I suppose they haven’t learned anything from the last beat down skeptics gave them on their Statue of Liberty Fiasco
Bjørn Lomborg writes:
National Geographic is at it again. They present the world “if all the ice melted” — and they have the temerity to suggest it will happen with more global warming.
“If we continue adding carbon to the atmosphere, we’ll very likely create an ice-free planet, with an average temperature of perhaps 80 degrees Fahrenheit instead of the current 58.”
This, of course, is only the outcome of continuing ever larger carbon emissions for many hundreds of years, something that no one is realistically expecting.
Could we please have a sensible, non-scare conversation back at the venerable National Geographic?
National Geographic’s last scare: http://on.fb.me/1iJR5t6
And here is their new one: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/09/rising-seas/if-ice-melted-map
===============================================================
[Anthony] Meanwhile both Arctic and Antarctic ice are within normal parameters of standard deviation:
Arctic is about 1 standard deviation below the average line:
![N_stddev_timeseries[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/n_stddev_timeseries1.png?quality=75)
The Antarctic is above two standard deviations:
![S_stddev_timeseries[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/s_stddev_timeseries1.png?quality=75)
Globally, sea ice is at normal:
![global.daily.ice.area.withtrend[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/global-daily-ice-area-withtrend1.jpg?quality=83)
Related articles
- The ice is not melting, yet still the scaremongers blunder on (junkscience.com)
- National Geographic rising sea level prophecy – cause for concern or absurd fairytale? (wattsupwiththat.com)
jono1066 says:
November 5, 2013 at 1:45 pm
I don[‘]t see the big problem …
The lovely new land in the Antarctic and Greenland would be dark 6 months of the year (so would the tropics (as they are now) but not all in one long period).
pwl says:
November 5, 2013 at 12:37 pm
Thanks for the Greenland calculation. Now run the numbers for the West & East Antarctic Ice Sheets. The EAIS has existed for over 30 million years, starting when Earth was much warmer than now & CO2 much higher.
If National Geographic’s non-scientific content increases, here’s a map of what the pages would look like in 50 years: http://www.madmagazine.com/
I’m with Jono. Looks like I’ll be living on beachfront property pretty soon.
Speedoes and Magaritas for me. Pour on the coal.
😉
Yawn.
So what? It can’t happen. As others have pointed out, there isn’t enough
sequestered FF (Fossil Fuel) to create enough CO2 to melt all the ice.
If we tried, the plants would just love it and all the little beasties in the seas
which created all the lime-stones and chalks would soon soak it all up.
But no, won’t happen. We’re not in control despite what the Witch Hunters
think. We’re in an Ice Age. To be a wee bit more precise, we’re in the
Holocene Interstadial (about the 17th or 18th Interstadial) of the Quaternary
or Pleistocene Ice Age.
The Ice Age is about 2.5 MegaYears old, It’s very young, as Ice Ages go.
It’s got another 60 or more MegaYears to run before this planet returns to
ice-free conditions.
Ice Ages are made up of Stadials (the icy cold bits) and Interstadials
(the warmer less icy bits). In this Ice Age, stadials have lasted from
about 40kYears (in the early days) to about 100kYears for the
more recent ones. Hmm, it must be getting colder.
Interstadials (the warm bits between glaciations), are not as long as the
Stadials. To quote that untrusted and unreliable source, Wikipedia,
`most Interstadials last about 5kYears.’ The last glaciation (Wisconson
Glaciation) melted about 12kYears ago. So we must be nearly due for
another glaciation if this interstadial has lasted 12kYears already.
According to this (the Wiki) source and others such as NG, the
Milankovich Cycles trigger the glaciations. (So where-abouts are
we in the current MC?)
Now, NG should know all the above. Most, if not all, of it was published
in the NG pages over the last four or five decades. Have they got such
short memories to not know it? Or do they not read or believe any of
what they publish? They certainly seem very short of intellectual capacity
to not take any of it into account. How and why can they think their own
readers can’t remember and put all this together, to be able to publish
such bare-faced scare-mongering? Shame on you NG.
Perhaps it’s just as well I’ve always read, and liked reading. Other People’s
NGs …
In all seriousness though, lets ask the question “what if…?”
First thing to observe is water is heavier than ice. So if all this extra water is compressing the Pacific basin, the land around the edges (Oregon California Peru Chile Japan Russia) is going to be pushed up. Spectacular earthquakes and eruptions will occur as the ocean plate is subducted by the coastal plates, but the net effect will be slim to no change in apparent sea level.
On the bright side: San Francisco’s death grip on California politics will be shaken up.
“If all the ice melted.”
To be followed by:
If the moon crashed into the earth…
If a frog had wings…
If your Auntie had balls…
lowercasefred says:
November 5, 2013 at 2:23 pm
“If all the ice melted.”
To be followed by:
If the moon crashed into the earth…
If a frog had wings…
If your Auntie had balls…
==============
and my all time favorite Marine Corps Gunnery Sgt comment:
Yeah, and IF crickets had machine guns, crows wouldn’t mess with’em, would they?(language severely modified for the children’s sake.
Why focus on the “what if” part of NG’s Rising Seas topic? There is a feature article as well:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/09/rising-seas/folger-text
“In a state exposed to hurricanes as well as rising seas, people like John Van Leer, an oceanographer at the University of Miami, worry that one day they will no longer be able to insure—or sell—their houses. “If buyers can’t insure it, they can’t get a mortgage on it. And if they can’t get a mortgage, you can only sell to cash buyers,” Van Leer says. “What I’m looking for is a climate-change denier with a lot of money.”
And why bring in sea ice extent? Melting of sea ice will not produce sea level rise (but note that sea ice volume is on a downward trend), but thermal expansion of ocean waters will (oceans are warming) and so will loss of glacier ice (they are declining in total, a few glaciers may increase because of increased precipitation though), and greenland ice (increasing loss has been observed), and antarctic ice (increased loss in total, west antarctic losing much, east antarctic gaining some because of increased precipitation but not enough to undo west antarctic loss).
Bjorn Lomborg says, “This, of course, is only the outcome of continuing ever larger carbon emissions for many hundreds of years, something that no one is realistically expecting.”
This is ignorant scaremongering from Bjorn Lomborg, A completely idiotic statement. There is no way in many hundreds of years we could ever get to an average of 80 degrees. The effect of increased CO2 is always diminishing – the greatest impact occurs over the first 100 PPM.
This guy is an embarrassment to all serious scientists.
“…if the sea level rises 216 feet…”
I’m still above sea level 74′ see proper planning prevents p*** poor performance or in this case drowning.
Sisi,
What’s your point? That CO2 is causing a loss of Antarctic ice? Sorry, but that is wrong.
And your snide comment that WUWT games the ratings is equally wrong. Anthony has gone out of his way to instruct readers to not game the Weblog Awards by voting more than once. He has posted those instructions in every Weblog vote. OTOH, alarmist blogs crow about how many votes they have gamed in that way. So your complaint is typical alarmist projection.
You just cannot face the fact that your side is in the minority, and losing the debate. If you would stick to verifiable, testable science, instead of making ad hominem remarks abot the Koch’s, you would start to have some credibility.
This is why I no longer subscribe to National Geographic. I grew up with it as my Grandparents, and, later, parents subscribed. Such a shame.
What’s ‘National Geographic’?
It sounds like some sort of hero-less Saturday morning cartoon show? Lots of disaster hype for kids to fantasize mighty mouse heroic ‘save the day’ dreams?
After Peter Gleick committed forgery and identity theft to smear Heartland Institute, National Geographic rewarded him with a high profile blog. IMO, that makes National Geographic accomplices after the fact.
Oops! slight oversight.
/sarc
My arithmetic doesn’t agree with theirs, either.
They say that melting 5,000,000 cubic miles of ice would raise the oceans 216 feet. I don’t think that’s right.
216 ft x 12 in/ft x 25.4 mm/in = 65,836.8 mm
5,000,000 / 65,836.8 = 75.9 cubic miles of ice per 1 mm of sea-level rise.
But I calculate the ratio as 94.7 cubic miles of ice per i mm of sea-level rise.
The oceans cover about 3.618×10^8 sq-km, so a one mm global average increase in sea-level requires 10^-3 m x (3.618×10^14 m^2) = 3.618 x 10^11 cubic meters of water. A cubic meter of fresh water weighs 1000 kg, so (disregarding the salinity/density effects of mixing fresh meltwater with seawater) a one mm increase in sea-level requires about 3.618 x 10^14 kg = 361.8 gigatonnes. Ice has a density of about 0.9167, so that’s about 394.6 cubic km, which is 94.67 cubic miles.
In other words, by my arithmetic, about 94.7 cubic miles of ice must melt and run into the ocean to raise the seas by one millimeter (and a bit more than that if you raise it a lot, due to increasing ocean surface area as the coastlines retreat). So, unless I made a mistake, melting 5 million cubic miles of ice would only raise the oceans about 172 feet, not 216 feet.
Did I make a mistake, or did National Geographic?
OMG I will cycle to work today to try to stop the entire Antarctic ice sheet from melting. It is the least I can do in the face of such human tragedy. [/sarc]
Steve Keohane says:
“Cancelled my subscription 20 years ago. My father had all issues back into the late 40′s…”
Not to worry, Steve, every year there is a new DVD available with every past issue of NG. No need to clutter up the garage with paper copies.
Excellent comments in this thread! Some global warming funnies:
click1
click2
click3
I thought Earth’s average temperature was 52 F, not 58 F.
Yea. Scaremongering alright. Still, it is interesting thought. In the Eocene the earth was ice free at both poles, is this correct? If so, would the oceans have still been stratified by temperature as they are today? I mean just as a glass of icewater is kept close to freezing throughout until the ice has melted, wouldn’t the same be true of the oceans? If I drill a well in the middle of the continent, geothermal gradient will get me into quite hot temperatures by 12,000 ft, but the ocean is near freezing at that depth. Without ice at either pole, what would the temp profile of the oceans be like. Would geothermal heat be significant?
How about the Biblical Flood…when the waters rose thousands of feet…and only Noah’s party survived…lots of people believe that was literally true
How about them showing what the world would look like when the sun turns into a red giant or super nova or the moon leaves orbit or it gets hit by a comet/large asteroid all things that might could may happen sooner or later and mankind needs to know (worry) about!
James Bull
We need another verse –
If all the ice had melted…
Or is this the staff at GISS morning song.
sisi says:
but note that sea ice volume is on a downward trend
============================================
eh? Wrong.
The Southern Hemisphere is just coming out of its winter and into its
summer. At the beginning of October (that’s just last month1!) Antarctic
sea ice was covering a record sized extent! That’s an upward trend!
The Southern Ocean’s pack ice area has been increasing steadily, decade
on decade since at least the 1950s.
it’s only the Arctic Ocean’s pack ice which has been melting away.
This winter, it’s starting to look as though that trend may be reversing.