Which of these states is closest to 20,000 square kilometers in area?
UPDATE: USGS has issued a statement, see below.
WUWT reader “DC” points us to this Gore-esque pronouncement from a USGS scientist about “Antarctic ice loss”.
Jane Ferrigno of the U.S. Geological Survey in a National Public Radio interview
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124178690 (Audio clip available)
Ms. FERRIGNO: The fact that the ice shelves are changing on the peninsula is a significant signal that global change, climate warming, is affecting the ice cover of Antarctica. It’s affecting first the area that’s towards the north, that’s slightly warmer, but the effect of the warming has traveled from the northern part of the peninsula to the southern part of the peninsula, where it’s colder.
…
“RAZ: Give us a sense of how much ice [on the Antarctic peninsula] has been lost over the past, say, 10 years.
Ms. FERRIGNO: I think I’ll go back 20 years, and in the last 20 years, I would say at least 20,000 square kilometers of ice has been lost, and that’s comparable to an area somewhere between the state of Texas and the state of Alaska.
RAZ: So about the size of the state of Texas in terms of ice has been lost in the past 20 years. ”
It gets better.
Ms. FERRIGNO: Well, this is a fairly small amount of ice when you consider the whole Antarctic continent consists of about 13 million square kilometers of ice.
RAZ: I mean, it sounds so dramatic, the size of Texas, right?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. FERRIGNO: It is. It is very dramatic, and it is larger than the size of Texas, but when you consider the entire Antarctic ice sheet, it’s still a fairly minimal amount. But the thing that we’re really interested in seeing is that this is a sort of a red flag because if the warming continues, if the retreat continues, if the amount of ice on the continent starts to flow into the water, then there will be substantial impact to the sea level.
RAZ: That’s Jane Ferrigno. She is a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
Jane Ferrigno, thanks for coming in.
Ms. FERRIGNO: Thank you.
Ms. Ferrigno might do well to have a look at this map of the USA and Antarctica compared at Texas A&M University’s Polar Science program to get a sense of scale.
Here’s the story on all the Southern hemisphere sea ice, which includes all Antarctic sea ice, from Cryosphere today:
Maybe Ms. Ferrigno will be embarrassed enough by her geographic ineptitude and will heed Gavin Schmidt’s advice and stop trying to “persuade the public“.
======================================
UPDATE:
Statement from USGS:
The comment by Jane in the NPR interview was an honest mistake. We are sorry for the delay in responding to your email, but Jane has been out of the office. Below is an apology and clarification statement that will be posted on the NPR site soon. Jane will be in the office later today, and if you have any questions, please let me or her know.
From Jane …
I want to apologize to NPR and the listening audience for my misstatement last Sunday, February 28. During the last 20 years, an area more than 20,000 sq. km. (comparable to the size of New Jersey) has broken off the ice shelves of the Antarctic Peninsula. It is the Antarctic Peninsula, the source of the ice loss, that I meant to say was larger than the state of Texas but smaller than the state of Alaska.
Thank you,
Jessica Robertson
Public Affairs Specialist
Office of Communications
U.S. Geological Survey
(703) 648-6624
I wonder how Ms. Jane Ferrigno would do on “Are you smarter than a 5th Grader?”
Europe is a country and everyone speaks french there
Murray Carpenter (09:26:37) :
For a winter that blew cold air all over the N. Hemisphere, the Arctic temp. average was no worse for the wear, and the Sea Ice extent didn’t miss a beat either.
This is a prime example of government science at its best. It only goes further down hill from there.
Criticism of Gore keeps piling up:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/03/03/gore_still_hot_on_his_doomsday_rhetoric/
Well, it is very good for govt work. Think how awkward it would be if her comparisons had been to objects in our solar system.
Lets thank our lucky stars that the US Geological Survey has at least some standards…
Aren’t these the same folks trying to say that the relative stability (even cooling) in the US is not that important because the US is such a small part of the Earth’s surface?
So qualified to be a government employee and promote the AGW iis vewy, vewy, vewy scawy story.
Simple solution – let’s have Congress pass a law (their solution to every perceived problem) to save the ice shelves, ordering the winds to stop blowing, the sea waves to quit crashing on the ice and fracturing it, and the glaciers to quite pushing ice too far out onto the sea where it becomes unsustainable.
That was some “Blonde Moment”
@JinHO
“Is there anyone left out there that still takes these people seriously?”
Yes! My wife and most of our friends as well. Well… as seriously as most people in California can get at least. Driving a car and listening to NPR is like being in the oracle at Delphi, with the rarified local air amplifying the effect.
20,000, 200,000, 2000,000… Yeah, whatever, it’s all good, dude…
I happened to stumble upon a book in the library that must have been the father of the IPCC reports. It was a compendium of the current climate knowledge to 1982 (IIRC). One interesting chapter was on sea level rise. It stated that the expected rise was about 80cm and was due primarily from heat expansion and some mountain glacier melt. Greenland melt was thought to be offset by an increase in Antarctic ice from increased precipitation. They stated that the gain in ice in the Antarctic could be greater than the melt from Greenland.
It was interesting to note the lack of politics in the book, even in some work by Hansen. Probably before he discovered CAGW.
Reminds me of a question asked, on record, during the international meeting, by Clinton’s Secretary of Energy: “What country, exactly, supplies our nuclear warheads?”
Face it, fellow US citizens, we are being ruled by the people who know only one thing: how to embezzle our money. Everything else is beyond their comprehension.
A USGS scientist !!!!
OMG!
Either this scientist is completely stupid and incompetent, are a lying charlatan trying to pull yet another fast one on the public. It’s probably in the IPCC 4AR too.
Fire her and save some tax dollars.
Which way would be best to make the comparison between 89-90 and 09-10 (or 88-89 and 08-09), by the peaks, the trough or the average? Looking at 89-90 season on the graph, the peaks are about the same and the trough is a little lower in 09-10. The average for the base period might be a little more than currently but, by eye, it seems to be pretty much irrelevant considering the intervening variations.
Ferrigno would have been much better off going with the interviewer’s 10 years. Is it possible he knows more about the subject than Ferrigno?
So an area the size of New Jersey has broken off and floated out to sea, wouldn’t it be better for all of us if New Jersey would break off and float out to sea.
Climate alarmists are rapidly reaching the intellectual level of The Flat Earth Society. People like Ms. Ferrigno who should be sources of fact seem to be quite comfortable saying things with certainty that are not close to reality.
Did Raz keep asking her about the size of Texas to show
1.How serious it was?
2. Give her the chance to correct such an obvious Gaffe?
3. To show what a stupid person she is for a US Geologist, which he reminds the viewers of at the end?
It’s just like all the other AGW nonesince. Sounds fine to the average listener on its face. When you look into it, its all just crap.
But the interesting point is that the same error of magnitude underpins the Himalayan Glacier story as well. Recall that 500K km2 should have been 35K km2. So called informed parties seem to have (a) no idea as to basic geographic facts and (b) not the wit to look them up. The above diagrams make this abundantly clear. The question becomes how did Ms. Ferringo not know this!! That the NPR commentator didn’t know is less surprising but, given the magnitude of the error, is still a question with epistemological import.
Eyeballing a straight line over the last 20 years on the anomaly map, I’d say Antarctic sea ice has gained by about 300,000 sq km, i.e. half the state of Texas. Like snowstorms in D.C., that’s proof of AGW – the models predicted it!
You guys are so unfair. In the golden past nobody has doublechecked what scientists have said. Now they have to expect their statements looked at by every laymen. How sad.
I am already surprised why the Antarctic ice is not melted yet by the inner-earth millions of degree C … right, Al?
And, btw, everything is bigger than Texas, why not those ice shelfs. Or was it … in Texas?
Enough fun for today. Gotta go.
I have always wondered how Antarctica ice can melt with temperatures so far below freezing. Does anybody think a degree or two matters in Antarctica ?
When you look at satellite shots the ice is breaking off, not melting off the main Antarctica ice shelf.
If anybody cares, in the history of earth all the ice has melted and the whole planet was an ice ball before. And it survived.
Real honest scientists had better start speaking up about all this climatic false hood or else the word scientist will be on equal footing as the word politician. They will only have themselves to blame if they don’t start speaking up in mass.
I’ve solved the puzzle. When she refers to Texas, she means Texas County, Oklahoma, in the panhandle, area 5,306 km².
See, move along folks, no problem here!
Isn’t she professor of geography at the University of Gore?