Lying with Statistics: The National Climate Assessment Falsely Hypes Ice Loss in Greenland and Antarctica

Thus my maxim:
“Anyone who is giving you numerators without denominators is trying to deceive you.”

Since the total mass of ice at each location is not known very precisely, how can one measure the loss with any degree of accuracy? In other words, it seems to me the gain/loss of ice at both locations is “in the noise” — too small to know whether it is growing or shrinking, let alone to measure the rate of growth/shrinkage.

Reblogged this on Centinel2012 and commented:
We still have a few sane scientists!

How can Antarctica be losing ice if it just recently reached an all time greatest extent?

Well, quite possibly because the Antarctic extent measures the ice floating on the sea around Antarctica.
However, why is there ice loss on Antarctica? Are we perhaps seeing the downswing of a cyclic process?

Sublimation

Nice take-down. Thanks.

If all the ice were to melt from the polar region would slow the Earth 600ms. We’ve seen a 2 ms slowdown since 1970. Like most every Earth measurement though, there are numerous conflating factors.

and ~400km³ per year spread over 360 million km² is roughly 1mm of sea level rise per year.

Straight out of How to Lie with Statistics, one of my favorite books. Present a cherrypicked slice of the data on a non-absolute scale. In this case we can throw in presenting an irrelevantly short interval — one whole decade. Really? For a climate trend?
A third problem is that — once again — the data is presented without error bars! We do not know — note well — how much ice there is on Greenland or Antarctica to within one percent, and the entire range of data in either graph is less than a tenth of that, but since we do not get to see either the raw data points underlying the curves above or the error bars per point, we are left with the impression that the lines are accurate to within the width of the line and that the measurement process is not subject to any sort of systematic error that might produce the observed bias without it reflecting any sort of actual trend in the ice volume. For example, even if the curve is based on GRACE data, GRACE can very likely not accurately resolve the full volume distribution of the underlying mass — it effectively projects the mass distribution onto some presumed spherical shell.
But what shell? If Antarctica and Greenland are continuing their post-ice-age subsidence, then dense magma is flowing out from underneath them, their land surface is falling, and of course their gravitational surface field is reducing. But GRACE cannot resolve this from field reduction due to ice loss without unprovable assumptions being made, and this sort of thing has to at the very least contribute to the probable error. But if the data is presented without that error being shown, the entire “trend” in the data above could be nothing but irrelevant noise.
It is equally instructive to do precisely the same thing — plot the absolute temperature instead of the supposed temperature “anomaly” — over the last 165 years:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1850/to:2015/offset:288/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1850/to:2015/scale:0.0001
Not quite a hockey stick, eh? It would be even better (again) to add error bars to this curve — say plus or minus 1 C for the 288, another plus or minus 1 C (or more) for the bulk of HADCRUT4 gradually shrinking down to the 0.15 C they acknowledge over the last decade or so (which is IMO optimistic by at least a factor of 2, given the divergence between HADCRUT4 and e.g. GISS and the fact that HADCRUT4 doesn’t correct at all for UHI, where UHI alone is probably twice this).
One day it will be very instructive to look back at the horrendous abuses of the theory of statistics in the general field of climate science, especially in its presentation to both policy makers and the general public. Somewhere in between the actual research papers (which often do treat uncertainty at a level that would pass most referees) and the Summary for Policy Makers and CNN, error estimates and uncertainty either disappear altogether or are replaced by indefensible weasel-words like “high confidence”.
High confidence based on what, exactly? Not the central limit theorem. Not the data. Not on the excellent agreement between the models and the data. Confidence in statistics has a precise meaning, and one has to be able to back up any assignment of confidence with a computation based on the laws and theorems of axiomatic statistics. The use of the term “confidence” in the Summary for Policy Makers, on the other hand, appears to be much more akin to the use of the term “confidence” as it is used in “confidence racket”, or “con(fidence) artist”. “Trust me, I’m a Climate Scientist” seems to be a free pass to making indefensible assertions using the language of statistics but without any of the numerical backing one would require of research in any other heavily statistics-based field.
This is one of the reasons I’m active on this list. I actually understand statistics pretty well, and know what one can and cannot expect out of predictive models. One cannot squeeze blood from a stone. Nor can one solve the Navier-Stokes equations at a spatiotemporal resolution that — for cells 100 km x 100 km x 1 km, and timesteps determined by the speed of sound divided into the longest (instead of the shortest) cell dimension — is roughly 10^20 times what one expects to have to use given a Kolmogorov scale for the nonlinear dynamics of around (less than) 1 cm. Climate models are based on nothing more than the fond hope that none of the dynamics neglected or approximated on shorter spatiotemporal scales is relevant, in spite of the direct evidence (from the models themselves) that this is not so!
rgb

Someone please check my math!
So, they say we’ve lost 1000 gigatons of Antarctic “land ice” since 2006?
Let’s assume they mean “gigatonnes” (a tonne or metric ton is 1000 kg) to make the calculation easier”
1000 gigatonnes = 10^15 kg.
density of ice = 917 kg/m^3
(10^15 kg)/(917 kg/m^3) = 1.09 x 10^12 m^3
Now, over the same interval, the Antarctic sea ice has increased by about 1.8 million km^2, or 1.8 x 10^12 m^2.
Do we think that extra sea ice is greater or less than 0.6 m thick?
Will the net ice difference be more or less than the amount of ice Al Gore uses in a year’s worth of martinis?

This is right out of the little green handbook I have “How To Lie With Statistics.” It’s a classic example, and dishonest as can be.

This Administration uses statistics as a means of distraction. Con-artists fleecing victims use distraction in a similar way.
This Administration’s pattern is predictable:
Make wild claims about an alleged problem.
Control the information flow on the problem.
De-legitimize those who question the Administration’s claims.
Propose a wildly unworkable and expensive ‘solution’.
Shove through the solution.
Blame those who questioned the process when it fails and/or ignore the failure.

150 years, 200 years, 100,000 years, mouse farts in geological terms. 500 million years is a much more appropriate time scale to measure this against. Not only is Earth obscenely cold, the planet also has a dangerous CO2 deficiency. Earth spent hundreds of millions of years with no ice at the poles. If anything, Antarctic ice is an anomaly that’s going to melt completely anyway.
100 years only seems like a long time because that’s about how long we live. To the planet, the measurement windows we’re using are meaningless nonsense that aren’t even valuable as an error, let alone any legitimate understanding of how the planet works.

No matter how much GRACE data processing, like RGBfromduke inferred above, I don’t think it’s possible [to know], with this tiny a variation, if Antarctica is losing ice. Subsidence alone sounds like a big enough error source, but looking at how GRACE itself works, it makes no actual earth facing measurements whatsoever — it’s [two] satellites flying in tandem that simply measure the distance to each other, and record variations as gravitational anomalies.
It would seem that being able to tell what is snow, ice, rock, void, or whatever in an overflown area (and the depth/volume/mass of the various layers) would be extraordinarily imprecise and loaded with assumptions – so much so that the error bars would far exceed the purported range of the suggested anomaly (as rgb says),

My bad. 4.5/1000 per DECADE = 4.5/10,000 per year.
Apologies.

Good article, but it misses the bigger story.
I looked up the source of the data for ice melt. The title of Wouters et al 2013 is “Limits in detecting acceleration of ice sheet mass loss due to climate variability“. The abstract says

We find that the record length of spaceborne gravity observations is too short at present to meaningfully separate long-term accelerations from short-term ice sheet variability. We also find that the detection threshold of mass loss acceleration depends on record length: to detect an acceleration at an accuracy within ±10 Gt yr−2, a period of 10 years or more of observations is required for Antarctica and about 20 years for Greenland.

That is, previous claims of an acceleration in ice melt of the polar ice caps from GRACE are effectively declared statistically invalid. This includes following papers with the periods of data coverage:-
Velicogna 2009 – 2002 to 2009 data
Chen et al 2009 – Greenland only 2002 to 2009 data
Velicogna and Wahr 2005 – Greenland only 2002 to 2004 data
What is more, the headlines of a few years ago that claimed the Greenland ice cap was collapsing are also invalid. Without acceleration there is no collapse.

Another way to relate all those gigatonnes of ice loss is against sea level rise.
It takes about 365 gigatonnes of ice to raise sea levels by just one millimeter. That means over 10 years the ice melt has contributed around one-third of the sea level rise recorded by the satellites.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
Put another way, polar ice melt is raising sea levels at the rate of 4 inches a century.

So Obama wants to spend money on reducing the human impact on our planet. And this is a problem because..? Regardless of what you think about climate change, answer this – what is the terrible problem with trying to invest in our planets future, trying to make it a cleaner and healthier environment for us and future generations? No false data was presented.

Who WAS to blame? Man of course. Before 1950 AND 1950. It’s worse than we thought and we shoulda acted.

Climate change and forest fires synergistically drive widespread melt events of the Greenland Ice Sheet
…The warmest temperature recorded in the core occurred in 1785, but widespread melting did not occur due to low BC concentration….
[See figures]
[Kaitlin M. Keegan et al]
Abstract
….The record indicates that warmer temperatures were the norm in the earlier part of the past 4000 years, including century-long intervals nearly 1°C warmer than the present decade (2001–2010). Therefore, we conclude that the current decadal mean temperature in Greenland has not exceeded the envelope of natural variability over the past 4000 years, a period that seems to include part of the Holocene…..
[Takuro Kobashi et. al.]
——-
Abstract
An aerial view of 80 years of climate-related glacier fluctuations in southeast Greenland
…………the recent retreat was matched in its vigour during a period of warming in the 1930s with comparable increases in air temperature. We show that many land-terminating glaciers underwent a more rapid retreat in the 1930s than in the 2000s,……
[Anders A. Bjørk et. al. – 20 April 2012]
——-
Abstract
Greenland warming of 1920–1930 and 1995–2005
“…the rate of warming in 1920–1930 was about 50% higher than that in 1995–2005….”
[Petr Chylek et. al. – 20 June 2006]
——-
Abstract
Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Air Temperature Variability: 1840–2007
“…The annual whole ice sheet 1919–32 warming trend is 33% greater in magnitude than the 1994–2007 warming….”
[Jason E. Box et. al. – 2009]
——-
Abstract
Extending Greenland temperature records into the late eighteenth century
“…The warmest year in the extended Greenland temperature record is 1941, while the 1930s and 1940s are the warmest decades….”
[B. M. Vinther et. al. – 6 June 2006 [pdf]]
——-
Abstract
The State of the West Greenland Current up to 1944
“….It is found that warmer conditions existed during the decade of 1880, followed by a colder period up to about 1920, when the present warm period began. The peak of the present warm period appears to have been reached in the middle 1930’s,…..”
[M. J. Dunbar – 1946]
——-
Abstract
A period of warm winters in Western Greenland and the temperature see-saw between Western Greenland and Central Europe
Particulars are given regarding the big rise of winter temperatures in Greenland and its more oceanic climate during the last fifteen years….
Dr. F. Loewe – 1937

[A rare typo from your pen? “”1950 AND 1950” should be ?? .mod]

I am sceptical of all the ice loss garbage. I suspect they are fiddling the figures, applying massive torture and bending the data. Even if they weren’t the numbers they give are just too small to tell us anything meaningful. And even if they are right there is nothing alarming in the numbers for the year 2100. I’m going for a beer.

“Loss from the two Polar Ice Sheets”
??
When did Greenland become part of the polar ice sheet?

Reading from my phone, so I can’t see if this has been discussed. The fact that the authors believe that Adam and Eve are the original humans does not lend authority to their argument. To believe that, one must have faith and reject geology. Nothing wrong with that. Except it puts one in the company of the consensus. I won’t comment further on this theological debate here on a science blog.

Lou says:
July 6, 2014 at 3:21 pm
So Obama wants to spend money on reducing the human impact on our planet. And this is a problem because..?
It’s a problem because the “problem” (according to IPCC) is HUGE and will require ZILLIONS od dollars.
Think of it as an insurance issue; if the cost of insuring against a particular event is greater than the cost of re of the event, don’t bother insuring. Businesses face these sorts of decisions daily and take appropriate actions, because it’s THEIR money that would be wasted. Governments, on the other hand, spend OUR money.

As an outsider to the very technical discussions I have continued to wonder about the increase in air moisture as the sea rises (and warms). My humble opinion: so as the seas rise, more land is covered, then there more evaporation, then more rain and snow. With more snow, the glaciers return and the water in the oceans recede. Is this too simple?

Maybe. However, it is certainly plausible. Nobody really knows, though. We do know that something (or more likely, some combination of somethings) creates a climate “set point” that it loosely oscillates about, and that that set point slowly wanders. We do not have even a semi-empirical or solid heuristic “theory” of how or why it wanders, and cannot dream at this point of predicting its motion (which depends in some detail on how the climate sloshes around in its vicinity as well as on some presumed set of external but unpredictable drivers like the state of the Sun). Then, the climate is a highly nonlinear, chaotic system and doesn’t really “need” any glib explanation for the glacial/interglacial cycle, or for bobbles such as the LIA and MWP and the modern warm period.
What we do know is that if one takes CO_2 levels over geological time as known from radiometric proxies, and plots it against global average temperature over geological as known from radiometric proxies and the fossil record, there is damn-all correlation between the two. This “anti-hockey stick” graph should be the cover art for AR6, which should be the last AR of the IPCC before the IPCC disbands, or repurposes itself looking for the advent of the next glacial episode, or whatever. If it had been plotted first, instead of last, the world would be a trillion or two dollars wealthier and maybe 30 million people (most of them children) who are the casualties of the ongoing “climate alarmism catastrophe” would still be alive.
But I do like your theory for at least part of the macro behavior for glaciation, when combined with albedo effects and the unknown but strongly correlated Milankovitch (orbital) effects and the possibility of some sort of aerosol feedback from isostatic rebound vulcanism and the variation of thermohaline oceanic circulation and who knows, long term variable behavior of the Sun acting as a de facto “trigger” when orbital factors destabilize the interglacial phase. There is no lack of possible causes, in other words, and they all probably contribute in a strongly coupled nonlinear dynamical system, or rather set of three coupled systems, two Navier-Stokes (ocean and atmosphere) and one magnetohydrodynamici (that is, even more unsolvable, the sun). As long as this system is uncomputable and heuristic models fail, we Do Not Know, even though people are eager to claim that we do.
rgb

henry says
what are you saying?
besides sea ice coverage, is somebody measuring the depth of sea ice as well? Everywhere ?[in Antarctica]. How?

It’s simple: the plots given are not based on thickness. GRACE attempts to estimate mass changes by observing changes in the gravity field. So: if total mass of sea ice increases while land ice decreases for a net decrease in mass, that could account for the estimated decline.
Or, as others have pointed out, it could be experimental error. I don’t think that in either case, warming is the only explanation. And “losing mass” could mean other factors as well; I would guess those are less likely than a loss in ice mass. There could, for example, be some sort of replacement of denser crustal rock with less dense rock. Possibly there are other possible explanations for that as well.
Upshot is: GRACE isn’t measuring ice thickness or even ice mass. They’re just inferring the amount of ice mass based on fluctuations in the observed gravitational field.

But I’m still terrified! Of Global Warming Alarmists and their effect on the low-info voter types.

The National Climate Assessment (NCA) implies a serious loss of ice. Yet the real world observational data held by the National Snow And Ice Data Center, funded by NASA, shows otherwise.

Link, please. It’s a big website, is NSIDC.org.