Steven Goddard looks at trends in Antarctica and compares to NASA’s recent article.
A January 12, 2010 Earth Observatory article warns that Antarctica
“has been losing more than a hundred cubic kilometers (24 cubic miles) of ice each year since 2002” and that “if all of this ice melted, it would raise global sea level by about 60 meter (197 feet).“
If sea level rose 60 meters, that would wipe out most of the world’s population – which would no doubt make some environmentalists happy. Sadly for them though, Antarctica contains 30 × 10^6 km3 of ice which means that it will take 300,000 years for all the ice to melt at NASA’s claimed current rate of 100 km3 per year. (Chances are that we will run out of fossil fuels long before then.) The surface area of Antarctica is 14.2 million km2 which would indicate an average melt of less than 7 millimeters per year across the continent. (Is NASA claiming that they can measure changes in Antarctic ice thickness within 7 millimeters?) But even more problematic is that UAH satellite data shows no increase in temperatures in Antarctica, rather a small decline.
NASA themselves appear very confused about Antarctic temperature trends. As you can see in the two images below, sometimes they think Antarctica is warming and other times they think it is cooling.
According to NSIDC, sea ice extent has been increasing over time around Antarctica – this is consistent with the idea that temperatures are cooling.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/s_plot_hires.png
The University of Illinois Cryosphere Lab shows that Antarctic sea ice area has also been increasing over time.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png
One of the key features of Hansen’s global warming theory is that the polar regions are supposed to warm much faster than the rest of the planet. The image below is from his classic 1984 paper, and shows that Antarctica is supposed to warm up 6C after a doubling of CO2. If the cooling trend which UAH shows continues, it will take Antarctica a very long time to warm up six degrees.
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/effects/downloads/Challenge_chapter2.pdf
Hansen also predicted that sea ice would diminish around Antarctica and significantly decrease albedo. Clearly that prediction was wrong as well.
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/effects/downloads/Challenge_chapter2.pdf
Some are quick to come to Hansen’s defense by saying that “climate science has improved since that paper was written, we now know that Antarctic shouldn’t warm as fast as the Arctic.” That is indeed a fine explanation, but the problem is that most of Antarctica is not warming at all.
According to the University of Colorado Sea Level Lab, sea level is rising at about 32cm/century. At that rate it will take 18,750 years for sea level to rise 60 meters (per the NASA article.)
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_noib_global_sm.jpg
Temperatures in Vostok, Antarctica average -85F in the winter, and warm all the way up to -25F in the summer. If global warming raises the temperature there by a mere fifty-seven degrees, we may seem some melting occurring in the summer.
Difficult to see what NASA is worried about.
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“Randy (04:45:20) :
If I did the math correctly, Antarctica has a volume of 30X106 KM3. The world oceans have a surface area of 351419000 KM2.
That calculates out to 0.008 meters of rise in the ocean height to absorb all of the ice that would melt!”
If you divide 3*10^7 km^3 by 3.5*10^8 km^2 you get 8.5*10^(-2) km = 85 m
Oliver K. Manuel, in no way am I challenging you, but I’m curious what you mean when you say that NASA’s propaganda machine has been running since the moon landing?
The TOPEX/Jason measurements of sea level is just a short term natural increase as can been seen in this in situ observation in Sydney. http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_global_station.shtml?stnid=680-140. There is no accelaration in the trend at all.
The actual long term global sea level rise is half this, at 1.74mm/year with decdal variations up and down. http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2006GL028492.shtml
Thus it would take more than 30,000 years to get to the 60 meters.
” Herman L (04:54:48) :
Can we expect a post on the Arctic just like this one on the Antarctic? ”
Look for the post from the time when “DMI Polar Temperatur” was introduced (upper right, the picture that looks like a bell curve); you might have a look at “Sea Ice” (like a sine curve), too, and all that was written around August to October of last year.
>> Randy (04:45:20) :
If I did the math correctly, Antarctica has a volume of 30X106 KM3. The world oceans have a surface area of 351419000 KM2.
That calculates out to 0.008 meters of rise in the ocean height to absorb all of the ice that would melt!
What information am I missing? Help I am confused! <<
Dividing 30 million by 351.419 million gives 0.085 km or 85 meters. Presumably it's reduced to 60 meters because some of that goes on top of current land.
Alright, that’s it. NASA has ceased being needed for space exploration, with it’s remaining usefulness dwindling fast. Sure, they with their public funding made sense back during the Cold War, when the “space race” was about bragging rights and the “peaceful exploration of space” put a nice public face on the development of missiles and other weapons. But now we’d have a better chance at getting back to the Moon by following the technical specs of Salvage 1. Hey, Issac Asimov was the scientific advisor so there should be solid usable info there.
Time now for full-out commercial space exploration. We’ll have corporate sponsorships. Coming soon, Martian lander sponsored by Coca Cola, with the proud Coke logo emblazoned on the sides and clearly visible in the video footage. Followed by McDonald’s, which will proudly erect a small Golden Arches thus becoming the very first fast food franchise, and restaurant period, to advertise on another planet. All data will be released publicly, no “intellectual property” claims, which is what we want so the science progresses. So what is there to complain about?
First commercial mission to the Moon: The full cremated remains of a loved one, in a suitably hardened container, will be crash-landed in a crater. $200,000 each, minimum of 100 sales needed to commence project, buying will also get you access to exclusive encrypted live video and telemetry feeds over the internet. Pets are accepted. The piece of hardware that actually launches the block of containers will monitor the impact with full spectrographic data analysis, then assume a lunar orbit for mapping purposes.
Yeah, that’ll work.
“If sea level rose 60 meters, that would wipe out most of the world’s population – which would no doubt make some environmentalists happy.”
Well, it would also make some Republicans happy, because most of those people would be foreigners and/or brown skinned.
“One of the key features of Hansen’s global warming theory is that the polar regions are supposed to warm much faster than the rest of the planet. The image below is from his classic 1984 paper, and shows that Antarctica is supposed to warm up 6C after a doubling of CO2. If the cooling trend which UAH shows continues, it will take Antarctica a very long time to warm up six degrees.”
There is very little difference between what Hansen is doing and the old time soothsayers. Sure Hansen has computers with to ply his magical tricks of math and dead tree entrails at the core of his predictions. It’s the same confidence game just different means of deception.
When a “theory” (actually a hypothesis, well not even that as a hypothesis needs to have proper tests that would falsify it should the tests fail to validate the hypothesis) fails to “connect” with objective reality it’s no longer a theory and it’s repugnant to science call it that. At best it’s a failed hypothesis and more likely just another pile of steaming mind poop that needs to be shoveled into the dust bins of history, just like millions of other failed hypotheses in the meandering progression of hard science.
Objective Reality is a Harsh Mistress ™ and she is very unforgiving.
http://www.PathsToKnowledge.NET?s=soothsaying
Neil Craig (04:30:54) :
“With 300,000 years one would expect most persons to have time to step back from the rising waters.”
Neil erosion and plate subduction would out pace that.
“Hansen also predicted that sea ice would diminish around Antarctica and significantly decrease albedo. Clearly that prediction was wrong as well.”
But that (an increase in libido) requires the land ice to melt, as almost all the ice down here is on land. That is miles thick!
Hermon! Great reply!
I look forward to your rebuttal of the other points of the post.
So HRM Prince Philip won´t need to reincarnate as a mortal virus to reduce human population. All malthusianists praise goddess Gaia for her intelligence cheering with koolaid.
Re
Phillip Bratby (04:56:36) :
And more worries from the BBC. If it’s not too little snow, it’s too much ice. All due to climate change:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8494000/8494397.stm
see this article
http://www.currentresults.com/Wildlife/Endangered-Species/Endangered-Mammals/wolverine-709211.php
which says
On mainland BC, wolverines are estimated to number 3,520. They comprise part of the western Canada population that spans boreal and arctic regions. Western Canadian wolverines in 2003 probably totalled 15,000 to 19,000 animals. Their populations, however, have lately fallen in Alberta, Ontario and southern BC.
The same factors that have removed wolverines from much of their range – overharvesting and human encroachment into their habitat – continue to plague them. Wolverines suffer from unsustainable hunting and trapping in 21% of BC’s population units. A 2005 study in western Montana found that licensed trapping largely contributed to wolverine population declines of 30% a year in four mountain ranges.
300,000 years? That’s only if it continues to melt through the next three ice ages, LOL.
The actual temperature stations show a decline too over that time period. The whole story by NASA is as disingenuous as it can get. If there is one thing we don’t need to worry about, it’s ice loss in the Antarctic.
Herman L (04:54:48) :
Do you have any names of the environmentalists who you assert would be happy to see this?
Here you are the answers you are in need of:
:
http://www.green-agenda.com/index.html
Hey Playing the Urgency card. If it won’t happen for 100 years, we can fund the research in 100 years minus some time cushion. If the ocean is poised to rise tommorrow, we need to have research and solutions in place to day. Show us some tangible rising but until then,
fogetaboutit
“We need to get some broad based support,
to capture the public’s imagination…So we have to offer up scary scenarios,
make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts…
Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
– Prof. Stephen Schneider,
Stanford Professor of Climatology,
lead author of many IPCC reports
http://www.green-agenda.com/index.html
A question for Dr. Manuel – would I be correct in assuming you are the author of “EARTH’S HEAT SOURCE -THE SUN”? I hope you continue to provide your views on the matter here!
” Herman L (04:54:48) :
If sea level rose 60 meters, that would wipe out most of the world’s population – which would no doubt make some environmentalists happy.
Do you have any names of the environmentalists who you assert would be happy to see this?”
Try
The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement
http://www.vhemt.org/
Ano (04:40:06) :
From the linked article:-
“Michael Schodlok, a JPL scientist who models the way ice shelves and the ocean interact…”
And:-
“Glaciologist Robert Bindschadler of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center…”
Sorry, I may be obtuse, but WTF is NASA doing employing people to model ice shelves at the Jet Propulsion Lab and glaciologists at the Space Flight Center?
No wonder there isn’t a viable replacement for the space shuttle. Nobody’s doing any space stuff.
This is standard stuff. There’s little funding for NASA’s primary mission so they create new reasons to keep those tax dollars flowing in.
Only that impossible object God is an umoved mover. Everything else is caused. But nothing can be the cause of itself – and changes in climate cannot be put down to climate change.
What’s more there cannot be increasing effects of a warming that isn’t at present available to be a cause.
The current problem with so called climate science is that it’s not a hard science anymore. It’s gone limp with wild agenda driven speculations taken as if they are what is happening in objective reality without the hard science to back it up.
Sure they have instruments and gauges and satellites and what not that can record data so thus it seems like hard science. Unfortunately the instruments is where the tiny bit of hard science in climate science ends. It’s at the point after data collection that the hard goes limp and we end up with the wild agenda driven speculations jokingly and tragically called a “theory” as if it was true.
Objective Reality is a Harsh Mistress ™ as Hansen, Mann, Jones, et. al. are finding out the HARD way.
Keep up the work insisting that climate science become a hard science again with Publicly Open Source Analysis, Auditing and Verification Processes where anyone with the skills can Peer Review and Audit and Verify or Falsify it.
Part of what makes a hard science hard is the rigorous auditing and verification and testing against that harsh mistress of Objective Reality.
A hypothesis or theory is ultimately only a map of objective reality. We need to make sure that we have the best map possible for the climate of Earth in order to ensure or maximize the odds of the survival of our species. Geo-engineering terrorfroming our one Earth based on junk science is not going to achieve that. Hard science that is verified and then verified again hundreds of times is what is needed.
Hansen, you soothsayer of doom, you’re fired.
pwl
http://www.PathsToKnowledge.NET?s=soothsaying
NASAs toy GRACE is the main point that should be discussed here. most in the agw camp proclaim grace as showing the ice reducing in antarctica, not surface ice. this needs to be covered.
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/20100108_Is_Antarctica_Melting.html
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/antarctic_melting.html