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
Even Ph.D astronomers fall for this crap. I will keep and repost this quote from Phil for the next few years:
“As you can see by this NASA graphic from the linked page, Antarctica loses over 100 billion tons of ice per year, the equivalent of about a hundred cubic kilometers (more than 20 cubic miles) of ice. That number is hard to grasp, but it’s the equivalent to the volume of a mountain about 14,000 feet high — or, if you prefer, it’s like saying that one Colorado Rocky Mountain’s worth of ice disappears every year. Just in Antarctica alone.”
As an Astronomer and rather smart person, Phil needs to explain to everyone how any satellite could measure such a tiny change in gravity over the entire continent of Antarctica to such an amazing accuracy!
How was this truely amazing accuracy from a satellite validated and verified?
Curious minds would like to know…
My bet is that Phil will claim that he trusted what he was being told without question, but finally realized that something was wrong. That absolute trust in un-verified data sources was a major embarrassment to him.
That, or he will delete all historical records of anything that he said on the subject…
………………
Later, he had this reply:
“The noise machine will rattle cages and distract and sling mud and do a grave disservice to everyone. But I’ll be here to fight them along with thousands and thousands of other scientists. And you know what? I have a hope: if we must battle over this for the next hundred years, we’ll have a nice, cool world in which to do it.”
This gets better and better…
Perhaps no surprise that mistakes/exaggerations were made, the Director of the USGS is a Dr. Marcia K. McNutt :-))
I listen to NPR and usually donate. This year, with the AGW coverage, not a dime.
since there are approx 590 ‘New Jerseys’ of ice in Antarctica it would take roughly 12,000 years to lose all of it. To me that says a ‘New Jersey’ of ice isn’t all that much.
First, who said anything about all the ice in Antarctica? That’s just gross goalpost-moving… twenty thousand square kilometers of ice is twenty thousand square kilometers of ice. A New Jersey, six Big Bends… that’s a buttload of ice.
If you want to say she exaggerated, fine: she either screwed up, which is pathetic, or intentionally misrepresented the facts, which is odious. But saying an amount of ice equivalent to an entire US state “isn’t all that much” is reaching, in my opinion.
Hard to imagine that a geographer could be so utterly and completely clueless.
Yes, it is. Good thing she’s a geologist.
People make mistakes, whether it’s mixing up words that begin with “geo” or confusing sea ice for land ice.
D. Matteson (10:13:07) :
“………. wouldn’t it be better for all of us if New Jersey would break off and float out to sea.” Ahh! Another rhetorical question! I love it!
Questioner: “How many of you does it take to change a light blub?”
USGS scientist: “Well, the average light blub is 20,000cm in diameter and the normal length of a left handed ladder is 6.479 yards and the size of a rubber glove is 2 pints, so therefore …… lets see …… divide by 4.3 ……. multiply by the distance to the sun, 92,000 miles, ah . . . . none! We call the maintenance department. And in about 3 months they send a GQCLEE. She does it”.
Questioner: “A GQCLEE”?
USGS scientist: “Green Qualified and Certified Luminance Enhancement Engineer”.
20 000 km2, that’s 2/3 the size of Belgium. How impressive ! There’s more change of Belgium disappearing from the map than the polar ice caps.
Actually area wise it was smaller than Idaho County, Idaho which is listed as the 25th largest US County. Area 8,484.88 sq. miles. Hmmm – could somebody put up a US map with Idaho County highlighted?
John Barrett (10:40:23) :
Come on you Americans, get with it.
20,000 sq km is the size of
Wales !
You should know by now that Wales has become the standard unit for measuring area, be it icebergs or rainforests.
REPLY: Save the Wales
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Wales says thank you.
Cymru am Byth!
I think I’ve found a way to demonstrate that Ms Ferrigno isn’t completely Geo-ignorant. She said, “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.”
Couldn’t she have meant that some area between Texas and Alaska, say New Jersey, was about 20,000 square kilometers? Okay, how about this.
Perhaps she was just confused, nervous. The area between Texas and Alaska, including the rest of the Continental US and Canada appears to be about the same size as the Antarctic Continent according to the map in this post. Perfectly understandable slip.
“In Antarctica, you’ll find 90 percent of the world’s glacial ice, but new research from the U.S. Geological Survey shows that every ice front in the southern part of the Antarctic Peninsula is retreating.
Jane Ferrigno is the lead author of that new report. She says scientists have known for a while that some of the peninsula’s ice shelves are breaking up.”
Being the “lead author” there is no way she could make that kind of mistake. We must be missing something or they tried too hard to dum it down for us. Where is the report? My consulting engineering friends label us geologists as “Soft Scientists” referring to our tendency toward looking at the general picture and not the hard numbers. I guess this shoe fits here.
And don’t get me started on “All Things (warming) Considered”. I was an NPR junkey as a young man but had to stop listening a few years ago with all the Gore-like alarmist garbble they feed us. Very dissapointing!
This lady has had her allocated fifteen minutes of fame. Unfortunately for her it was on WUWT. Will she EVER live this down?
John Barrett (10:40:23) :
Wales is so old hat. The current European standard for ice extent comparison is Luxembourg
See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7322754/Giant-iceberg-could-disrupt-ocean-currents.html
I was reading up on the oceans currents recently, and the flow across the arctic and antarctic is linear with around continents being eddie type effects due to the rotation of the planet traps these waters from moving lateral as well.
Jane seems to be a geologist, NOT a geographer. She seems to have had problems with facts for a long time. The followind appears to be from 2002. (Scroll to end. amnh = American Museum of Natural History)
http://www.amnh.org/education/resources/rfl/web/antarctica/i_ferrigno.html
“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.”
To the alarmists is it global warming, climate change, global change, or climate warming? Answer: All of the above!
Tarpon – The earth can survive a lot. However, we are going to go back into a glacial period sometime in the next few hundred years, and that is going to result in a huge extinction as humans eat everything, trying to survive. “AGW is serious”? It is to laugh.
MikeH – Want the job of building some more down there? 8D
The only answer to this kind of incompetent reporting is to write to the ombudsman of the offending media outlet if they have one and to the CEO. The following is my email to NPR’s ombudsman which I als sent to their CEO with additional comment.
Date Created: 3/3/2010 2:18:38 PM
Subject Failure to Fact Check:
Body: In a Guy Raz interview with Jane Ferrigno of the USGS (URL below)the claim was made that the amount of ice that was lost from the antatctic Peninsula was at least 20,000 square kilometers, an area that was claimed to be between the size of Texas and Alaska:
“…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. Ms. FERRIGNO: Yeah, that’s true.”
As one of the commenters noted, 20,000 sqkm is about 1/3 the size of West Virginia, Texas is Approx. 700,000 sq km and Alaska is about 1.7 million sqkm. Further, there was no consideration given to natural variation. This kind of scare-mongering, sloppy reporting ill serves your mission to educate your audience. Where is your reporting on Dr. Phil Jones admitting that there has been no statistically significant difference in warming between the warming periods that have occurred since the 1930’s or that not releasing one’s data, etc was standard practice in climate science. So much for the scientific method. Read the comments posted with the transcript to understand just how poorly this interview serves your listeners.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/storyComments.php?storyId=124178690&pageNum=1
Even if it were a square 20,000 km per side that is still less than Texas!
A C Osborn (10:03:25) : That was some “Blonde Moment”
i48.tinypic.com/zoe5n4.jpg
What is of concern is that when I Googled her (to see if she is Lou’s daughter) I found that she has done more than 10 interviews on this subject over the last few weeks. One would think that she would have her facts straight by now or that the speech on her teleprompter would have been corrected.
Lol… ahem… I’m reminded of a certain former vice president…
http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Dan_Quayle/
whoops lost a 000 there, of course 20,000 km on a side would be 400 Million km2 much, much bigger.
Areas of so-called melting ice mean very little….it is the volume of melting ice that is important…Chen et al (2009) estimate about 220 gigatonnes per year for the whole of antarctica…there is of course large errors assocaited with these figures due to glacial rebound..however assuming 220 gigatonnes per year, this would translate to an annual global sea level rise of about 0.6 mm…
Ferrignorant!
I’m pretty sure she was just really nervous and misspoke. She made two other speaking mistakes too, one where she confused the south and the north saying they were surprised to see retreat in the north rather than the south, and another where she must have tried to say either climate change or global warming, but instead said “global change, climate warming”. Plus if you listen to the clip you can hear the nerves in her voice.
Also, the whole fact about ice loss, whatever the heck is actually correct (and which I agree, is not clear), was not supposed to be part of this news. The whole point of this news release was to say that they didn’t expect the extent to which ice shelves are retreating on the southern part of the Antarctic peninsula. The coverage from USA Today reports it correctly:
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2010/02/antarctic-melting-threatens-worldwide-sea-level-rise/1
I work with scientists a lot and they tend to not be very good with interviews, so I’m sure she’s horribly embarrassed about this and yes, probably won’t do another radio or tv one any time soon. As for NPR, they do these interviews and assume that if the source is a credible one that they won’t say anything inaccurate, but in this case I think she just got nervous and messed up. You might be a little nervous too if you were going on a national radio program. Anyway, you don’t have to crucify the poor woman, she doesn’t get paid to be speaker, she gets paid to be a scientist.
Also, it is accurate to say the continent of Antarctica, which is larger than the US, but not by an enormous amount (see graphic provided), has lost an area the size of a state in the previous two decades (maybe new jersey, but at least the size of rhode island anyway). Imagine if the US had lost that much land… well, I guess if it were New Jersey it might be okay.