By Steven Goddard,
The headline reads “NASA Satellites Detect Unexpected Ice Loss in East Antarctica”
ScienceDaily (Nov. 26, 2009) — Using gravity measurement data from the NASA/German Aerospace Center’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission, a team of scientists from the University of Texas at Austin has found that the East Antarctic ice sheet-home to about 90 percent of Earth’s solid fresh water and previously considered stable-may have begun to lose ice.
Better move to higher ground! NASA also reported :
In 2007, NASA generated this map (below) of Antarctica showing just how hot it is getting down there in the land of Penguins.
Now I am really worried! But wait……. There are a few minor problems.
Assume for a minute that we accept the GRACE numbers. The first problem is Antarctica contains a lot of ice : 30 × 10^6 km³. At 100 km³ per year, it will take 300,000 years to melt.
The next problem is with the NASA temperature map. From the NASA article “The scientists estimate the level of uncertainty in the measurements is between 2-3 degrees Celsius.” They are claiming precision of better than 0.05°C, with an error more than an order of magnitude larger than their 25 year trend. The error bar is large enough that the same data could just as easily indicate rapid cooling and blue colors. That will get you an F in any high school science class.
And that is exactly what happened. The hot red map above was preceded by a cold blue map which showed Antarctica getting cooler. What motivation could NASA have had to change colors without mathematical justification?
NASA justified their heating up Antarctica with this comment :
This image was first published on April 27, 2006, and it was based on data from 1981-2004. A more recent version was published on November 21, 2007. The new version extended the data range through 2007, and was based on a revised analysis that included better inter-calibration among all the satellite records that are part of the time series.
As I have already pointed out, this is absurd. Their error bar is so large that they could have painted the map any color they wanted. Apparently someone at NASA wanted red.
But why are we looking at temperature trends anyway? The real issue is absolute temperatures. Some of the regions in which GRACE claims ice loss in East Antarctica average colder than -30°C during the summer, and never, ever get above freezing. How can you melt ice at those temperatures?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Antarctic_surface_temperature.png
I overlaid the Antarctica summer temperature map on the GRACE “melt” map, below. As you can see, GRACE is showing ice loss in places that stay incredibly cold, all year round.
The problem with GRACE is that it measures gravity, not ice. Changes in gravity can be due to a lot of different things beneath the surface of the ice. Antarctica has active magma chambers. Plate tectonics and isostasy also cause gravity changes.
We should be clever enough not to be blinded by technology. The claims that ice is melting in East Antarctica don’t have a lot of justification.
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This study rubs me the wrong way.
“How can you melt ice at those temperatures?”
With a volcano… or a blow torch!
As usual, they are lying through their teeth.
I wish these nut jobs would put half this much time, money, and effort into at least trying to do something worth while……………
“”“Antarctica has been losing more than a hundred cubic kilometers (24 cubic miles) of ice each year since 2002” “”
and frankly no one has noticed.
I guess the moral is, don’t go to sleep on the beach……
You don’t have to melt ice to reduce its quantity. Ice will sublime directly into water vapor when it’s cold enough, the winds are strong enough, and the effect lasts long enough.
A cold dry wind will sublimate the ice away, given enough time.
Perhaps wind has an effect on the Antarctic ice as it seems to have an effect on the Arctic, to a degree.
OK I’ll stop the sarcasm.
This is really starting to piss me off, why don’t NASA do their own job, as space association, and let NOAA fudge the data themselves, kapeesh?
Actually, in too many high school science classes erroneous assumptions will get you an A. That’s part of the reason why part of the public swallows these mangled half-truth stories.
NASA lies.
It’s a good thing they weren’t under oath to present “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
Leaving out that tiny little fact that with 30 million km³ it will take 300,000 years for it all to melt serves to create a feeling that there’s a need for panic, a rush to fix an imaginary problem. In other words, a lie.
300,000 years. Hmmm … I wonder how many ice ages our descendants will face during that time.
Oh, how silly of me. We’ve already been told how we’ll be extinct by 2050, that the planet will become like Venus. Right.
Perhaps the high priests of climate “science” need to change the animal whose entrails they’ve been examining.
Does anyone monitor volcanic activity below the sea-ice? The British Antarctic Survey have sometimes quoted seismic activity which could possibly explain detachment of floating sea-ice from the land born ice. Is it unreasonable to suggest that sub-sea eruptions could thin the underside of the ice shelf? The air above could remain below minus 10ºC all year but the ice become thinner.
“They are claiming precision of better than 0.05°C, with an error more than an order of magnitude larger than their 25 year trend. The error bar is large enough that the same data could just as easily indicate rapid cooling and blue colors. ”
It is simply astonishing that this kind of CRAP is being published. We are in more trouble than I even thought (and I’m REALLY pessimistic).
Am I maths deficient or are they claiming to be able to make a reliable measurements to six decimal places?
Can we get some anti-alarmist legislation making it a civil offense to overstate official scientific reports based on some easily defined circumstances, such as this one. We already consider this academic dishonesty. Why not apply it to government. It would make the most interesting congressional debate.
Gosh. Not only is the BP spill insignificant compared to the volume of water in the gulf of mexico, it is insignificant compared to the volume of antarctic ice that somehow figures out a way to melt at << -20 deg-C !
I wonder if GRACE looks at any landmasses that have no ice and finds them melting at comparable rates?
The accelerating land ice melt scenario poses a problem for sea level rise because if too much is attributed to melting land ice then the steric component due to increasing sea temps must be reduced. The only solution is to exagerate the rise to 3 cm/ year to accomodate both scary scenarios.
http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/global_change_analysis.html#temp
Looking at the mass component of sea level rise from 2004 to 2008 as determined from Grace it appears that it reaches its largest amount in the fall when the Antarctic land and sea ice should be at its highest. Does this make sense?
When the time comes to cut American government spending, and that time is coming, I know a bureau and a university which are deserving candidates for cuts.
In this article from the Mail & Guardian, in which the study’s author, Jianli Chen, of the University of Texas at Austin was interviewed;
http://www.mg.co.za/article/2009-11-23-worlds-largest-ice-sheet-melting-faster-than-expected
this statement jumped out at me;
“The scientists used a computer model to take account of ongoing movements in the Earth’s surface caused by the retreat of glaciers at the end of the last ice age. Uncertainties in the model gave the scientists only a broad estimate of ice loss in the East Antarctic ice sheet of between five-billion and 109-billion tonnes a year.”
It is then used to justify the claim that:
“The East Antarctic ice sheet, which makes up three-quarters of the continent’s 14 00 square kilometres, is losing about 57-billion tonnes of ice a year into surrounding waters, according to a satellite survey of the region”
Nice to be accurate within an order of magnitude or so… Seems like another garbage model to me.
Also interesting is that Jianli Chen also turns up in this 2006 Washington Post article touting his model showing a rapidly melting Greenland ice sheet:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/10/AR2006081001557.html
Between Jianli Chen and Jinlun Zhang we seem to identified the primary sources of most Earth’s supposed ice losses…
Mike G , great question. Also, antarctica is basically an archipelago, and as tides move in an 18 year cycle this to could affect the very percise numbers claimed; as well as magma movemments within the mantel.
Johannes Rexx says: “You don’t have to melt ice to reduce its quantity. Ice will sublime directly into water vapor when it’s cold enough, the winds are strong enough, and the effect lasts long enough.”
Wrong. Cold ice temperatures reduce sublimation.
I wonder as to the likelihood that the melting of five or ten percent of the Eastern might lower the temperature of the oceans sufficiently to bring about a glacial period.
Johannes Rex,
From Sci-tech Encyclopedia
As Chis B hinted ,more like wind ablation than sublimation.
I know NASA is an arm of the government and the government (at present, but that’s changing) uses global warming to pass laws and regulations it wants. But where is the NASA that made the earth stand still to see a man take a step onto the moon?!
All together now:
M-I-C
K-E-Y
M-O-U-S-E
Mickey mouse study from a mickey mouse organisation trying oh-so-desperately hard to retain some relevance and funding.
This is just so unscientific.
Are you kidding me? This analysis is completely and utterly without scientific merit. I’m usually relatively interested in Goddard’s work but this is without a doubt a time when I can’t agree in the slightest. Antarctica (like most anyone knows) does not lose the majority of its ice through melting but rather through marine terminating glaciers having their ice go over the grounding lines. Antarctica does not even allow for significant melting due to temperatures being too cold. When you see accelerated mass losses like in Antarctica, it is due to increases in glacier velocity without subsequent increases in input ice. Thus more ice leaves then is replaced by meteorological conditions. The acceleration of glaciers in Antarctica is due to many reasons. In some regions it is due to the removal of buttressing ice shelves, in others it is due to grounding line retreats associated with increased subsurface ice melt by warming waters. There are also instances in the antarctic peninsula where there is melting occurring but because of its low resolution, grace does not see the mass loss as significantly as it has been.
Overall, to approach this topic in the manner that Goddard has is simplistic and shows that he did not read into the core literature which suggests why West Antarctic in particular is losing ice. As an individual who studies glaciology and has done so in Antarctica, I find it very important for individuals to become informed on the issues there, therefore I ask that this post be revised so as to not misrepresent what scientists are saying about what causes mass changes in the region.