Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I came across this beautiful example of chartsmanship today in a Chris Mooney post of raw, pure, visceral alarmism, it’s a gem. It’s from the Mother Jones website and comes with the lovely headline “Humans Have Already Set in Motion 69 Feet of Sea Level Rise”. I do love the claims that something is “set in motion”, it’s scientific cowardice to make that claim, it’s totally impossible to falsify. I could claim that Vladimir Putin has “already set in motion” the next financial meltdown … could you falsify my claim? In any case, Mooney’s post shows the terribly worrying loss of ice from Greenland, from a study by Jason Box
Figure 1. Cumulative loss of ice area in Greenland. As you can see, Greenland is toast … it’s losing well over a hundred square kilometres of ice per year, and the chart shows it heading to the cellar, looks like a total meltdown coming up.
So … what actually is happening with Greenland? To figure that out, we need another chart, the real chart—the chart of the post 2000 ice loss, and what might happen over say the next century if it continues losing over a hundred cubic kilometres of ice per year.
To do that, we have to start by finding out the area of the ice sheet that covers Greenland. As usual, there are various estimates. The Physics Hypertextbook is great for this kind of thing because it gives a variety of estimates from various authors. They range from a low end of 1.7 million square kilometres to a high of 2.2 million square km. I’ll take an average of 1.9 million square km.
So … here is the effect on the Greenland ice cap that a continued loss of -131.5 km2 per year every year until 2100 would have:
Figure 2. Effect of -131.5 km2/yr ice loss on the ≈ two million square kilometres of the Greenland ice cap.
Pretty scary, huh? By the year 2100, if it continues losing ice at the rate Jason Box claims above, -131.5 km2 per year, the total ice area of Greenland will have gone from 1.90 million square km all the way down to … well, to two decimals of accuracy, by the year 2100 the ice will be down to 1.90 million square kilometres …
Gotta love those charts … in any case, let us consider the headline, “Humans Have Already Set in Motion 69 Feet of Sea Level Rise”. I suppose it is true IF we are the cause and IF the decline continues, both of which seem doubtful. Assuming all that were true, at the current rate of -131.5 km2 of ice loss per year, Greenland will be ice-free fairly soon, in only … well … 1,900,000 km2 ice area / 131.5 km2 per year annual loss ≈ 14,500 years from now …
Rats … I guess it’s a bit early to be looking for a nice piece of land for my Greenland vineyard …
w.
[UPDATE] Well, it is inevitably true that what I think is clear actually isn’t … no surprise there. From the comments:
Kasuha says:
February 7, 2013 at 8:28 am
Um, you know… “Greenland marine-terminating glacier area changes” and “cumulative loss of ice area in Greenland” are two a bit different things. Or rather, very different things.
Maybe you should take one more look at what exactly are you doing here.
I completely agree with the conclusion that the alarmism is unsubstantiated in this case. But the way you used to get there is not valid.
I agree with you, Kasuha, that “Greenland marine-terminating glacier area changes” and “cumulative loss of ice area in Greenland” are two very different things. That’s the problem. Mooney is using a chart of the changes in the area of the discharge of the Greenland ice into the ocean as the screaming visual for a claim that we’ve set in motion a 69 foot sea level rise … and the two have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
I didn’t know how to best discuss that kind of lunacy, so I took the path of saying well, suppose Boxes’ results were correct and it actually made a difference regarding the ice area, what difference would it make? I was not attempting to model the entire ice loss of Greenland, as I’ve been through that question in some detail already …
Perhaps there are better ways to get the point across, as you point out … that’s the one I picked.
Thanks,
w.
Keep in mind, Mooney only refers to the “terminating glacier” area. Of course, VOLUME is much more significant, and that data isn’t presented. Your figure 2 is a GEM!!!
Overall, the Greenland total surface has been accreting snow (and its subsequent firning into ice), experiencing loss at its (mostly western) edges, and the continent remains largely in balance.
MarkW says:
February 7, 2013 at 8:25 am
Peter Laux says:
February 7, 2013 at 7:02 am
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If you believe that the fact that “Glacier Girl” was found under 268 feet of ice means that the glaciers are 268 feet higher than they were 50 years ago, then you need to study up on how glaciers work…..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You missed the point. If the glaciers are melting then how come 268 feet of ice has accumulated on top of a WWII plane. That is an average of over 5 feet of ice per year accumulation.
Glacier ‘speed’ on the other hand is determined by the accumulation so calving increases as the accumulation increases.
Mooney speaks for the American Geophysical Union, if I recall. He specializes in communicating science to the masses on their behalf.
They kept Mooney (and Gleick, apparently) in spite of the plain evidence of deception and prejudicial claims and much more.
So Mooney’s deceptive hype is an approved effort on the part of the American Geophysical Union.
Uh, so, to the layman, even if we lose some coastal lands due to scary ice melt, we’ll gain new ground in places like Greenland? Over the course of thousands of years? Plus, places like Siberia, given the scary warming death cycle, will become warm and fertile, giving a whole new place to plant beaucoup crops and raise beaucoup brats. Awesome! Here’s to hoping the North warms up so all the Yankees will go back home to their formerly frigid Northern homes, leaving us Southerners to revive and preserve our old culture. (Just kidding, folks. I actually like a few Yankees. 🙂
Greenland Ice. A loss rate of 230 km3 a year is about 0.0046% ice volume loss per year, assuming a total of 5 million Km3. (At a constant rate, that’s about 1000 years to lose 5% of volume).
(note some total Greenland ice volume estimates are as low as 2.6 million km3)
BUT…
…some recent publications indicate the loss rate may only be half that earlier estimate:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100906085152.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100906085152.htm
According to a study by Kelly & Long
it has been suggested that the Greenland Ice Sheet receded tens of kilometers within its present day margins during the early and mid Holocene, which is registered by Greenland ice cores as ~2.5°C warmer than at present
In many locations the ice sheet and mountain glaciers reached their maximum extents since the early Holocene during the Little Ice Age
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/little-ice-age-was-the-coldest-period-for-10000-years/
In the historical context, the Greenland ice sheet is still unusually large.
Steven Mosher says:
February 7, 2013 at 8:38 am
I disagree. It doesn’t matter that the guy is measuring terminal glacial area loss – it is still valid to compare that figure to the total ice sheet area, especially if you consider that it is the total ice sheet area that actually ‘feeds’ the glacial terminations.
There are any number of reasons for terminal reduction, not least of which is a decreased rate of glacial influx or travel speed if you prefer (to replace the melting ice edge, for example) – it doesn’t have to be related to a simple temperature change cause at all!
BillD says: February 7, 2013 at 9:10 am
“….. So, the idea that a linear rate of ice loss can be extrapolated over many decades seems highly unlikely. What will happen if the warming continues?….”
The sea level adjacent to Greenland will drop, reducing the ice loss rate …so relax, it is sort of self regulating, really.
“A Shifting of Paradigms in the Study of Ice-Sheet Grounding Lines” Gomez etal 2011 and 2012
http://www.nipccreport.org/articles/2011/mar/16mar2011a4.html
Years ago, Dr. Susan Solomon, then head of the U.S. delegation to the US IPCC,
was asked how long the Greenland ice sheet would take to melt. She made the
mistake of telling the truth: “About 1500 years.”
Where this chump Mooney gets “69 feet of sea level rise” when even Al Gore
the father of climate liars acknowledged that the full Greenland ice sheet melting would
only bring 7 meters (22 feet), is not at all clear to me.
One other thing: the Greenland ice sheet seems to be losing mass at lower altitudes but GAINING
mass at higher altitudes above ~1500 meters altitude. See Zwally et al., “Mass changes of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and shelves and contributions to sea-level rise: 1992-2002.” <u.Journal of Glaciology 51: 509-527. Recent measurements by the GRACE and ICEsat
satellites seem to have very uncertain error bars.
The 69 feet of sea level rise, refered to in the above blog, is suppose to represent a complete melting of the Greenland Ice cap. I don’t think that was made clear by the blog post. I did a quick calculation and came up with 60 feet for a complete melt.
BillD:
At February 7, 2013 at 9:10 am you say to Willis
Funny how the narrative changes from day-to-day.
The ice gain and loss from glaciers is mostly a function of snow fall and not temperature.
Only yesterday there was an article on WUWT about a claim that increased snow fall will result from higher temperatures.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/06/michael-tobis-has-bupkis/
That article reported that Michael Tobis (a strong warmunist) is claiming recent exceptional snow fall in Moscow is to be expected because warming causes more snow. But in 2010 Tobis said lack of snow at the winter Olympics is consistent with AGW because heavy snow fall is “not the sort of thing we particularly expect more of because of human interference”.
Everything fits AGW according to you guys because your narrative changes with the weather.
Richard
Gotta love Willis’s grasp of numbers! Here is something else to consider. To get 69 feet of sea level rise you would have to melt most of the Greenland ice sheet and a considerable amount of the Antarctic ice sheet. How likely is that? We can answer that question by looking at what happened during past interglacials when temperatures were warmer than present (without the help of CO2!). We know this from oxygen isotope data from the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores–but wait a minute. If these ice sheets had melted significantly, why do we still have the ice from which we get the interglacial temperature data? In addition, we have definitive data showing that the Anarctic ice sheet has been stable (i.e., not significantly melted) since the Miocene (15 million years ago). How can the Antarctic ice sheet not melt during warm interglacials? Well, for openers, the average annual temperature there is -58 degrees F so you would have to raise the temperature 58 + 32 = 90 degrees just to get to the melting point of ice. Somehow people who are predicting catastrophic rise of sea level (e.g. 69 ft) seem to have overlooked these facts.
At a rate of -131km2/ year 1.90 mill km2 actually goes down to 1.89mill km2 in 87 years with an accuracy of 2 decimals.
Now, that is scary.
/sarc off
That ice mass is an ongoing nucleus (the largest one in the NH) for recurring glaciations and will be in place until / if the tectonics break the current Ice Age choke hold. At the end of the interglacial it will be fascinating for those alive then to witness the bridging of the Davis Strait. Once that happens, the rest will happen fast. Of course additional nuclii will form on the Canadian Shield, it’s not going to be like some sort of unitary dozer blade heading Southsouthwest.
Stack that up against the 50 million km^3 that disappeared after the last ice age. Greenland’s ice sheet contains 3 million km^3 and most of it survived the previous, much warmer interglacial:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian
“The Hippopotamus was distributed as far north as the rivers Rhine and Thames.[1] Trees grew as far north as southern Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago instead of only as far north as Kuujjuaq in northern Quebec…”
Although, with Stoat Connolley savaging climatology entries in Wiki, they say:
“global annual mean temperatures were probably similar to those of the Holocene”
I guess the hippos had fur coats on. Lord, what a mess that has to be cleaned up after the death of CAGW.
Steven Mosher says:
February 7, 2013 at 8:38 am
Thanks, Steven. I see that I wasn’t clear, I have no problem with Boxes work. But Box and Mooney are indeed talking about two different things. That’s my point, that the loss that Box is talking about is meaningless to the question at hand. They are using his result, not because it has anything to do with the title of their article, but purely because the line on the graph goes down, down, down. It doesn’t have anything to do with the claim that a 69-foot sea rise has been “set in motion”, it shouldn’t be in the article at all.
w.
69′ of sealevel rise is 21.0m, which by 3.2 mm/yr (their numbers, not mine) 6572 years at this rate … or 1000 years if we are at 6.6X the current rate, 21.1 mm/yr ….
Do these guys actually think about what they are saying, are they capable of doing calculations, does math and time mean anything to them, or are they just ranting propagandists?
RP, I’d say. I’d never say they are stupid, because if they were that stupid they would be up for Darwin Awards by now.
Kasuha says:
February 7, 2013 at 8:28 am
I agree with you, Kasuha, that “Greenland marine-terminating glacier area changes” and “cumulative loss of ice area in Greenland” are two a bit different things. That’s the problem. Mooney is using a chart of the changes in the area of the discharge of the ice as the screaming visual for a claim that we’ve set in motion a 69 foot sea level rise …
I didn’t know how to best discuss that kind of lunacy, so I took the path of saying well, suppose Boxes’ results were correct and it actually made a difference regarding the ice area, what difference would it make?
Perhaps there are better ways to get the point across, as you point out … that’s the one I picked.
w.
NoAstronomer says:
February 7, 2013 at 8:33 am
@wte9 “Isn’t the real question how much ice loss will cause sixty-nine feet of sea level rise?”
According to wikipedia if the *entire* Greenland ice sheet melted the rise would be ~24 feet. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_ice_sheet].
But the Mooney post doesn’t say that it all comes from Greenland:
“Box also provided a large-scale perspective on how much sea level rise humanity has already probably set in motion from the burning of fossil fuels. The answer is staggering: 69 feet, including water from both Greenland and Antarctica, as well as other glaciers based on land from around the world.”
MarkW says: “If you believe that the fact that “Glacier Girl” was found under 268 feet of ice means that the glaciers are 268 feet higher than they were 50 years ago, then you need to study up on how glaciers work. To grossly simplify it, snow falls at the top of the glacier…”
Smart snow–falls only at the top of the glacier. How does it know?
Don Easterbrook says:
February 7, 2013 at 10:43 am
[i]Somehow people who are predicting catastrophic rise of sea level (e.g. 69 ft) seem to have overlooked these facts.[/i]
Just those facts? Wow….had me fooled!
oops!
Chris Mooney hosts a podcast called “Point of Inquiry” where he interviews scientists and other public figures, usually liberal progressives, on the edge of science. A few of his recent guests have been Bill McKibben. Joe Romm, Paul Krugman and Phil Plait. He often rails against “false balance” in the media, but I think his podcast could use a little more balance, “false” or otherwise. So I would like to suggest he do a series of “Counterpoint of Inquiry” episodes. Here’s my top ten list of guests and topics:
10.) Steven Mosher and Tom Fuller. The topic could be their book, “Climategate: The Crutape Letters”. I didn’t think they came off all that well on WUWT TV, so they’re at the bottom of the list. Maybe they could do better on a podcast.
9.) Steve Milloy. Junk science with the skeptic skeptics love to hate.
8.) Ronald Bailey. Reason magazine’s science correspondent could give a libertarian perspective on science.
7.) Steven McIntyre. A counterpoint to his episode with Michael Mann.
6.) Duane Gish. Gish galloping with the original “Gish Galloper”.
5.) Peter huber. Author of the book, “The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy”.
4.) Willis Eschenbach. The amateur scientist.
3.) Christopher Monckton. The man the warmist love to hate.
2.) Anthony Watts. Science communication in blogs.
1.) Matt Ridley. A non liberal progressive who liberal progressives concede is a great science writer.
Gail Combs says:
February 7, 2013 at 9:23 am
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The glacier is not 268 feet higher, the plane is 268 feet lower. As the new snow falls, it pushes down the ice that is beneath it.
jorgekafkazar says:
February 7, 2013 at 11:21 am
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If you know of a method by which new snow can burrow through the glacier in order to deposit itself at the bottom, please be a chum and spill the beans.