Guest post by Thomas Fuller
It is hard to understand many of those who are convinced that climate change will destroy civilization. Previous ideas about massive sea level rise or tipping points leading to unending temperature increases have been debunked. Conventional theory on climate change points to moderate temperature and sea level rises that can be dealt with using existing technology, although the sooner we start the easier it will be.
But for some, the need to believe (and to preach) about a coming catastrophe is so strong that they are willing to overturn their own theories to take temporary advantage of ephemeral observations that will support their apocalyptic vision of the future.
The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment has been an operational satellite mission since 2002, measuring differences in the Earth’s gravity. Pictures of our planet using GRACE look more like a partially deflated soccer ball than the pristine globe we’re more accustomed to seeing.
As written in Wikipedia:
“GRACE is the first Earth-monitoring mission in the history of space flight whose key measurement is not derived from electromagnetic waves either reflected off, emitted by, or transmitted through Earth’s surface and/or atmosphere. Instead, the mission uses a microwave ranging system to accurately measure changes in the speed and distance between two identical spacecraft flying in a polar orbit about 220 kilometers (137 miles) apart, 500 kilometers (311 miles) above Earth. The ranging system is so sensitive it can detect separation changes as small as 10 microns—about one-tenth the width of a human hair over a distance of 220 kilometers.”
And according to some scientists working with GRACE measurements, Antarctica is losing ice. Not just the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet, which has been predicted to melt and succumb to mechanical pressure since the 1930s, but also the vastly larger ice sheet covering East Antarctica.
And sure enough, the ‘apocaholics’ are all over this, using it to reinforce their unrelenting drumbeat of doom-laden predictions of disastrous sea level rises.
But this is actually quite strange. According to climate change theory, ice should be increasing in Antarctica–the (very slight) increase in temperatures and the natural increase in precipitation should result in more snow over Antarctica which gets compressed into higher levels of ice. The same phenomenon is both predicted and observed in Greenland, by the way.
Instead of using this as proof of global warming, these people should be either wondering about the measurements or re-examining their theories. Because this is observed data working against the principles of their theory… But they cannot pass up the chance for a quick and easy headline that reinforces the ‘all disaster, only disaster, 24 hours a day’ routine.
Certainly all measurements before GRACE showed increasing ice in Antarctica, as they do today.
My guess (I’m not a scientist and do not claim to know) is that there are still a few bugs to work out in how they are doing this. If you recall, when satellites first started being used to measure Earth temperatures, there were a few glitches caused by orbital decay and other mechanical problems.
Certainly their description of how they analyze the data provided by GRACE shows many an opportunity for error to creep in. They use a bit of guess work and inferences from computer models to create base levels for the land that rises and falls under the differing levels of ice. Which is what they have to do at the moment, until they get enough real base data. I’m certainly not blaming the scientists for any of this. They’re proceeding the way they have to proceed. My beef is with those who step in front of the scientists with their interpretations.
So the paper referred to by scare artists like Michael Tobis of Only In It For The Gold says the Eastern Antarctic has lost 57 billion tons a year–plus or minus 52 billion tons. Hmm. I think we need a few more orbits, myself. Having a margin of error as large as the original figure doesn’t inspire confidence.
But to hear some talk, it’s back to the Day After Tomorrow tidal waves drowning New York. You can always tell when they’re trying to scare you–they talk about firm figures for how much ice is melting, without the data needed to put it into perspective. 57 billion tons certainly sounds like a lot of ice. However, as a percentage of the total it is not even an asterisk. Antarctica has 150 million billion tons of ice…
Do you remember that iceberg that calved off Antarctica in March? (Calving is a perfectly normal event, and has nothing to do with climate change.) The one the size of Rhode Island? It was estimated at 860 billion tons.
“A 2008 study estimated that Antarctica loses about 1.6 trillion metric tons of ice each year, but gets nearly that much back as annual snowfall. The icy continent may suffer a net ice loss of about 100-200 billion metric tons per year, but Scambos said the exact figure remains uncertain.” (Live Science, Is Antarctica Falling Apart? March, 2010).
In essence, what we have here is a new satellite using new tools to take measurements. The data recovered is analyzed using guesses and inferences. Their analysis is presented with a margin of error as large as the amount of ice they say is melting from Antarctica. The loss is is less than 1% of the normal annual melt.
Other measurements, consistent with climate theory, have consistently shown the Antarctic gaining, not losing ice.
So obviously we’re all going to drown, right? Well, when I tried to have a discussion with Michael Tobis in the comments section of his weblog, it didn’t go too well. I’ll let one of his allies offer the final word from those trying to scare us all:
“Tom Fuller seems to have missed the point I made yesterday.
Sea levels are going to go way, way, way, way, way up.
Got it now?”
Umm, no. I don’t
Thomas Fuller http://www.redbubble.com/people/hfuller
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Addendum by Anthony:
Meanwhile, GRACE data is coming under question, and a new technique yields different results:
The melting of the ice sheets of Greenland and West Antarctica is about twice as slow as previously thought. The study, conducted by TU Delft, SRON and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The scientists published their findings in the September issue of Nature Geoscience.
We have concluded that the Greenland and West Antarctica ice caps are melting at approximately half the speed originally predicted.’ The average rise in sea levels as a result of the melting ice caps is also lower.
Source below, click on image for original story. Interestingly, the NASA JPL website does not have this announcement on the Global Climate Change section or any other portion of the website that I can find.
WUWT has covered the GRACE issue previously:
GRACE’s warts – new peer reviewed paper suggests errors and adjustments may be large
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I am not scared, are you?
I recall an article that suggested that the GRACE satellite set still required adjustments to reconcile the space based measurements with the measurements that the guys with the tape measures were getting. The GRACE staff were doing their thing adjusting the measurements they get through intepolation of readings to agree with the observed facts, you know how science is supposed to work.
I expect eventually they will get the hang of how the brand new equipment is working and then some rellay good science can get going.
I say really new in spite of the fact it has been orbiting for 8 years. The system of measurements is a new idea well thought out and apparantly working , they now have to get the concept to reflect reality.
According to climate change theory, ice should be increasing in Antarctica–the (very slight) increase in temperatures and the natural increase in precipitation should result in more snow over Antarctica which gets compressed into higher levels of ice. The same phenomenon is both predicted and observed in Greenland, by the way.
You are making half of this up. You are correct that higher temperatures are predicted to increase accumulation, but higher temperatures will also give increased surface melt towards the margins of the ice sheet and increase the calving rate of tidewater glaciers. Theory doesn’t make any general pronouncement about which term, accumulation or loss, will dominate, and in different outcomes are possible in different times and places.
REPLY: You make a good case for citations, show yours, I’m sure Fuller will reciprocate. – Anthony
“Tom Fuller seems to have missed the point I made yesterday.
Sea levels are going to go way, way, way, way, way up.
Got it now?”
“What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”
I think that guy may be in trouble…
Tom sez again: “57 billion tons a year–plus or minus 52 billion tons. Hmm. I think we need a few more orbits, myself. Having a margin of error as large as the original figure doesn’t inspire confidence.”
Amongst many other mistakes you are making in this post, you are repeating this error in your understanding of basic statistics and confidence intervals – which was clearly explained to you over at “Only In it for the Gold”. And yet, you’ve chosen to come here to display your innumeracy to an even larger audience?
Maybe Mosher will explain this one to you. He does seem to want to keep the outright nonsense to a minimum around here. And this is a doozy.
You don’t seem to be much of one for references, so I’ll return in kind here: GRACE results do not undermine climate models which eventually call for a loss of ice from East Antarctica. They do somewhat challenge the current models regarding dynamical ice sheet response to small warming. This is nothing to feel reassured about.
And with respect to David Benson’s attempt at some basic remedial education for you: “Sea levels are going to go way, way, way, way, way up.” Tom, you yourself are stating that temperatures are likely to rise by, what, 1.1 to 2.4C or something like this, this century? I’m not going back to check, but something like this is your own forecast. If that is the case, then unless the basic physics has changed so that everything we know from paleoclimate about equilibrium sea level response to temperature change, then we are eventually going to see at least 5 metre increases, and possibly as much as 20 metres. Not tomorrow, not this century, but sometime. Unless you have some special insight as to why “this time it’s different”.
You don’t seem to be much for references here, so I’ll just make my assertions until you start backing yours up with something other than personal conjecture. You’ve seen my references before, Tom.
Self flagellation is not new. Take a look at this quote:
Have you forgotten the wickedness of your fathers, and the wickedness of the president, and the wickedness of their wives, and your own wickedness, and the wickedness of your wives, which they have committed in the land of America, and in the streets of Washington? Therefore God said ‘I will set my face against you for your evil, and cut off all of America. For I will punish those who dwell in America, just as I have punished those in Europe, by the sword, by the famine, and by the pestilence.’ . . . (With apologies to Jeremiah ch44.)
This is god (nee Jeremiah) addressing his own people. With priests (Greenies) like this, who needs enemies?
Data? We don’t need….Same old expertise at work?
Back in 58, when I started my Surveying classes in the Royal Engineers, we were taught that the shape of the earth approximated an Oblate Spheroid, but that differences in gravity, made the real shape all lumpy and bumpy like having small-pox. This education by the way before sattelites. So GRACE is catching up on old knowledge.
Ah well why spoil a good story with facts.
Why should we believe any of this data? Antarctica is clearly getting colder and ice is increasing. Some of the alarmists have tried to pawn the increase in ice off as being due to increased snowfall, like Tom tries to do here. But that doesn’t make sense when it’s getting colder down there, as NASA showed up until a few years ago when they made up a new map with made-up data.
GRACE is on a bumpy road with a few kinks to work out.
It would be nice if GRACE open sourced their systems and software so that people could see exactly how they are manipulating the raw data from the instruments.
It ain’t “observational data” if it’s been statistically “manipulated” or “interpolated” (aka fabricated).
Hidden science only leads to unnecessary argument by authority situations that can’t be verified, and as we know so well, unverifiable science isn’t science, it’s something else but it ain’t science.
GRACE is no exception, it must be audited openly if it’s to be given the gravity of trust it’s people are claiming.
“Previous ideas about massive sea level rise or tipping points leading to unending temperature increases have been debunked.”
The first bit depends what you mean exactly by “massive”. The second bit is pure strawman. No-one ever predicted unending temperature increases.
“Conventional theory on climate change points to moderate temperature and sea level rises that can be dealt with using existing technology, although the sooner we start the easier it will be.”
Apart from again needing to define your terms – how much is moderate? – you are suggesting that “conventional theory” predicts a narrow range of possibilities. It does not. Conventional theory (as summarised in the WG1 IPCC report) is that the most likely value of climate sensitivity is about 3±1.5°C of warming for a doubling of CO2. “Modest” is not an adjective that can realistically be applied to a likely global temperature rise of 3°C.
Could you say exactly which “conventional theory” you were referring to that predicted “modest” temperature and sea level rises?
Tom:
Great article — I have a new word to play with “apocaholic” — loved it. I don’t have time to critique anything — but maybe it does not need a critique as you made the case for “can we all check our numbers and methods please? … and that is good enough for me. New methods being compared to old methods often bring out errors — but whenever in the old or the new is what takes time.
Keep your sense of humor! You will need it ever more!
It is still hard for me to read supposed scientists spout such nonsense as the way, way, way up. Not that it might not happen, it has in the past, it’s the idea that this time it’s man’s fault. Of course, they may also believe that previous events were also man’s fault due to, I don’t know, maybe a fall from grace in the Garden of Eden or the equivalent, i.e. man is inherently bad.
And they call some people religious nuts?
Once again…..
the science is settled…..
If Antarctica is losing Ice faster than it makes it, how come the Sea Ice is up at the top of it’s range?
GRACE may have problems to sort out, but a coldest ever summer melt air temp above 80N and a near-record Antarctic Sea Ice year does not say “Global Warming”.
JRR Canada says:
September 6, 2010 at 9:48 am
Data? We don’t need….Same old expertise at work?
——————————————————–
Just need skill and some luck, apparently…
Hmmm, they launch a new instrument, and it shows what they wanted it to show…who is surprised.
In other news real data shows that the ocean is rising at 3.2 mm a year, or it is rising at a rate, yearly, that is as thick as the cloth in your clothing. Could you detect that? Is that really a concern?
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_noib_global.jpg
This experiment and the NASA press releases concerning it are one of the factors that has led me to believe that NASA is more interested in propaganda then science. It was around 2002 that I really started to pay attention to what they were promoting.
It started with a nagging feeling of something wrong going back to the late 90s. Then I read a paper “proving” that “Global Warming” was going to increase drought in the South-West even though rain fall would increase. The claim that was being attempted was that transpiration rates would go up faster the rainfall. I grew up in the desert. I spent most of my life as an amateur scientist (stating when I was 8) studying the desert, with my major interest being aquatic life. If these guys knew anything about how the desert works, they would realize that transpiration rates would go down. Plants and fungus change modes in the presence of water.
Right after this I read the first press release reporting the first results of GRACE, “Antarctica was loosing ice!” The bird had not been in the sky long enough to have collected enough data to even begin to make any conclusions, and the claimed amount, which was promoted as being a huge amount, was in reality so small compared to the normal change over as to insignificant. It was pretty apparent that they were just making stuff up. BTW, at the time, I worked in an industry that uses some of the most advanced mathematical tools mankind has developed. One of these is called an inverse convolution. It is my guess that that is what is used to weasel out the ice content. Without a well defined baseline and a clear quantification of such things as the response of land to geological processes, attempting to do an inverse convolution is impossible.
Large number tend to impress/worry people so I always try to figure out exactly what they mean. For orders of magnitude, given that Antarctica is about 14,000,000 sq km, the loss of 1 mm of ice over the entire continent would weigh about 13 billion tons. So a loss of a 100 billion tons is the equivalent of roughly 8 mm of ice. Given that the average depth of ice on Antarctica is over 2000000 mm, the loss of 100 or 200 billion tons of ice per year is not something to be immediately worried about.
Somebody should probably check my arithmetic.
Gosh, 57 billion tons of ice lost from Antarctica each year! It will take something in the order of 400 thousand CUBIC KILOMETERS of ice melt to raise global sea levels just 1 meter. There is about 0.9 billion tons of ice in a cubic kilometer, just 6000 years or so, blink of an eye in geological terms.
Is it me? Is it because of my years of working with instrumentation, and measurements in the industrial realm?
You know what that very linear movement of the sea level looks like.
INSTRUMENT DRIFT…
Hummmm…
Signed, party pooper fuddy duddy.
Max
The sea will rise 20 metres. “Not tomorrow, not this century, but sometime.”
But this only IF (big IF) warming continues for centuries to come. In fact, models about Greenland (Ridley et al) show it may take 3000 years of continuous high temperatures to melt down completely. For Antarctica the timescale is much longer, because warming is predicted to be maximum at the Arctic but minimum (or nil) at Antarctica.
But besides thiese trifles, I think it should be evident that the idea that someting will surely happen “not tomorrow, not this century, but sometime” is not really a scientific idea. For one thing, it is not falsifiable. Anything could happen “sometime”, but for a real prediction one must identify the drivers and derive the timescale, the rate, the feedbacks and so on. Otherwise, the opposite prediction would be equally valid, as well as predicting the Second Coming, or making no prediction at all.
rustneversleeps
September 6, 2010 at 9:41 am
You don’t know what you are talking about. According to the palaeontological record, a 6±2°C was related to a 5M raise in sea level, and a global golden age for mankind. So who cares if the sea levels raise. It is not as if there is anything special about the level they are at now.
DesertYote:
“Antarctica was loosing ice!”
One thing is for sure: Something is being lost: Money.
I prefer to describe ice gain or loss in Greenland or the Antarctic in parts per million. East Antarctic contains somewhere between 23 million and 26 million cubic kilometers of ice, or (assuming density of 0.9 gm/cc), about 21 million billion to 23 million billion tons of ice. Using the GRACE estimated loss of 57 billion tons per yr, that corresponds to about 2.5 to 2.7 parts per million ice loss per year.
A 1% reduction in East Antarctic ice mass will take 3700 years. Yikes! Time to sell the oceanfront villa in Montecito…
Even if GRACE is correct (I think the error bars should be +/- 10 ppm at least), the ice loss rates demonstrate yet another problem with the CAGW hypothesis.