferrigno will be embarrassed enough by her geographic ineptitude and will heed Gavin Schmidt’s advice and stop trying to “persuade the public“.
======================================
UPDATE:
Statement from USGS:
The comment by Jane in the NPR interview was an honest mistake. We are sorry for the delay in responding to your email, but Jane has been out of the office. Below is an apology and clarification statement that will be posted on the NPR site soon. Jane will be in the office later today, and if you have any questions, please let me or her know.
From Jane …
I want to apologize to NPR and the listening audience for my misstatement last Sunday, February 28. During the last 20 years, an area more than 20,000 sq. km. (comparable to the size of New Jersey) has broken off the ice shelves of the Antarctic Peninsula. It is the Antarctic Peninsula, the source of the ice loss, that I meant to say was larger than the state of Texas but smaller than the state of Alaska.
Thank you,
Jessica Robertson
Public Affairs Specialist
Office of Communications
U.S. Geological Survey
(703) 648-6624
Is there anyone left out there that still takes these people seriously?
Oh my goodness. Does Ms Ferrigno believe that the Sun revolves around the Earth as well?
Or that witches float because they are made of wood?
-Dave
Why let mere details get in the way of a good hysterical narrative?
Which state is larger, texas, new jersey or alaska?
Michigan! go blue.
Seriously what I wanted to say to Gavin was that scientists are persuading the public, or rather they are changing the public’s mind. in unintended ironic ways.
The first iceberg, B9B, broke off in 1987 and has been floating around for 23 years.
Are these the two icebergs she is counting as lost?
I’m trying to find a plausible way that a geographer could possible think 20,000 sq km is a larger area than Texas. I’m failing. If she’d dropped a factor of 10, I’d say, well, it happens. But this is just mathematically and geographically illiterate.
Shocking.
Also of note. Arctic Sea Ice Extent is on an upswing;
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
and just a hair away from the arbitrary normal range used by NCIDC:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png
Global Sea Ice Area appears to be making a run on average;
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg
and Antarctic Sea Ice Extent is above average:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_stddev_timeseries.png
There are certainly no signs of the catastrophic, accelerating, extremely rapid, alarming, faster than we predicted only a few years ago, sea ice free arctic summer and drowning polar bear type melting we’ve heard so much about…
A complete farrago of misinformation from Ms Ferringo?
According to your graph (still less than Texas)
0.223 x Million s KM = 223,000 sqKM.
Assuming there’s not an averate/slope that would be 1/20th of that even..
Well, if you take the spherical Earth and flatten it into a Mercator projection, then a New Jersey-sized chunk of Antarctica probably does look about the size of Texas.
Which confirms what I’ve long suspected: warmists are flat-earthers! 🙂
The sea-ice anomaly graph is of absolutly zero relevance to a piece about ice-shelf loss. But it tells the story you want other to hear, right?
REPLY: No, it tells the story that is constantly ignored. Here’s a few more:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/17/ipcc-gate-du-jour-antarctic-sea-ice-increase-underestimated-by-50/
Most people fail to realize the difference in the peninsula versus the continent of Antarctica:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/18/what-happens-when-you-divide-antarctica-into-two-distinct-climate-zones/
Here’s one that deals with the improper weighting of temperature data in the Antarctic peninsula:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/29/steig-et-al-falsified/
BTW, is Jane Ferrigno a Miss America contestant?
You’re not so perfect yourself. Guess you need to brush up on your chart reading skills. The title in the chart you preface with “Here’s the story on all Antarctic ice from Cryosphere today:” is “Southern Hemisphere SEA Ice Anomaly.” Not ALL ice or even Antarctic ice. SEA ice in the SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE.
Pot meet kettle.
REPLY: Which includes all Antarctic sea ice. But you’re right, I’ll make it clearer.
Wow… an Antarctic IceShelf Crackup Domino theory.
Never mind that the growing Ice Shelf seems to crack, go out further, refreeze and fill in behind the pieces, they don’t get very far.
NPR is rather hard to take when you know they have these set-piece interviews with no challenge.
My Engineering Geology final consisted of designing an earthen dam somewhere in the New Haven quadrangle. The goal was to trap the greatest water volume in a reservoir with the least surface area.
I sited my dam in exactly the right spot.
I laid out an ideal construction procedure.
Then I listed the reservoir specifications.
I wrote down 10^6 where I meant to write 10^9 for the reservoir volume.
When I handed it to the professor, he looked at my paper and said, “Mr. Middleton, you have a promising career ahead of you with the Army Corps of Engineers. You just designed a reservoir that is 100m high and traps a reservoir 1km by 10m.” Or something like that.
I had all the dimensions correct in my calculations. I just had a “typo” in the spec’s. He didn’t take many points off, I still got an A, but I’ll never forget that moment ~30 years ago.
The moral to the story is that geologists will occasionally confuse thousands, millions and billions… Too many zeros.
I think that the GRACE data (Velicogna) show that the Antarctic lost about 153 km^3 of ice per year from 2003-2008. The volume of the Antarctic ice sheet (West and East) is something like 30 million km^3. That’s about 0.0005% per year. I’m sure that the GRACE gravity meters are really good… But I bet that the margin of error in the PGR estimate is more than 0.0005%.
Furthermore, Luxembourg-sized chunks of ice couldn’t be breaking off of Antarctica unless the ice sheet was growing and pushing the ice extent north. My ice maker doesn’t overflow when I set the freezer temperature above 32F. Glacial episodes and Bond cold events are identified in marine sediments by looking for ice-rafted debris… AKA dirt dropped from icebergs.
AGW’s best friends are illiteracy, innumeracy and credulity.
Ms. FERRIGNO: ” The fact that the ice shelves are changing on the peninsula”
Pardon my ignorance, but what is exactly an “ice shelf on the peninsula”? Is that sea ice?
Without regard to ice anomaly, Antarctica is its own unique climate. It has a constant high albedo and the ocean current that encircles it isolates it from the balance of the oceans. Are we paying for this sort of “research”?
Maybe Lou Ferringo [The Incredible Hulk], is Ms Ferringo’s dad and he will burst onto the AGW scene and make short work of all the sceptics.
We had better be careful what we say.
YIKES!
How many contrarian callers make it onto NPR on Science Friday?
Texas is more than twice as large as The Antarctic Peninsula.
UAH shows no warming in the Antarctic Peninsula.
http://climate.uah.edu/25yearbig.jpg
Wow, the U.S. Geological Survey really sets the bar high for admission I guess.
If she’s a professional surveyor then I am Nigerian Royalty – RAZ should send me his bank account information so I can blah.. blah.. blah…
That’s not fair!
The poor woman was confused and obviously not taught too much geography or science at school.
On another matter – Does anyone know the answer to this?
1. According to the warmists, rising CO2 levels (and the accompanying supposed ‘forcing’) are supposed to significantly increase surface temperatures.
2. Rising temperatures increase evaporation (part of the ‘forcing’ argument); that means more water vapour in the atmosphere.
3. Water vapour is a ‘greenhouse gas’, which means temperatures should rise further, BUT
4. Rising water vapour levels should increase global rainfall and the number of days it rains. This should mean the atmosphere cools down, especially in the tropics, where rainy days are usually much cooler. Also, more clouds mean that more direct sunlight is reflected back into outer space, thereby cooling things down. But more clouds mean that there is greater insulation trappping the heat close to surface.
5. Question: How on Earth is it possible to accurately quantify this into a computer model, in addition to all the other factors affecting climate?
What concerns me is , of the voting public hearing this sort of official pronouncement, very few will know how poor is the quality control of facts by these people lecturing them on the state of the planet.