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.”
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AJStrata says:
February 9, 2012 at 10:15 am
If you wanted thoroughly to confuse yourself you would perhaps launch two satellites that closely follow each other in orbit and measure precisely the real-time variations of the distance between them.
Since the distance measured can be affected by numerous variables which alter the gravity field in which the satellites move, you could could have giga-hours of endless fun trying work out which one is having the dominant effect at any point in time.
You could, for example, assume that any negative changes in the gravity field over areas of forest (eg the Amazon) are due to the effects of logging.
You could also have endless fun over the oceans looking for relatively long term changes in surface atmospheric pressure which causes a 1cm water-equivalent change in gravity for every 1mb change in mean surface pressure.
Of course, everyone knows that there are no changes anywhere else on earth or in the heavens other than in the very thin shell that is the surface of the earth where man operates. /sarc
A physicist says:
February 9, 2012 at 12:20 pm
“TomB asks: Is this the same GRACE satellite that is used to make claims of catastrophic sea level rise?
TomB, the short answer is “yes”.
Moreover, high-precision GRACE gravimetry plays a key role in James Hansen’s Seven Key Predictions of Warmism.”
Let’s see
A1/P1 Satellite altimeters will affirm the prediction of accelerating sea-level rise, and
A2/P2 Satellite gravitometry will affirm the prediction of accelerating ice-mass loss, and
A3/P3 Satellite photography will affirm Arctic ice-cap loss and polward biome migration,
A4/P4 Satellite radiometry (solar) will affirm the prediction of stable solar output, and
A5/P5 Satellite radiometry (terrestrial) will affirm the prediction of radiative energy imbalance, and
A6/P6 Satellite telemetry (from ARGO) will affirm the prediction of warming oceans, and
A7/P7 Satellite spectrophotometry will affirm the prediction of a warming particle-laden atmosphere.
In a world where anything is “possible” I must admit the possibility that satellites “will affirm” this list, but other than No. 4 I’d have to suggest that the rest have been pretty much a miss so far.
Kadaka, hank you for the correction! 🙂
To parse the argument carefully between strong science and strong skepticism:
The strong science position: Ninety-seven percent of climatologists advocate strong science AGW: there is a substantial probability that Hansen-style predictions of CAGW are correct …
…nbsp; and yet, only the most irrational scientists are certain that the CAGW probability is greater than (say) 80%.
The strong skepticism position: AGW skeptics advocate the strong skepticism view: there is a substantial probability that Hansen-style predictions of CAGW are incorrect …
…nbsp; and yet, only the most irrational skeptics are certain that the CAGW probability is less than (say) 20%.
The outstanding merit of GRACE (and similar research programs) is that by the end of the next solar cycle (say in 15-20 years), when we check Hansen’s “Big Seven” predictions, humanity will have a much more solid idea who’s right.
Am I to believe the scientists? Or the consensus? It’s so confusing. /sarc
John F. Hultquist says:
John, the anomalies seem to be most frequent along convergent zones (western coast of North and South America) and divergent zones (the mid-Atlantic ridge). Grace measures gravity but the experts at NASA are looking at changes in gravity over a very short period of time. Plus the “foot-print” of the anomalies seems a lot larger than what would be expected for discrete glaciers. I doubt these anomalies are water but more likely due to something deeper within the crust.
The actual article is here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature10847.html
Himalaya and Karakoram, according to the GRACE satellites, lost ice at a rate of -5 ± 6 Gt yr−1 since 2002.
Total −536 ± 93 Gt yr−1
GICs* excl. Greenland and Antarctica PGICs** −148 ± 30 Gt yr−1
Antarctica + Greenland ice sheet and PGICs −384 ± 71 Gt yr−1
Total contribution to SLR 1.48 ± 0.26 mm yr−1 ***
SLR due to GICs excl. Greenland and Antarctica PGICs 0.41 ± 0.08 mm yr−1
SLR due to Antarctica + Greenland ice sheet and PGICs 1.06 ± 0.19 mm yr−1
* Glaciers/Ice caps
** Peripheral GICs
*** …agrees well with independent estimates of sea level rise originating from land ice loss and other terrestrial sources
Never mind the water and ice side of things, I for one would love to see a time-lapse of the grinding down of mountains and carving out of valleys etc by the bull-dozing effect of the advance / melt/retreat / advance again of the glacier cycle. How much rock are those things breaking off and tearing out then pulverising into smaller pieces and pushing/carrying downhill to the plains and oceans ?!
Oh noes, rocks displace water … it’s worse than we thought !
KR says:
February 9, 2012 at 3:36 pm
So, in case they’re actually right, about 5-7 inches per century?
A physicist says:
February 9, 2012 at 12:20 pm
“Moreover, high-precision GRACE gravimetry plays a key role in James Hansen’s Seven Key Predictions of Warmism.”
Yawn. Next he’ll predict a tropospheric hotspot. You know what happens when a warmist’s prediction is falsified by observations. He has a Colorado con artist write a paper that expands the error bars so much that the observation suddenly confirms the prediction.
A physicist says:
February 9, 2012 at 3:10 pm
“The strong science position: Ninety-seven percent of climatologists advocate strong science AGW: there is a substantial probability that Hansen-style predictions of CAGW are correct …”
That’s 72 climate scientists out of a population of 75 who answered the e-mail survey, to be specific. We wanna be scientific, don’t we.
A physicist says:
February 9, 2012 at 3:10 pm
“…nbsp; and yet, only the most irrational skeptics are certain that the CAGW probability is less than (say) 20%.”
Can I have an error bar with that number. BTW, 100% of self-proclaimed physicists are off their meds again today.
A physicist says:
February 9, 2012 at 3:10 pm
“…nbsp; and yet, only the most irrational skeptics are certain that the CAGW probability is less than (say) 20%.”
You seem to possess some interesting notions about probability. Given that scientists, whose field of study is the actual phenomena that make up the supposedly looming catastrophes that constitute most of climate scare propaganda, generally indicate no correlation with GAT trends or demonstrable physical links to any CO2 generated activity I would suggest that the probability of our future being disastrous due to anything that occurs in the climate may be slightly more than my winning the Powerball jackpot tomorrow night, but the probability of it being disastrous due to our ill considered responses to this phony crisis is about 100%.
Dave Wendt – Don’t forget the thermal expansion (current SLR including both melt and thermal expansion is ~3mm/year), acceleration (0.009 ± 0.003 mm year^-2, according to Church and White, http://www.springerlink.com/content/h2575k28311g5146/); those add up to about 345mm (13.5 inches) over the next 100 years.
3mm * 100yrs + 0.009mm/2 * 100yrs^2 = 345mm
The big risk factor is potential destabilization of Antarctic (particularly the WAIS) and Greenland ice caps. Any changes there can only increase SLR. From the USGS cryosphere data, http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs2-00/ – Estimated potential maximum sea-level rise from the total melting of present-day glaciers:
Location / Volume (km3) / Potential sea-level rise, (m)
East Antarctic ice sheet / 26,039,200 / 64.80
West Antarctic ice sheet / 3,262,000 / 8.06
Antarctic Peninsula / 227,100 / .46
Greenland / 2,620,000 / 6.55
All other ice caps, ice fields, and valley glaciers / 180,000 / .45
Total / 32,328,300 / 80.32
I can sum this up in one ‘word’.
“Doh!”
KR says:
February 9, 2012 at 5:01 pm
Dave Wendt – Don’t forget the thermal expansion (current SLR including both melt and thermal expansion is ~3mm/year), acceleration (0.009 ± 0.003 mm year^-2, according to Church and White, http://www.springerlink.com/content/h2575k28311g5146/); those add up to about 29-30 inches over the next 100 years.
I’d suggest you redo the arithmetic on that. 30 inches in a century would require an average of 7.62 mm/yr. An acceleration at the rate given would add a mm to the current rate in somewhere between 83 and 167 yrs.
Yet another data result that the earth OVERALL globally is warming up and is DEFINITELY NOT COOLING!!
You know it is amazing how folk MISUNDERSTAND. The record floods of Pakistan ripped that country a part. It is obvious to me that much of this flooding in India and Pakistan would have re-condensed on top of those very high mountains.
Yes – the ice may a build up in places but it is a climate that is on the move as the hydrological cycle speeds. This is in both ice melt to the ocean permanently and land based water returns to the oceans.
A combination I’m sure with sea level rises.
Look carefully folks GREENLAND is losing mass. Look carefully Antarctica is losing MASS.
Starting slow is expected and the projected trend — will it expedite melting into the future?
All ground based evidence confirms it is very highly likely.
To me, this is the most curious quote: “The new data does not mean that concerns about climate change are overblown in any way. It means there is a much larger uncertainty in high mountain Asia than we thought. Taken globally all the observations of the Earth’s ice – permafrost, Arctic sea ice, snow cover and glaciers – are going in the same direction.”
Hmmmmm.
HenryP says:
February 9, 2012 at 6:14 am
Voodo is misspelled.
It should be voodoo
Sorry Henry, the correct spelling is I P C C.
From A physicist on February 9, 2012 at 3:10 pm:
INCORRECT. The original Doran and Zimmerman 2009 study: http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf
Of 3146 respondents to the survey participation requests sent to 10,257 Earth scientists, the “97%” actually is:
Thus you were incorrect, it is not “climatologists” but a subset of scientists who self-identified their expertise as climate science which was further winnowed down with a “climate change” publishing constraint. Thus a scientist whose expertise is climate science but for whom more than 50% of their recent papers related to the processing of climate data without notable mention of climate change would be excluded.
Then comes the actual questions:
Question 1 by its wording indicates “recent” human times and a comparison with 18th-century temperatures, rather than somewhat longer human-scale time periods that could encompass more of the current interglacial like the Medieval and Roman Warm Periods. Since the temperatures have increased since the Little Ice Age, the answer is “risen”. If one wishes to go further back with geological timescales before the current interglacial and consider how the current default setting of Earth is continental glaciations with significantly colder mean global temperatures, then the answer is “risen”. Thus the structure of the question practically guarantees the response of “risen”.
Question 2 requires the evaluation of the term “significant contributing factor”. Is 5% significant? 2%? There is no specific attribution to a particular sort of human activity, and there are many candidates such as land use changes (clearing of forests, etc) and black carbon (soot) emissions. There is also no specification for the direction of change, thus the proposed cooling action of human sulfate aerosol emissions could justify answering “yes”. So overall, the wording of the question practically guarantees a response of “yes”.
And amazingly enough, the responses show this:
Thus the strong science position of this winnowed-down self-identified group is “Sure, the global mean temperatures have risen. Yeah, humans were responsible for some share of the change, whatever change it was.”
This in no way whatsoever says “there is a substantial probability that Hansen-style predictions of CAGW are correct” as you have attributed to the “97%” figure.
I must conclude you are either ignorant of the facts concerning the “97%” figure, deluded, lacking the intellectual capacity to properly understand the study (admittedly a remote possibility), or are being deliberately deceptive about what the “97%” you keep tossing around really means as opposed to what you say it means. If deliberately deceptive, I will say your usage is sufficient to invoke the term “malevolently deceptive”.
If trying to invoke the HTML non-breaking space character, use the ampersand (&) before the “nbsp;”, as detailed on the WUWT Test page. When copying and pasting from a “talking points” document with HTML codes, it helps to know and recognize such codes so you can be sure your copying will display properly and so you can correct as needed.
Dave Wendt – Yes, I had a basic math error the first time I calculated that, and replaced that with the correct numbers. My apologies for the mix-up.
Thanks to the moderators for letting me correct that.
rossbrisbane says:
February 9, 2012 at 7:05 pm
“Look carefully folks GREENLAND is losing mass. Look carefully Antarctica is losing MASS.”
Then it was awfully rude of those folks a NASA not to include that on the nice map they provided for us. Other than a small piece in the NE corner of Greenland, all the rest of it and Antarctica as well appear to be white as fresh snow, which by the legend they so helpfully provided suggests no change at all. If you choose to rely on some other measure of those ice masses I would suggest you consider the fact that the mass of an ice sheet can decline for reasons other than it melting away. Consider the interactive map provided by this site
http://tinyurl.com/Drought-monitor
I’ve been monitoring this site for 2-3 years and from the beginning to the present Greenland has been lit up on all timescales by more severe to exceptional drought areas than anywhere in Africa or the American Southwest
DirkH says:
February 9, 2012 at 4:41 pm
A physicist says:
February 9, 2012 at 3:10 pm
“The strong science position: Ninety-seven percent of climatologists advocate strong science AGW: there is a substantial probability that Hansen-style predictions of CAGW are correct …”
That’s 72 climate scientists out of a population of 75 who answered the e-mail survey, to be specific. We wanna be scientific, don’t we.
=====================================
Its worse then we think. They asked vague questions to over ten thousand “scientist”. About three thousand responded. They eliminated about 97% of them, (they did not like their answers) and kept the remaining “scientist”, not climate scientist, but you know, the ones who get paid to notice frogs are getting bigger, no wait, smaller, whatever, they get paid, and they think the climate is changing and humans have something to do with it. A Physicist, what ever you are smoking, dont hide it, divide it.
BTW Kadaka’s post explains it far better, this is just the elevator version.
“Look carefully folks GREENLAND is losing mass. Look carefully Antarctica is losing MASS.”
Dave Wendt says:
“I would suggest you consider the fact that the mass of an ice sheet can decline for reasons other than it melting away. Consider the interactive map provided by this site”
You are going have to prove it are you not?
I would suggest that ice in those parts just does not disappear in an implied cooling world.
See the global map
Mass has gained only on highest Mountain Peaks in the World. And what of the floods in Pakistan. You really think all that water went to the sea?
I am satisfied that a global warming trend is proven beyond any reasonable doubt by the Grace total global result. Yes the surprise was Antarctica – why?
Anything else is cherry picking.
Case: Where did all those record floods end up in the hydrological cycle?
rossbrisbane,
Relax, dude. You’re scaring yourself!☺
@rossbrisbane,
Which “global warming trend is proven beyond any reasonable doubt” ?
You do understand that GRACE measures gravity anomalies not temperatures, don’t you? If so, you probably understand that the calculated total mass differences don’t show any significant ice mass-loss before the glacial isostatic adjustment is subtracted. And you would also know that the measured GIA’s are far smaller than the modeled GIA’s used to predict accelerating ice mass-loss.