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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kim (10:45:15) :
Eric 09:52:27
Hey, glaciers calve, thus carving. And the Palmer Peninsula is a known hot spot. So what’s it all about, Alfie?
I was interested to note that the Wilkins Ice Shelf is estimated to be several hundred years old. Perhaps formed during the Little Ice Age. We have been recovering from the Little Ice Age. Perhaps that’s the meaning of this.
At least you accept the fact that the ice shelf is receding based on the photos;
What does recovering from the Little Ice Age mean? The little ice age was not really a global phenomenon. Various regions experienced cooler temperatures at different times. We really aren’t sure what phenomena caused the little ice age. Was it solar irradience, volcanoes or what? How do we know what we are recovering from it? What is the theory behind this slogan?
eric 19:20:00
You have no proof that the Little Ice Age was not a world wide phenomenon. It was during the Maunder Minimum, a solar phenomenon, so if the sun caused it, it was a global phenomenon. The other main contender for cause is a series of volcanoes, also presumably with a global effect.
Sorry, the Hockey Stick was crook’d. Neither blade nor shaft were honest.
============================================
I can’t believe you folks are so blase about this.
Firstly, in the span of history, citing 1999 and events within the last decade does not make something “frequent”. It just means its building momentum.
Regarding your graph. LOOK AT IT.
Take the low points from it. It used to dip close to -2. It hasn’t done that in decades now. Obviously, there are fluctuations for given years, but I was startled by the overall trend.
Its going up. It dips, it swerves, but its ultimately getting warmer. Does it only count if its a straight line graph? If so, I haven’t encountered any natural graph that meets those prerequisites.
You guys are drawing conclusions based on beliefs rather than data, and not looking at the overall trends. You’re looking at graphs, which is better than most of the masses, but you’re not looking at the overall arc.
The other question, is why is it so bad for humans to create sustainable energy? I mean evolutionarily speaking and in terms of US national interests.
I don’t think we should be reliant on unstable, dictatorial theocracies to power our life styles. In that regard, I guess I’m a bit of an isolationist.
I also think that creating sustainable energy is the next step in human progress. That we can truly control and harness energy to suit our purposes without squabbling over it.
Also, I’d like links to scientists to read their points on this.
Frankly, unless one of you is a geologist or climatologist, you are an amateur without proper training. Link to a prominent scientist who agrees with you, as I’d be very curious to read it.
~snip~
[From the screen name on, it’s all downhill. ~dbstealey, mod.]
By your own submission, the statistics in the graph you posted clearly show that average temperatures aren’t hitting the lows that they normally hit. Not to mention that the first two “high” temperature readings are higher than ever before. So, it’s obvious this isn’t just the media “blowing hot air”. It’s all of us.
This story might be a bad example of global warming, with facts not backing up the story. But global warming is very much real.
Don’t you see the summers getting longer and hotter, winters much cooler. Temperatures rising across the globe. And you still say, global warming is a myth. Wake Up!
You guys believing this should note that the photos show the breakup of annual ice as well as the iceshelf. If you consider the whole thing to be just ice shelf you are being decieved.
It is a little idiot to believe this story. If you look at the ASAR Envisat image which has illustrated the shelf break up you’ll understand just how much ice has broken up. and notice that the photos he uses for comparison and in different months. He uses summer to show break up, and winter to show how the ice shelf rejuvenates itself. what he is showing is winter sea-ice in regions where the ice shelf used to be. Just for the record for all of you. Sea-ice in antarctica is growing at a rate of 1.4% per decade. but it is extremely variable. Sea-ice is not the important global warming monitoring mechanism in antarctica, ice shelves and mass balance are. “Grace” gravity measurements, “Radarsat” Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar, and “ICEsat” Lasar Altimetry indicate that the Antarctic Ice Sheet as a whole is losing mass on the order of 25 GT per year. This does not represent a large amount because the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is losing extensive amounts of ice, but warming in high elevations of the Eastern Antarctic Ice Sheet has resulted in increased accumulation of precipitation.
Ok, to those that think AGW is real and that it is responsible for this “unusual” event.
It is well documented that over the last 100 years public relations companies have developed techniques to increase the wants and needs to create the consumer, debt ridden society we live in today. So “we” are responsible, yet do you want to mean “we” as in us, this generation, the people who are alive at this very second, all 6.5 billion (approx) and then create new ways to tax us for the events that have led to this moment in human time or do you want to think about re-wording your terminology and say “the human species over its course of evolution”. Or would it be more prudent to look at the people responsible for creating the consumer society “we” live in out of greed to be able to think of and treat us like cattle, including you and I mean those that are trying to defend the very core of what they stand for, control and power.
My issue is that if you believe “we” are responsible then tax us, if you can prove to me it is us at this moment who are responsible for the events that are or might be unfolding then I will do what you say is fair.
If you cannot prove it is us at this moment in time then I ask you to consider looking at the people/families that have made money in creating this consumer debt riddelled society we live in and then follow the money that is asking for certain things today to suppress and further indebt us. To me if this is happening (which I highly disagree it is but that’s another matter) then you should look at creating policy that takes the money from those people. If you did it would remove hunger, disease, poverty the second you take the money from them and put it into a “social” account for all of those “we’s” that are alive at this moment and give us the opportunity to actually do something about this series of events you claim we are having.
Nice comment Phillip H. They are scaring us good! And this Ice Shelf is a perfect example of a scare when the average Antartic ice is almost off the chart ABOVE averages.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.south.jpg
It is completely insane that RealClimate consider Wilkins as anything whatsoever, but sadly they do! Obviously, to them it the beginning of the end. This would be a terrific place to start and look at the science from Appinsys site in the article above or the scaremongering of RealClimate/IPCC below.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/04/wilkins-ice-shelf-collapse/
Thanks nofreewind, looks like I killed off the topic, which to those that are still asking questions about what is really happening I apologise. I had to have a rant because I am fed up with the consistent way language has been used in this and previous fear mongering debates. I have an environmental science degree and was surprised in the way that I and others were treated when we questioned other factors that didn’t involve “human caused” effects.
It isn’t hard to see that the average joe is going to believe something like this as catastrophic which is a great shame as it is removing any choices they might have had.
http://nsidc.org/
You know, correct me if I am wrong, but in the succession of photos, the amount of ice never seems to get back to where it was. If you want REAL data sets, you know … from guys that are sponsored by the ones that sent us to the moon … go to the national snow and ice data center. Would you get a Ferrari serviced at the local wal-mart?
Look at the difference between the first and last picture of the B&W’s
Scientists, most important of all should be able to get it into their thick skulls, that MAN is a part of the NATURAL CYCLE of this planet. The problem IS NOT is it MAN MADE, or NATURAL CYCLE … we are a part of nature, morons.
If you suggest otherwise, you suggest we are either super natural or unnatural.
We are in-fact NATURAL aren’t we? Idiots. The problem is WHAT TO WE DO. Start thinking, and not like your grandfather.
Reply: Close to being censored a bit. Please tone it down. ~ charles the moderator
Charles, thank you for your objectivity.