WUWT readers may recall that when the “Himalayan Glaciers will melt by 2035” error was first revealed, IPCC chairman Rajenda Pachauri famously labeled claims of the mistake “voodoo science”and then had to retract that slur later.
Now it appears there hasn’t been any melt at all in the last 10 years. I never thought I’d see this in the Guardian:
The discovery has stunned scientists, who had believed that around 50bn tonnes of meltwater were being shed each year and not being replaced by new snowfall.
The study is the first to survey all the world’s icecaps and glaciers and was made possible by the use of satellite data. Overall, the contribution of melting ice outside the two largest caps – Greenland and Antarctica – is much less then previously estimated, with the lack of ice loss in the Himalayas and the other high peaks of Asia responsible for most of the discrepancy.
Full story here
h/t to more people than I can name – Anthony
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Looking at the plot of ice thickness changes from the GRACE data (from the NASA press release that spawned this story), it appears parts of the Himalayan area is actually gaining ice:
Changes in ice thickness (in centimeters per year) during 2003-2010 as measured by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, averaged over each of the world’s ice caps and glacier systems outside of Greenland and Antarctica. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Colorado
Here’s a zoom in on India:
Average yearly change in mass, in centimeters of water, during 2003-2010, as measured by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, for the Indian subcontinent. The dots represent glacier locations. There is significant mass loss in this region, but it is concentrated over the plains south of the glaciers, and is caused by groundwater depletion. Blue represents ice mass loss, while red represents ice mass gain.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Colorado
UPDATE: Here’s the Univ. of Colroado press release:
303-492-8349
University of Colorado at Boulder
CU-Boulder study shows global glaciers, ice caps, shedding billions of tons of mass annually
Study also shows Greenland, Antarctica and global glaciers and ice caps lost roughly 8 times the volume of Lake Erie from 2003-2010
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  IMAGE:A new CU-Boulder study using the NASA/Germany GRACE satellite shows Earth is losing roughly 150 billion tons of ice annually.Click here for more information. |
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Earth’s glaciers and ice caps outside of the regions of Greenland and Antarctica are shedding roughly 150 billion tons of ice annually, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder.
The research effort is the first comprehensive satellite study of the contribution of the world’s melting glaciers and ice caps to global sea level rise and indicates they are adding roughly 0.4 millimeters annually, said CU-Boulder physics Professor John Wahr, who helped lead the study. The measurements are important because the melting of the world’s glaciers and ice caps, along with Greenland and Antarctica, pose the greatest threat to sea level increases in the future, Wahr said.
The researchers used satellite measurements taken with the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, a joint effort of NASA and Germany, to calculate that the world’s glaciers and ice caps had lost about 148 billion tons, or about 39 cubic miles of ice annually from 2003 to 2010. The total does not count the mass from individual glacier and ice caps on the fringes of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets — roughly an additional 80 billion tons.
“This is the first time anyone has looked at all of the mass loss from all of Earth’s glaciers and ice caps with GRACE,” said Wahr. “The Earth is losing an incredible amount of ice to the oceans annually, and these new results will help us answer important questions in terms of both sea rise and how the planet’s cold regions are responding to global change.”
A paper on the subject is being published in the Feb. 9 online edition of the journal Nature. The first author, Thomas Jacob, did his research at CU-Boulder and is now at the Bureau de Recherches Géologiques et Minières, in Orléans, France. Other paper co-authors include Professor Tad Pfeffer of CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research and Sean Swenson, a former CU-Boulder physics doctoral student who is now a researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.
“The strength of GRACE is that it sees everything in the system,” said Wahr. “Even though we don’t have the resolution to look at individual glaciers, GRACE has proven to be an exceptional tool.” Traditional estimates of Earth’s ice caps and glaciers have been made using ground-based measurements from relatively few glaciers to infer what all of the unmonitored glaciers around the world were doing, he said. Only a few hundred of the roughly 200,000 glaciers worldwide have been monitored for a decade or more.
Launched in 2002, two GRACE satellites whip around Earth in tandem 16 times a day at an altitude of about 300 miles, sensing subtle variations in Earth’s mass and gravitational pull. Separated by roughly 135 miles, the satellites measure changes in Earth’s gravity field caused by regional changes in the planet’s mass, including ice sheets, oceans and water stored in the soil and in underground aquifers.
A positive change in gravity during a satellite approach over Greenland, for example, tugs the lead GRACE satellite away from the trailing satellite, speeding it up and increasing the distance between the two. As the satellites straddle Greenland, the front satellite slows down and the trailing satellite speeds up. A sensitive ranging system allows researchers to measure the distance of the two satellites down to as small as 1 micron — about 1/100 the width of a human hair — and to calculate ice and water amounts from particular regions of interest around the globe using their gravity fields.
For the global glaciers and ice cap measurements, the study authors created separate “mascons,” large, ice-covered regions of Earth of various ovate-type shapes. Jacob and Wahr blanketed 20 regions of Earth with 175 mascons and calculated the estimated mass balance for each mascon.
The CU-led team also used GRACE data to calculate that the ice loss from both Greenland and Antarctica, including their peripheral ice caps and glaciers, was roughly 385 billion tons of ice annually. The total mass ice loss from Greenland, Antarctica and all Earth’s glaciers and ice caps from 2003 to 2010 was about 1,000 cubic miles, about eight times the water volume of Lake Erie, said Wahr.
“The total amount of ice lost to Earth’s oceans from 2003 to 2010 would cover the entire United States in about 1 and one-half feet of water,” said Wahr, also a fellow at the CU-headquartered Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.
The vast majority of climate scientists agree that human activities like pumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is warming the planet, an effect that is most pronounced in the polar regions.
One unexpected study result from GRACE was that the estimated ice loss from high Asia mountains — including ranges like the Himalaya, the Pamir and the Tien Shan — was only about 4 billion tons of ice annually. Some previous ground-based estimates of ice loss in the high Asia mountains have ranged up to 50 billion tons annually, Wahr said.
“The GRACE results in this region really were a surprise,” said Wahr. “One possible explanation is that previous estimates were based on measurements taken primarily from some of the lower, more accessible glaciers in Asia and were extrapolated to infer the behavior of higher glaciers. But unlike the lower glaciers, many of the high glaciers would still be too cold to lose mass even in the presence of atmospheric warming.”
“What is still not clear is how these rates of melt may increase and how rapidly glaciers may shrink in the coming decades,” said Pfeffer, also a professor in CU-Boulder’s civil, environmental and architectural engineering department. “That makes it hard to project into the future.”
According to the GRACE data, total sea level rise from all land-based ice on Earth including Greenland and Antarctica was roughly 1.5 millimeters per year annually or about 12 millimeters, or one-half inch, from 2003 to 2010, said Wahr. The sea rise amount does include the expansion of water due to warming, which is the second key sea-rise component and is roughly equal to melt totals, he said.
“One big question is how sea level rise is going to change in this century,” said Pfeffer. “If we could understand the physics more completely and perfect numerical models to simulate all of the processes controlling sea level — especially glacier and ice sheet changes — we would have a much better means to make predictions. But we are not quite there yet.”
I wonder if Al Gore saw this. Certainly makes his trip to Antarctica to film the ice minimum look pretty silly — not that it wasn’t silly to begin with.
Can’t fund much of this is American papers. Not apparent in the LA Times, Denver Post, or the NY Post. Surprise! But the most widely read paper in America is, ironically enough, The Daily Mail, and it is prominent there as well as Drudge.
There seems to be a bit of a problem with this work. During the period that this analysis covers, from 2003 to 2010, Lake Mead in Nevada, with an area of 640 sq km, lost over 12 METERS of height. That’s over 1200 cm of water equivalent height. Despite this huge change in the local water mass, a change that absolutely dwarfs all of the other changes plotted on these charts, Lake Mead doesn’t show up. Lake Mead isn’t even a tiny blip. Not all is right here.
@ur momisugly physicist
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/20/graces-warts-new-peer-reviewed-paper-suggests-errors-and-adjustments-may-be-large/
Have all the warts been burned off of GRACE?
Michael Reed says:
February 9, 2012 at 3:52 am
“Okay, all you ice observers out there. Consider these two quotes from the Guardian article:
Prof John Wahr of the University of Colorado said: “People should be just as worried about the melting of the world’s ice as they were before.”
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Means that if they were not worried, then they can comfortably stay that way.
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Michael Reed says:
Okay, all you ice observers out there. Consider these two quotes from the Guardian article:
“Bristol University glaciologist Prof Jonathan Bamber, who was not part of the research team, said: ‘The new data does not mean that concerns about climate change are overblown in any way.’ He added: ‘Taken globally all the observations of the Earth’s ice – permafrost, Arctic sea ice, snow cover and glaciers – are going in the same direction.’
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Means concern over the attempted takeover by climate change-mongers, is not overblown, and that the rest of the ice is doing just as the new study shows for the Himalayan glaciers – all the ice is doing the same thing, Bamber says, in light of the new study !
One of the most prolific authors on GRACE has been Dr. Isabella Velicogna, UC Irvine. Back in 2009 Dr. Velicogna published this paper in GRL:
Increasing rates of ice mass loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets revealed by GRACE
Dr. Velicogna concluded that the ice mass-loss was “accelerating with time.” She found that “in Antarctica the mass loss increased from 104 Gt/yr in 2002–2006 to 246 Gt/yr in 2006–2009.”
Since the launch of GRACE, Dr. Velicogna has participated in several papers on GRACE and ice mass loss estimates for Antarctic and Greenland. Each paper has presented a more dire situation than the previous one, yet GRACE has not actually measured a significant ice mass loss in Antarctica. The actual GRACE measurements indicate a net mass gain (44 ±20 Gt/yr) from October 2003 through February 2007.
Total Mass Difference: TMD = Actual GRACE measurements. TMD – IJ05 and TMD – ICE5G = GRACE measurements adjusted for GIA (Riva et al., 2007).
Furthermore, the GIA-adjusted Total Mass Differences (TMD) from the TU Delft publication are significantly lower than those of Velicogna 2009.
GIA is the abbreviation for “glacial isostatic adjustment,” sometimes referred to as post-glacial rebound (PGR). The areas of the Earth’s crust that were covered by thick ice sheets during the last glacial maximum were depressed by the ice mass. As the ice sheets have retreated over the last 15-20,000 years, the crust has rebounded (risen) in those areas. So, the GRACE measurements have to be adjusted for GIA. The problem is that no one really knows what the GIA rate actually is. This is particularly true for Antarctica.
Riva et al., 2007 concluded that the ice mass-loss rate in Antarctica from 2002-2007 could have been anywhere from zero-point-zero Gt/yr up to 120 Gt/yr. Dr. Riva recently co-authored a paper in GRL (Thomas et al., 2011) which concluded that GPS observations suggest “that modeled or empirical GIA uplift signals are often over-estimated” and that “the spatial pattern of secular ice mass change derived from Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) data and GIA models may be unreliable, and that several recent secular Antarctic ice mass loss estimates are systematically biased, mainly too high.” (I don’t have access to the full text of Thomas et al., 2011, just the abstract).
So, there’s no evidence that the Antarctic ice sheets have experienced any significant ice mass-loss since GRACE has been flying. The GIA has generally been as large or larger than the asserted ice mass-loss.
And how much water is taken from the oceans and lakes and deposited on the glaciers every year?
You see belief is the problem. I too do believe ;>) that too many warmists simply believe without checking first. They simply believe what the scientists believe. Belief has no place in scientific observations.
Now over to the Guardian comments section……………………………………………….Oh, I see no comments allowed for this story. I wonder why? ;>)
Further to my last comment, comments have appeared under different journalists covering the same story. It’ll be a hoot to read.
I know how GRACE works and I have issues with the idea GRACE can detect ice/water mass changes verses any other change in mass. The assumptions underlying these claims are on thin ice – pun intended.
GRACE is a very simple and very cool instrument. It is made up of two satellites in the same orbit a measured distance apart in a polar low earth orbit. These two satellites know their orbital position to extreme precision due to on-board and differential GPS. Their on-board clocks are tightly synchronized together as well.
Between the two satellites an RF signal is transmitted back and forth with time signals on it. These measure the distance between the satellites to an incredible precision (can’t recall it off the top of my head, but I think it is in the sub mm range). When the first satellite begins to go over an area of greater mass it is pulled ahead slightly, expanding the distance between the 2 birds. When it pass over the spot it is slowed down and the distance shrinks back to where it was. The trailing satellite does the same thing (which is why it takes a while to work out which one is being effected, and if both are how to distinguish the mass under one verses the other).
After you do this many times you get a nice picture of the lows and highs of the mass under the birds – which is of course the surface of the earth. Oceans will be very different than continents, mountains different from plains, etc.
So when GRACE says the mass has changed over time, it means all the mass under that spot in orbit – all the way to the core.
I can pull out my picture of the crust verses the rest of the planet’s mass again and point out that the amount of ice sitting on top all the molten iron, magma, crust, etc is a miniscule amount -but why belabor the point. GRACE only knows the mass changed – not WHY.
It is a huge jump in logic to say the blue is due to ice and not magma pockets or some collapsed pocket somewhere. I would love to know how they can be sure the mass change is related to water?
To claim 3.5 mm/yr of sea level rise over the study period is simply not true. The drop in SLR since 1998 is the single biggest example of ‘hide the decline’ by AGW proponents. None of the government sea level sites (CU,Aviso,Ciro) plot SLR but rather graph global mean sea level vs time. The only SLR plots revealed are detrended. The only site I have found that plots a 12 month ruining average of SLR vs time is Climate For You. http://www.climate4you.com/index.htm
It reveals that SLR has dropped from an 12 month average of 4 mm/yr in 1998 to near zero today.
This graph simply destroys AGW in my opinion and therefore easy to see why it cannot be found easily.
Latitude says:
February 9, 2012 at 8:34 am
James Sexton says:
February 9, 2012 at 8:21 am
What I thought was illuminating was the way they estimated ice loss/sea level rise prior to the satellites. …..
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That too….and the fact that satellite measurements of sea level are a total crock….
People argue over the adjustments made to satellite measurements….
the data the comes out of the satellites
..and don’t go back far enough on the data to realize even the satellites were adjusted to show sea level rise
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I think this stems from the fact that critical thinking is no longer taught in our school systems. From the land based observations, we were told the sea levels were raising ~3 mm/yr. And so the satellites were adjusted to show this. Looking back at the physical gauges, there isn’t any indication that the asserted 3mm/yr was correct.
why do p[eople never quote the error bars? The Himalya figures are 4 gT per year +/-20 gT!
So the glaciers could have reduced by 24 gT or gained 16 gT! That is an extraordinarily wide estimate of what is happening!
I particularly love this part:
“Study also shows Greenland, Antarctica and global glaciers and ice caps lost roughly 8 times the volume of Lake Erie from 2003-2010”
Note the careful choice of Lake Erie (the shallowest of the Great Lakes by far) for comparison… guess it just wouldn’t sound as alarming had they said, instead,
“… lost roughly 1/3 the volume of Lake Superior from 2003-2010.”
AJStrata says:
February 9, 2012 at 10:15 am
Well said Sir! (or Madam).
To emphasise your point further, the cryosphere is, at most, 5Km. thick. The Earth beneath our feet extends 6,378.1 Km to the Earth’s core. What we actually know about that 6,378.1 Km could be written on the back of a (very small) postage stamp.
@ur momisugly richard verney
“It beggars belief that it could have found its way into the final version of the IPPC (sic) report. The fact that this claim was re-itterated by politicians demonstrates what little grasp they have on reality. This may explain why Gordon Brown was so financially inept, it would appear that he has no practical grasp of numbers.”
Richard, you are exactly correct when you say “it beggars belief.” Pardon me if I sound a bit pedantic here as I point out a few things that you doubtless already know. Rather obviously, the IPCC is a political organization; its decisions and the reports which it generates are based on political considerations and done by politicians posing as scientists. Gordon Brown, even more obviously, is a politician, not a scientist, and bases his decisions and actions on political factors as well. Upper level politicians are such consummate liars that we have whole families of jokes based on the proposition. They are not concerned about public welfare, they are concerned about power. They are sick. They are psychotic. They are power addicts. The only reason why they attain and hold such power is because we little John and Jane Does believe them when they lie to us. They are not particularly smart, not particularly wise, not particularly numerate; they are simply VERY good liars. They are the best liars in the world, the most subtle, the most convincing, the very upper, upper, upper, Olympic class liars the human race has created. One measure of how good they are at deceit is that even though we make jokes (all over the world, in every language, in every country) about how dishonest they are, the fact is that when they produce a mega-lie on the order of the IPCC report or the CAGW hoax in general, we continue to be stunned and surprised. We honest, average citizens continue to respond with “it beggars belief!”, and it does. It does beggar belief, every time, the things they do, and yet… and yet we fall for their lies over and over. We do not sem to learn from past experiences. These fraudsters are like a virus which infects the body politic, and we just never seem to develop antibodies against them. It beggars belief. I have hope that the growth of information technology and the decentralization of information access will help us more quickly recognize these liars in the future.
Is this the same GRACE satellite that is used to make claims of catastrophic sea level rise in this article?
http://news.yahoo.com/scientists-melt-mystery-over-icecaps-sea-levels-182700524.html
Once again these guys attempt to exploit the average human’s inability to deal with large numbers to try to maintain a sense of impending doom in the population. Gigatons of ice are disappearing! Very scary! Except of course that those seemingly giant numbers are actually at or below the round off error of our ability to measure the annual flux of ice and snow which has been occurring for thousands of years. Just the max-min flux in sea ice in the polar regions amounts to 25 million km2 or more every year. Then there is the land based snow cover that comes and goes seasonally, for which i don’t have a good number to hand at the moment, but I do know that just to get my not too large driveway usable after one middling snow storm involves moving several tons of the stuff. Then there is all the ice locked up in the icecaps of Antarctica and Greenland, which the map above suggests aren’t going anywhere at the moment, whose mass dwarfs the annual flux. And in the end all of it is, relative to the mass of the waters of the oceans of the world, a relative flyspeck.
Of course all of the above disregards the real fundamental issue, which is that ice and snow have never been the friends of humanity, and if in fact they are declining a bit, that is probably something that we should celebrating not trembling in fear in the face of.
AJStrata says:
February 9, 2012 at 10:15 am
Very nicely said AJStrata. You would think NASA has written an extensive paper answering your excellent question. They probably assume water is the only thing that moves over a short period of time. Moving magma would be a problem. Collapsing pockets more likely a one-time event.
Steve from Rockwood says:
February 9, 2012 at 7:24 am
. . . “Why so many larger anomalies at these boundaries? Is this where ice accumulates?
All plate boundaries are not created equal. Those where two plates come together (convergent plate boundaries) tend to cause an increase in elevation. High elevations are colder. Colder leads to snow, and snow to ice.
Another thing to keep in mind when looking at that nice map of the GRACE data is the perceptual distortion created by map projections. That large blob of purple and blue in the Canadian archipelago dominates the map, but bear in mind that in reality Greenland is only about a quarter of the area of the Lower 48 States of the US or Australia
A physicist said on February 9, 2012 at 12:20 pm (with formatting errors):
My oh my, you live in an interesting world. Next thing, Anthony will post a piece praising the benefits of a convection oven for cooking a pork roast using less electricity, and you’ll say rational skeptics *do* believe that Greenpeace and WWF may be correct in that going full-Vegan is best for all of humanity, and that convection ovens will provide humanity a vital tool for roasting tofurkey.
Thanks for the comment from the alternate universe where you normally reside. Best of luck there, hope the weather stays warm.
And now Reverend “A physicist” will read from the “Book of Hansen”
Intriguing.
Theyre stunned that their blind faith and upside downsy “science” techniques didnt correctly stack up.
Heres a clue for them: G.I.G.O.
And now theyre being found out, hopefully never to pollute ( i like that word) the sciences with their particular brand of hokum ever again.
In reality, they should all be heavily prosecuted for what theyve done.
Obtaining funds via deception being the main one.
Rico rico rico!