Those masters of disaster are at it again, and it appears our friendly scientists at that National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) help this story along each year.
Thanks to WUWT reader Ron de Haan who spotted this on:
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/AntarcticWilkinsIceShelf.htm
Note the dates for these two stories are a year apart, but use the same photo.
It seems that not only is the photography recycled, so is the storyline. It seems to happen every year, about this time. Note the photos show shear failure and cracks, not melted ice. Shear failure is mostly mechanical-stress related, though ice does tend to be more brittle at colder temperatures.
National Geographic reported this story headline last year, March 25th 2008
PHOTO IN THE NEWS: Giant Antarctic Ice Shelf Collapses
Don’t let the date in the upper right fool you, thats just an automatic “today’s date” javascript element found in many webpages.
From the Nat Geo story:
“[It’s] an event we don’t get to see very often,” Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, said in a press statement.
Now, how is it that an ice shelf breaks up in the spring of 2008 and again in the spring of 2009 and it’s “not very often”? Hmmm.
It seems NSIDC’s Ted Scambos gets around. Doing a Google search for
Wilkins ice shelf + “Ted Scambos”
yields about 4,930 results. Yep, he sure gets the word out every year.
Ted Scambos said something similar in 1999:
“On the southwest side of the peninsula, the Wilkins ice shelf retreated nearly 1,100 square kilometers in early March of last year [1998], said Scambos. … Within a few years, much of the Wilkins ice shelf will likely be gone” [http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?ID=3209&Method=Full&PageCall=&Title=Antarctic%20Ice%20Shelf%20Break-Up%20Accelerates&Cache=False].
But, as can be seen from the following January 1996 and March 2008 images, there has been hardly any change in a decade. Look at the photos below from the appinsys web site:
But wait, there’s more examples of that “not very often” Wilkins ice shelf breakup, again from the appinsys web site:
As the following historical satellite images of the Wilkins Ice Shelf show, the disintegration / re-growth is an annual event (winter ice re-growth season; summer melt season).
But we just know warming is involved, NSIDC says so:
The MSNBC 2008 article reports on a NSIDC article which states:
“NSIDC Lead Scientist Ted Scambos, who first spotted the disintegration in March, said, “We believe the Wilkins has been in place for at least a few hundred years. But warm air and exposure to ocean waves are causing a break-up.”
The closest station to the Wilkins Ice Shelf in the NOAA Global Historical Climate Network database is Rothera Point. The following figure shows the historical data for Rothera Point, with monthly temperatures in blue and the annual January temperature in red. Summer (Dec – Mar) temperatures have not increased – the 2000s January temperatures are similar to the 1940s (the oldest data available). So why does NSIDC’s Scambos blame it on air temperatures?
The appinsys article goes on to talk about ocean currents and sea surface temperatures being a contributor, and it is worth the read. See it here.
The real question is, how often are we going to see the Wilkins Ice Shelf be a lead news story as poster child for “global warming” to illustrate ice loss in Antarctica that is actually growing.
I guess as long as we have NSIDC’s Ted Scambos to help the media, it will be “something we get to see fairly often”.
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Greenpeace, Al Gore and David Suzuki become increasingly shrill
More comments about Wilkins shelf from New Zealand, courtesy of CFP.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/10298
The Wilkinson Ice Shelf, nothing more but an over sized ice cube machine.
OT, Huge CME produced by the sun
http://www.spaceweather.com/
Re: Wilkins Ice Sheet
The following is an extract from a post on the John Daly site (dated Feb 3 2000). The post was submitted by Chick Keller who, in 2006, was described (by Roger Pielke) as a “a retired Los Alamos lab climate modeler”.
Antarctica — Ice shelf breakup. After 400 years of relative stability, nearly 1,150 square miles of the Larson B and Wilkins ice shelves collapsed between March 1998 and March 1999.
Anyone got anything earlier than March 1999 for the Wilkins collapse? If not I claim the prize!
SST anomalies there have been dropping since the 1990s. The trend of the data since 1854 is negative. And the SST anomalies were higher in the 1880s than they were the 1990s.
Bob Tisdale, had you asked me the cause of the Wilkins Icesheet break up, I would have answered the warming since the LIA.
Now, having seen your graphs, I’m not so sure.
My alternate explanation would be increased wind stresses on the ice. Winds in this area below almost continously at hurricane force. Wind blowing over large areas of ice create huge forces.
Then there is a recently (5 years ago) discovered warm ocean current that flows along and in all likelyhood under the Wilkins Icesheet.
The link below says the warm current results from freshwater runoff further north on the Peninsula. Which suggests it varies as a result of local weather conditions.
http://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/viewArticle.do?id=19026
The Wilkins Icesheet is the large blue area in the lower part of the map.
Some years ago there was a position paper on the BAS website about warming in the area of the Antarctic Peninsula. It noted that there was significant warming there – 3% is my recollection – but this did not fit any of the models so was believed to be due to other factors: that, for example the Peninsula was at the junction of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
This paper is no longer on the BAS site. Does anyone know what has happened to it? Is it now believed that the greater than expected warming on the Peninsula is now reconcilable with AGW?
ken nielson,
Welcome to the world of autonomous auditing of government science.
As previously reported http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/01/22/surprise-theres-an-active-volcano-under-antarctic-ice/, there are active volcanos under the continent as well…
Do we know the names of every person at NSIDC and any other politicized agencies who might have sent out similar well-timed, recurring, alarmist screeds to compliant reporters? With a list of these names, a couple of weeks, and google news, I have a feeling that this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Mike Bryant
NO amount of logic, no amount of reason, no amount of fact is going to keep government from it’s chosen course. Tax increases and rationing energy. It has been ordained.
Pay more in taxes to the government, so government scientists can pretend to control the weather. Exposing their methods is just going to make them angry.
Real science should shun the whole affair, for it is they who are being taken done with the hoax.
Sometimes the answer is the the most obvious. If one looks at cryoshpere web page and antartica you will see at this time of year all of the continent protected by sea ice except the side of the penninsula where this Wilkens ice shelf is. It seems obvious that ocean exposure ( ice erosion) has alot to do with this side of the penninsula breaking up. notice on the other side of the pennisula the coast line is nice and smooth and no breaking up reported compared to jagged edge coastline on the wilkens side
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/NEWIMAGES/antarctic.seaice.color.000.png
This is the email I just sent to the NSICD about their recent Wilkins Ice Sheet press release:
Dear NSIDC:
Please inform Dr Ted Scambos that he needs a memory check, since it is obvious from photos dating back as far as 1996 that the Wilkins Ice Sheet breaks up every SH summer (Jan-Mar) and reforms during every SH winter (Jul-Sept). Dr Scambos was recently quoted as saying:
From the Nat Geo story: [It’s] an event we dont get to see very often, Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, said in a press statement.
SInce this is an annual event, and one year in galactic time is minute, it is a very frequent event and does not deserve the hysterical hype given to it each year by Dr Scambos and the NSIDC. Your credibility is greatly diminished!
I expect a full accounting by Dr Scambos and the NSIDC of this hypocritical and unethical behavior. Please review the following comment on Wattsupwiththat.com:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/17/the-antarctic-wilkins-ice-shelf-collapse-media-recycles-photos-and-storylines-from-previous-years/#more-7139
And respond with a public appology!
Shame on all of you!
William H Yarber II
We need to bombard them, and the media about this fabrication.
Oh dear, sounds like it’s time for another Walt Meier guest post!
Maybe you could just recycle the last one….
The real shame here is that so many of our political masters continue to play the game. Why do they need to maufacture stories and drama? What is the endgame? Is it to raise taxes? Surely it is not about further destroying our economies. If AGW or as it is more popularly known now as climate change is actually occuring why do they need to lie? As a scientist I base my understanding on data and the data clearly does not support AGW.
The whole issue has been hijacked by carpetbaggers for financial gain and the truth will eventually win out. However I am afraid it will not before our landscapes are destroyed by useless wind turbines.
Worse than that is the damage it will do to the consevation and sustainability movement when people find out they have been conned.
Ron de Haan (03:54:10) :
> OT, Huge CME produced by the sun http://www.spaceweather.com/
They say merely:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronal_mass_ejection says “The average mass based on coronagraph images is 1.6 × 10^15 g.”
A tonne is 10^6 g, a billion is 10^9, so the size of this this CME is only 60% of an average CME. Please don’t exaggerate, especially not on a topic that is about exaggeration!
Remember Mercer’s prediction in 1978?
“One warning sign that a dangerous warming is beginning in Antarctica, will be a breakup of ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula just south of the January 0C isotherm; the ice shelf in the Prince Gustav Channel, and the Wordie Ice Shelf; the ice shelf in George VI Sound, and the ice shelf in Wilkins Sound.”
Mercer, Nature, 1978, v271 pp.321-325
Of course, the fact that all these shelves have disappeared (Wilkins being the last survivor) cannot be anything else but a pure coincidence, no? A very big superposition of coincidences? These shelves broke up in the fastest warming region of Antarctica, but surely warming has nothing to do with that?
Bah…
REPLY: Meanwhile “Flanagan” while you cherry pick a tiny point on the peninsula which isn’t even in the same climatic regime (Maritime polar) as the main continent (Polar Icecap), the rest of Antarctica grows sea ice:
Antarctic Sea Ice for March
Extent......................Concentration
2009 5.0 million sq km 2.9 million sq km
1997 3.8 million sq km 2.2 million sq km
1980 3.5 million sq km 2.0 million sq km
This is an increase of 45% for ice concentration since 1980. Statistically significant, no?
But you’d rather believe Steig et al and his Mannomatic mathematics, now disproven.
Bah…
MSNBC is probably the biggest waste of time in cable history, look at their ratings, I think the only ones who watch that network are family members of on air hosts (and I say that loosely). They probably switch to another network during the shows too.
I was curious why you and practically no one else commented on this story when first reported. Now I know, thanks for the primer on just how insidious this cabal really is.
I knew something was up, when I posted the responses–at the time 100 percent “you’re full of s***”–to the initial story.
http://cbullitt.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/response-to-sci-am-alarm-on-wilkins-ice-sheet-stfu/
These so called scientists don’t work. They put out one headline and get more money to study something and then they just plagiarize or even worse use the old data and put out a new fairytail. These guys aren’t responsible. Where does NSIDC get it’s funding? Oh NASA and NOAA and ….what a crock!
http://nsidc.org/about/sponsors.html
http://nsidc.org/research/bios/scambos.html
“briefed Al Gore” wow that’s important now isn’t it. He’s and activist with an agenda not a scientist.
Somebody needs to call their boss or somebody overthere like Walt Mier and point this out. This is getting really bad when this guy puts out something as false as this. “The documents are fake but the story is true”. Dan Rather 2004.
[snip – tasteless, pointless]
I was wondering why an ice shelf would collapse when the oceans are rising.
Well spotted Ron!
What is quite funny is that if you go the guardian’s page
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/05/ice-shelf-wilkins-antarctic
(in fact it’s their sister paper the observer because it came out on Sunday April 5)
there is a section at the bottom called ‘related information’ (presumably generated automatically) that even shows the exactly same picture with the date 26 March 2008! ! 🙂
Well, the guardian is keen on recycling so I suppose it makes sense to recycle their news stories and pictures also.
Why are people who accept the actual measurements of global temperature (Hadley,NCDC,RSS and UAH which all show global cooling) refered to as sceptics whereas those who derive their world view from computer models consider themselves realists?
Ron de Haan (03:20:25) :
“The Wilkinson Ice Shelf, nothing more but an over sized ice cube machine.”
Good image!. Really, as you know, the Antarctic peninsula is where the Pacific´s warm pool water go down to refresh and go upwards along the south west american coast as the then cold Humboldt´s current. So, as you say, that “over sized cube machine” is working just fine.