I noted yesterday this story in Slashdot:
Canadian Ice Shelves Halve In Six Years
The CBC reports on new research that shows thousand-year-old ice shelves (much different than sea ice) are breaking up and have been reduced by half in a region of Canada over the last six years. ‘This summer alone saw the Serson ice shelf almost completely disappear and the Ward Hunt shelf split in half. The ice loss equals about three billion tonnes, or about 500 times the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza.’ More detailed pictures can be seen at The Conversation, with a quote from Professor Steven Sherwood, Co-Director of the University of NSW’s Climate Change Research Centre: ‘The real significance of this, in my view, is that this ice has reportedly been there for thousands of years. The same is true of glaciers that have recently disappeared in the Andes. These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming could be natural.
Meh. Last year it was Manhattan Island units, this year it’s Giza pyramid units. I suppose we can designate symbols for these: // and Δ
Whatever you call it, I call it the “Terrifying Petermann glacier ice chunk 2.0“, dubbed “deniersberg” by feckless Congressman Markey, which later refroze in the Nares Strait ice before it could wreak havoc on worldwide shipping. Before the satellite era we weren’t watching this stuff, so we really only have a few years of observations. Glaciers calve ice into the sea, its what they do. It has been going on for millions of years. By the logic presented in The Conversation, some might argue though that the glacier berg that sunk Titanic was payback for coal use. Just reading through the author list, and you’ll understand why.
Of course the science says, nothing to see here move along.
Papers, like “Late Pleistocene-Holocene Marine Geology of Nares Strait Region“, from Mudie et al., don’t leave much doubt about what was the past climate of the region:
Palaeoceanographic reconstructions from dinocyst assemblages show that from ~6.5 to 3.3 ka BP, there were large oscillations in summer sea surface temperature (SST) from 3 °C cooler than now to 6 °C warmer, and that variations in SIC ranged from two months more to four months less of heavy ice compared to now.
Imagine my surprise though, when I discovered the majority of early commenters at Slashdot taking this article to task. Usually they eat this stuff up. Here are some of the comments:
Re:”These observations should dispel…” (Score:5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30, @03:44PM (#37571112)
So I’m not one who tends to dismiss things that experts outside my field say, but this statement is quite a blatant fallacy: just because it’s been that way for thousands of years doesn’t mean that any change is certainly not natural. It’s these types of statements that cause so many to lose credibility. It doesn’t give me much faith in someone’s ability to interpret complex data when he can’t even construct a valid deduction from simple facts…
Uh, Greenland redux? (Score:5, Insightful) by arpad1 (458649) on Friday September 30, @03:39PM (#37571068)
How about a bit less in the way of hysteria? All the folks who were having kittens over the phony reduction in the Greenland ice sheet are looking like schmucks now so perhaps a few people, like the editors of Slashdot for instance, could forgo schmuckdom by not engaging in heavy breathing ahead of the facts?
Amazing (Score:5, Insightful) by avandesande (143899) on Friday September 30, @03:43PM (#37571104) Journal
These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming could be natural.
So you are saying that if there was natural global warming these ice shelves wouldn’t melt? That’s pretty amazing!
Bad phrasing (Score:3, Insightful) by OverlordQ (264228) on Friday September 30, @03:47PM (#37571162) Journal
‘The real significance of this, in my view, is that this ice has reportedly been there for thousands of years. The same is true of glaciers that have recently disappeared in the Andes. These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming could be natural.'”
How’s that saying go, past performance is no guarantee of future results. The Andes used to be under water for thousands of years; the continents used to all be one big land mass. If we lived back then I’m sure we’d be hearing about Anthropogenic Tectonic Drift.
Dont jump from “There used to be ice, now there isn’t.” to “We did it”
These unique and massive geographical features that we consider to be a part of the map of Canada are disappearing and they won’t come back
Alarmist.
The researchers say their disappearance suggests a possible return to conditions unseen in the Arctic for thousands of years.
So there used to be conditions where they would have melted anyways, climate changed and they appeared, now they’re disappearing again and you say we’ll never see them again?
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And those comments are just the tip of the iceberg. More here.
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**REPLY: Better get your fact straight, I never wrote that on this thread. – Anthony**
Anthony, yes you did , but you were quoting “Bad phrasing – (#37571162)”
HAHAHA it is amusing nevertheless, whatever ludicrous scenario someone might invent, then there are so many “monkeys with typewriters” now on the web that it isn’t only Shakespeare that you will find they have rewritten. How about this olde chestnut.
Anthropogenic Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO) Crisis.
Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO) is a colorless and odorless chemical compound, also referred to by some as Dihydrogen Oxide, Hydrogen Hydroxide, Hydronium Hydroxide, or simply Hydric acid. Its basis is the highly reactive hydroxyl radical, a species shown to mutate DNA, denature proteins, disrupt cell membranes, and chemically alter critical neurotransmitters. The atomic components of DHMO are found in a number of caustic, explosive and poisonous compounds such as Sulfuric Acid, Nitroglycerine and Ethyl Alcohol.
The government is currently using DHMO as a form of torture, forcing inmates in the “Justice” Department’s political prisons to stand under streams of the liquid form while breathing in clouds of Hydric Acid in gaseous form. This is inflicted on a daily basis for most inmates. Enough of this ingested into the lungs can cause convulsions and death, yet no one is speaking out against this menace.
Capitalist industrialists regularly inject DHMO into our food and drink in a variety of manufacturing and/or processing stages. This goes on with virtually no federal regulation–other than to determine that the DHMO used is “pure” by government standards. There have been reports of it found even in baby foods and formula. Does anyone care what we are putting in our bodies? While trace amounts have been shown to have little effect on the body, in sufficient quantity ingestion of this insidious substance can kill. It can induce a state of hyponatremia, causing in some cases disorientation, brain swelling, and death:
– http://www.dhmo.org/
LazyTeenager says:
October 1, 2011 at 3:07 pm
The melting of 1000 year old ice sheets on a ten year time scale disproves 2 ideas popular around here:
=======
Please define “ice sheet”.
It is a term I’m unfamiliar with.
Another thing that I’ve noticed over at ./ is that currently the normally uber-liberal /. crowd is giving Al Gore the same respect as they give Glenn Beck, he’s not just thrown under the bus, they’re using him as a speed-bump at the bus station.
All I can remember from the comments above is Motos, Montras and Death Throws.
LazyTeenager says:
“The melting of 1000 year old ice sheets on a ten year time scale disproves 2 ideas popular around here:”
Say what?!!!
Jeff Alberts says:
Safe from incorrect contractions, hopefully. I was hoping you might learn, but I guess not.
How about you learn that you are wrong. “Here’s” for “here are” is a natural and long-standing contraction.
Very long-stainding. I bring you Shakespeare, As You Like It:
Peace, ho! I bar confusion;
‘Tis I must make conclusion
Of these most strange events.
Here’s eight that must take hands
Now if you want to argue that Shakespeare did not know how to write English, go ahead and knock yourself out.
Anyway Jeff:
Anthony used ‘some’ as a collective noun, so what’s wrong with ‘here is some’?
British and American usage differ on collective nouns. I’d try to straighten it out but on my last transatlantic SST trip I landed before I took off. Now I have no idea whether I’m in England or the US.
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Paul Westhaver says:
October 1, 2011 at 10:10 am
“I guess I am becoming a curmudgeon……
I suggest that there are a large number of people who believe that the earth is overpopulated (I don’t) and they are looking to anything to prove it. They are in good company at the UN.
I think they are frustrated that the majority of the population of the world sees there efforts as false and now they cannot implement their UN actions. Sadly the scientists (biologists mostly) have surrendered their reason in service to this earthly god and their reputations are being swept away with their ace-in-the-hole of AGW.
I now exhibit a habit….
Hear claims of widespread catastrophe based on humanity, think closet eugenicist and UN sympathizer…..”
You can only hear ” The sky is falling!” so many times before it becomes a big YAWN and you start looking for the money trail. Wipe out the poor peasants and take their land has been a common human habit for centuries.
Ehrlich’s version of the eugenics concept is just a new twist on this very old human habit of conquest and wipe out the natives. They have just dressed it up in pretty new clothes to make it more palatable to the mases whose wealth they are using to advance their extermination plans.
They had to burn the village to save it from global warming is the plan in action. It is not by chance that a tree with really nasty characteristics was picked by Al G.re’s Company. See my comment: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/25/they-had-to-burn-the-village-to-save-it-from-global-warming/#comment-754959
From the comments on slashdot it looks like more and more people are finally waking up Thank goodness. Rasmussen reports 69% Say It’s Likely Scientists Have Falsified Global Warming Research,
Robert of Ottawa says:
October 1, 2011 at 11:00 am
There are two things going on here. one is a logical fallacy; the other is a deliberate lie employing that same logical fallacy.
1. The logical fallacy is that what is “normal” for the past few years is “normal” and excursions from the norm are a-normal.
2. That these excursions can be prevented by following the warmista political action dogma; i.e. give them control of your lives and they will take care of the “problem”.
As your number 1 implies, those that hold the data determine what “normal” is.
To paraphrase a well known saying: “Those who forget about past extreme weather events are bound to state that current weather extremes are unprecedented…”
UKIP Scotland says:
October 1, 2011 at 2:57 pm
Got it right. Continental drift. Shifting tectonic plates. Yeah, you can see it in their eyes, the shifty buggers.
So what is there to get all worked up about? This planet was ice free for over a billion years of its earlier history. It’s currently in a cold period (it has ice caps and glaciers), so why get alarmed when some of the ice melts?
In 20 years or so, it will all be back …
There is coal on the Antarctic peninsular but the antarctic has moved south since those trees grew many millions of years ago. We didn’t do that so APT is a no goer.
Did anyone notice if these breakups occured before or after the Japanese Tsunami?
Lord John Franklin’s expedition of 1845 lamented in a rather good song by Burt Jansch already traded on the common belief that there was a north-west passage. That area must have had the availability of being navigated sine time immemorial.
‘Paul Westhaver says:
October 1, 2011 at 11:19 am
A little inside baseball about the CBC…the source of the article….
With the new conservative majority running Canada for the next 4 years one of the government objectives is to shut down the CBC in effect,’
An identical twin to our BBC! I just wish our pathetic Conservative…sorry read Lib Dumb… govt had the balls/inclination to do the same!
One thing I like about WUWT is that sharp-eyed readers spot things in the Alarmist articles that I miss. When this article came up in a discussion a couple of days ago in
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/29/warming-island-greenland-sea-regional-climate-and-arctic-sea-ice-reconstruction/
I spotted this comment:
“David Middleton says:
September 30, 2011 at 2:56 am
Sounds like the ice shelf loss is slowing down.
“Between 1906 and 1982, there has been a 90 percent reduction in the areal extent of ice shelves along the entire coastline”… 1.2% per year. The ice shelves should have vanished in 1990, two years before the Canadian Arctic started to warm. ”
I think that is an astute comment by Dave. It makes me chuckle, for even when Alarmists attempt to alarm they undermine their own hysteria. If 90% of the iceshelf was gone before 1982, what is the panic about? Likely it is a process that has been ongoing since the end of the last ice age.
My favorite mush in the article states that the ice shelf was “part of the map of Canada.” Surely there is room there for a joke or two about the Times map of Greenland.
.
The less one has to spend, the less one tends to buy.
IOW – It’s the economy!
When the Greatest Depression is over, the kids will be doing the Jitter-Bug and the Charleston will be only seen in the Senior Citizen Centers (if the kids can afford to build them again;-)
Those glaciers you see
Aren’t meant to be. Eyes deceive,
And oh, so do we.
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Heh, tortured haiku. Probably better as standard four line doggerel.
=========
And this might just be a slight amplification of the normal melt-freeze cycle to help move Kevin Trenberth’s missing heat back off-planet. . . .
Ah, the new term for “the science is settled”; it is: “in one fell swoop the notion of skepticism has been dispelled”.
If there was a single ‘fell swoop’ on this issue it was Climategate.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/10/03/3329725.htm
if I read this correctly then the ice los cannot be attributed to warmer air. its the water temp, dummy!!
regards
On the issue of ice loss around the northern margin of Ellesmere Island. A search of the National Library’s newspaper archive (using the words Ellesmere Island ice shelf) finds a series of reports from the 1950s. I found this headline from the West Australian from the 8 November 1954 of interest:
ARCTIC IS WARMING, SCIENTISTS THINK
Two Canadian scientists, just back from the northern-most tip of Canada, said they found some evidence that the Arctic was becoming warmer.
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/52963556
One of the goals of the expedition was to locate the source of 3 very large ice islands that were discovered in the Arctic Ocean in the late 1940s.
From Geoffrey Hattersley-Smith. Northern Ellesmere Island. The Geographical Journal, Vol. 122, No. 1 (Mar., 1956), pp. 13-23
“In 1946, on a reconnaissance flight, the United States Air Force sighted T1, the first of the floating ice islands of the Polar Sea to be discovered. By the end of 1950 the U.S.A.F. had discovered T2 and T3, two more of these huge ice masses with the unusual, ribbed surface pattern. T2, the largest of the three, had an area of about 300 square miles. Subsequent study of air photographs showed that all or most of the ice islands almost certainly originated on the north coast of Ellesmere Island, where the ice shelf shows the same unusual surface pattern.”
300sq miles x about 50 m thickness provides 38.4 billion cubic meters of ice, or about 38.4 billion tonnes, or about 6400 Great Pyramids of Giza. That’s about 13 x the ice loss reported above in just one of the ice islands.
It seems that the calving of large blocks of shelf ice into the Arctic Ocean is not unprecedented even in recent history. It also seems that these observations from the late 1940s should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming could not be partly or mainly due to natural causes.
Everyone on the planet knows about the Little Ice Age and how we’re still coming out of it. Well, everyone that is that doesn’t go to Penn State. We’re on a Roller Coaster ride; we’ve gone up this huge little hill called the MWP, topped it, came down, down, down into the LIA, and then gone up, up, up, now we’re in a dark, dark tunnel; we just have no idea what’s coming next, another cold, cold decent or more hot, hot climbing, or the slow, slow stop where we all have to get off and cough up another ticket if we want to ride again. Life’s an exciting Roller Coaster ride, unless you go to Penn State.