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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In response to: “If sea level rose 60 meters, that would wipe out most of the world’s population – which would no doubt make some environmentalists happy.”
Boris (06:06:13) wrote: “Well, it would also make some Republicans happy, because most of those people would be foreigners and/or brown skinned.”
You’re projecting Boris. It seems that some liberals can’t see the world without viewing it through flesh-colored glasses. Oh, and you’re wrong too. I’ll wager you that more conservatives have donated to Haiti than liberals thus far, (and you don’t get to count government-funding as liberal funding.)
Oh, and it must really gall you that the liberal nemesis, George W. Bush, did more to combat AIDS in Africa than either his predecessor or replacement.
Love the photo caption on the BBC site re: Wolverines
The Wolverine is the largest TERRESTIAL member of the weasel family.
Are there larger ones on Mars, Venus or Alpha Centuria?
they have given up hard science for voodoo
Phil,
You can see UAH Antarctica coverage at the link below. Much better than GISS.
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/AAT_Browse.php?chan=6&satnum=15&aord=a
Boris (06:06:13) :
>>“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.
Good one Boris. Most of the posts stay on the science, but you slipped this one by. Of course, these Republicans tripled US aid to Africa just 3 years ago, but let’s throw out unsubstantiated accusations for the fun of it.
The fact is, there are numerous environments who look at people as a blight on the planet. How about this from Ted Turner?
“The simplest answer is that the world’s population should be about two billion, and we’ve got about six billion now,” Turner told E Magazine, an environmentalist publication. Turner went even further in an interview with Audubon magazine, stating that “A total world population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”
http://www.seattlepi.com/dayart/20090522/cartoon20090522.jpg
Heck with it. Let Washington DC continue to make “space exploration” something for outsourcing with unlimited international dealings, and let NASA keep following the Critical Issue In The Press Today. Then they can offload the old organization as the new UNASA with international funding and get it off the books.
If there is any worth to the concept at all, in under ten years Americans will realize why we need a US space agency, know exactly what it should be doing, and we can build a new one that can actually do what the old one did fifty years earlier.
I read the article and they may be right. It is known that as you increase the pressure on water that it will melt even below freezing. It is postulated that this was the mechanism that created the “Scablands” in Western US – catastrophic flood as an an ice dam broke from below (where pressure is highest) releasing a huge volumes from an inland sea (created by ice daming).
The idea is that as the ice gets 2 KM thick the pressure at the bottom is such that it melts from the bottom.
It is much the same idea as hockey skates – ever wonder why the slides so effectively – well the pressure melts the ice and creates a cushion of water.
Anyway all this is idle speculation as we have little observational data to know what is going on. All on can say is that this is very likely a natural process and it in no way threatens teh ice caps or sea levels.
[snip]
Thus it would take more than 30,000 years to get to the 60 meters.
And in 30,000 years everyone now alive will be dead. Don’t you see how much trouble we are in? More than six billion dead people. A catastrophe.
Does anybody know since when koolaid began being produced only as a GREEN beverage?
REPLY: These sorts of comments aren’t helpful. – Anthony
“If global warming raises the temperature there by a mere fifty-seven degrees, we may seem some melting occurring in the summer.”
If the temperature were even to rise to 0C for a few days, consider that the ice at the South Pole is 10,000 feet thick. If it melted an inch or two per year, it would still take 100,000+ years to melt the ice down to rock.
What would really change things, though, is rain. If the weather pattern changed and there were significant rains on that ice, things could change in a hurry. But as the air is very dry and there are no plants so no transpiration of moisture, it would be difficult to get enough water in the air to result in rain at 10,000 feet altitude even if it was warm enough.
Jeremy,
The heavy weight of an ice sheet causes the ground underneath it to depress into a bowl (isostasy.) The ice can’t slide off or “collapse” as alarmists love to speculate.
Sadly, either I can’t read or you didn’t get the numbers right, cause I get it to little more then 30 years.
Sanity check:
85 m in 30 years ~= 3 m (10 ft) a year. Some one would have noticed.
I dispute the claim that the wolverine is the largest member of the weasel family.
As long as Al Gore, Pachauri, members of the IPCC, hell the entire UN, walk the face of the earth the wolverine will have to satisfy itself with being the largest 4 legged weasel on earth.
Steve Goddard (08:47:38) :
Phil,
You can see UAH Antarctica coverage at the link below. Much better than GISS.
That’s the temperature around 25,000 feet ASL, are you suggesting that’s what was plotted in the original post? That height is about the position of the tropopause over Antarctica so that data has a large contribution from the stratosphere!
Quote: Mike Bryant (04:10:18) :
“It’s time to defund NASA, or at least the propaganda arm of it… They are following Pachauri, CRU and East Anglia into laughingstock territory.
Nasa, it’s not too late to save your reputation, but it’s almost too late.”
It is now at least 41 years too late for NASA!
NASA really went to the Moon in 1969 and discovered an inconvenient truth:
Under the direction of the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS), NASA became a propaganda machine in 1969, when analysis of the Apollo lunar samples revealed an inconvenient truth – the Sun is not a ball of Hydrogen (H) and H-fusion is not its source of heat.
I warned the NAS President of NAS (Dr. Ralph Cicerone) and members of NASA’s Space Science Board (SSB) of impending damage to NASA’s reputation on 26 June 2008.
To help get to the bottom of the NASA-gate filth, I will post the question that I asked and the names of NAS and SSB members at the 50th Anniversary of NASA and the IGY on the Kirt Griffin’s Neutron Repulsion server.
http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=42879/*http://groups.yahoo.com/group/neutron_repulsion
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Emeritus Professor of
Nuclear & Space Sciences
Former NASA PI for Apollo
” Steve Goddard (08:47:38) :
Phil,
You can see UAH Antarctica coverage at the link below. Much better than GISS.
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/AAT_Browse.php?chan=6&satnum=15&aord=a”
But there still seems to be a hole at the poles.
They must use a polar-orbiting satellite, too, TIROS-N and its successors.
Antarctic Ice “if all of this ice melted, it would raise global sea level by about 60 meter (197 feet).“
Why would anyone but an absolute, complete imbecile put out a statement like that. Well, I guess a “scientific” body could put out a statement that “if the sun went out there is a high probability we all might die”. I so glad they are making high salaries from funds taken from less fortunate taxpayers.
Just how is this vicious slam at ‘Republicans’ (a) germane to this discussion, and (b) appropriate for this blog?
On topic, isn’t a great deal of the world’s land mass higher than 60 meters above current sea level? Most of the world’s people don’t live right on the coasts, do they? Sure, a world-wide 60-meter tsunami would drown a lot of people, but gradual sea-level rise would allow plenty of time for people to move inland.
/Mr Lynn
hmmmmm. I must have misunderstood something very basic about the antarctic….
I allways have had the impression the mean tempearature there was around -40 Dec Celcius….and colder…
Meaning; If it was to warm up to over zero degrees celcius….that would be at least 40 degrees celcius warmer…
And if the antarctic is heating up 40 degrees celcius, so must the rest of the planet. Or more.
Meaning , we would be all dead, long ago. So , who would care about sealevel? What is more imortant; Who, except a voodoo-maker, would believe that would happen?
Or am I completely lost here? Somebody?
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?
Well, Herman, maybe the statement is a little hyperbolic, or maybe you’ve simply missed the association between Environmentalists including AGWers, population control and eugenics?
For example, there’s Obama own Science Advisor John Holdren who co-authored a book with the Erlichs a while back. Some rather troubling info on him can be found at:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/obama-science-advisor-called-for-planetary-regime-to-enforce-totalitarian-population-control-measures.html
Or see http://climategate.tv/?tag=eugenics , Carbon Eugenics, where the matter relating to Environmentalism is discussed, involving for example, the following which leads to the WWF:
Julian Huxley, brother of the famous writer, helped organize UNESCO in 1945. In the founding document of UNESCO entitled UNESCO: its philosophy and its purpose, he argues that one of the key aims of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization would be the re-legitimization of eugenics so the idea would once again become thinkable. He also went on to co-found the World Wildlife Fund with Nazi SS officer Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands.
Herman, the link between Environmentalism and Population control, and various methods to decrease population is all over the place. Check out Jeremy Rifkin, a noted Environmentalist, who I read about a while back and found to be a radical “sustainability” kind of guy, and totally out of his mind in regard also to population control, which he apparently considers nearly a good in its self.
As you may recall, even Andy Revkin got himself into some trouble along these lines.
I’ll throw in Ezekial Emanuel, Obama’s principle Healthcare advisor who is no doubt an Environmentalist too. He wants to ration healthcare based upon it being made a scarce resource, then he uses a “complete life” metric which judges a person’s worth by means of his own self-annointed as enlightened societal worth metric to see who should get what healthcare and when. Naturally he wisely excludes himself from the metric because he in fact produces nothing of worth along the lines of the kind of thing he wants to use as his metric in determining a person’s worth.
Btw, President Obama is an Environmentalist. He’s asserted that an elderly person’s quality of life or worth would not enter into his calculus as to the provision of healthcare.
In both Emanuel’s and Obama’s ‘overarching’ view, there are too many people, so a gratifying decrease is effected, even a ‘good’ decrease. Obviously, this ‘good’ would keep on increasing and invading into other enligntened areas of judgment regarding the question of who “should” live.
Phil,
You should probably go to the UAH website for an explanation of how they use microwaves to measure temperatures at various altitudes. The graph in this article uses their readings from the lower troposphere at 14,400 ft.
Alexej,
There is a hole at the South Pole, but much better coverage than GISS – which only has a dozen readings across the entire continent.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2009&month_last=12&sat=4&sst=0&type=anoms&mean_gen=12&year1=2009&year2=2009&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=250&pol=reg
Phil,
Here is the UAH map of today’s surface temperatures.
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/AAT_Browse.php?chan=03&satnum=15&aord=a
Arn Riewe (07:47:55) :
Isn’t it almost that time of the year for Dr. Ted Scambos (love the name) to issue his annual “rarely occurring ice shelf disintegration” report.
The annual Antarctic media melodrama commences between March and April.
All flights are booked out by the BBC, MSM, assorted politicians, back packer scientists and Ban Ki-moon with his entourage of free loaders.
Rajendra Pachauri won’t be there because he’s working on another novel, the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report
The above link may not work. To see the document posted on Kirt Griffin’s Yahoo Group, “Neutron Repulsion: An Alternative Energy,” neutron_repulsion@yahoogroups.com
To subscribe, go to
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/neutron_repulsion/join
Or send e-mail to:
neutron_repulsion-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel