Studies do not address sea level rise projections alleged by misleading media headlines
Guest essay by Larry Hamlin
As seems to always be the case the climate fear propaganda news media have completely mislead the public once again regarding climate related issues this time by alleging claims of 4 meter high future sea level rise increases supposedly addressed in two recent studies which performed analysis of glacier melt behavior of six large glaciers in West Antarctica.
One study was published in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) and titled “Sustained increase in ice discharge from the Amundsen Sea Embayment, West Antarctica, from 1973 to 2013“. This study is available here:
http://www.ess.uci.edu/researchgrp/erignot/files/grl51433.pdf
The second study was published in Science and titled “Marine Ice Sheet Collapse Potentially Under Way for the Thwaites Glacier Basin, West Antarctica“. This study is available here:
http://sciences.blogs.liberation.fr/files/glacier-thwaites.pdf
Both studies evaluate the relatively recent melt rate history of these glaciers with one focusing on the use observed satellite data to estimate melt rate behavior while the other uses computer models to estimate melt rate behavior.
Amazingly enough and considering how the press manufactured headlines about sea level rise increases being determined from these studies neither of the studies addresses or make any claims about the impact of their research results on specific future sea level rise projections.
In fact GLC study mentions nothing specific about future sea level rise projections while the Science study clearly notes that their research models “are not coupled to a global climate model to provide forcing nor do they include an ice-shelf cavity-circulation model to derive melt rates. Few if any such fully coupled models presently exist (13). As such, our simulations do not constitute a projection of future sea level in response to projected climate forcing.”
Also unreported by the same climate alarmist propaganda focused media were the significant qualifications, limitations and cautions noted in these studies concerning their glacier melt research findings.
The GRL published study noted for example the following qualifiers regarding its analysis:
“These observations are a possible sign of the progressive collapse of this sector in response to the high melting of its buttressing ice shelves by the ocean.”
“Until numerical ice sheet models coupled with realistic oceanic forcing are able to replicate these observations, projections of the evolution of this sector of West Antarctica should be interpreted with caution.”
The Science published study contained the following similarly related qualifiers regarding its analysis:
“Although our simple melt parameterization suggests that a full-scale collapse of this sector may be inevitable, it leaves large uncertainty in the timing. Thus, ice-sheet models fully coupled to ocean/climate models are required to reduce the uncertainty in the chronology of a collapse.”
Why aren’t these significant research finding qualifiers regarding the preliminary nature of these studies results addressed by the main stream media?
The main stream media manufactured numbers alleging sea level rise projections not addressed at all in either of these studies and then compounded that alarmist portrayal by concealing very significant scientific qualifiers noted in both studies regarding their glacier melt rate research findings.
Even some of the climate media have problems with how this entire climate alarmist episode has been handled. New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin wrote an article in that paper in 2009 addressing the glacier study work underway in West Antarctica titled “Study: West Antarctic Melt a Slow Affair” where he challenged the use of the word “collapse” in describing the melt behavior of that region. This article included the following observation:
“Over all, the loss of the West Antarctic ice from warming is appearing “more likely a definite thing to worry about on a thousand-year time scale but not a hundred years,”
With latest round of speculative media climate alarmism regarding the West Antarctica region glacier research Revkin has written yet another article titled “Consider Clashing Scientific and Societal Meanings of ‘collapse’ When Reading Antarctic Ice News” again challenging the use of the word “collapse”. He offers the following observations in this article about the recent alarmist news reporting:
News articles by The Times, Time, the Associated Press and others capture the basics in two new papers, one on six West Antarctic glaciers that appear to have nothing holding back eventual disappearance, accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, and the other taking a closer look at one of those ice masses, the Thwaites Glacier, posted online today by the journal Science.
Some headlines are completely overwrought — as with this NBC offering: “West Antarctic Ice Sheet’s Collapse Triggers Sea Level Warning.” This kind of coverage could be interpreted to mean there’s an imminent crisis. It’s hard to justify that conclusion given the core findings in the studies. (Am I trying to maintain a hold on reality or am I a “scold”?)
Take the Science paper: Marine Ice Sheet Collapse Potentially Under Way for the Thwaites Glacier Basin, West Antarctica. Using ice-flow models and observations, the researchers, led by Ian Joughin of the University of Washington, concluded:
“Except possibly for the lowest-melt scenario, the simulations indicate that early-stage collapse has begun. Less certain is the time scale, with the onset of rapid (>1 mm per year of sea-level rise) collapse in the different simulations within the range of 200 to 900 years.
To translate a bit, that means sometime between 200 and 900 years from now the rate of ice loss from this glacier could reach a volume sufficient to raise sea levels about 4 inches (100 millimeters) a century. At that point, according to the paper, ice loss could pick up steam, with big losses over a period of decades.* But in a phone conversation, Joughin said the modeling was not reliable enough to say how much, how soon.”
This on going West Antarctica reporting frenzy clearly establishes that the climate alarmist news media have abandoned any pretense of objectivity regarding climate reporting and become soldiers dedicated to conducting an alarmist propaganda campaign that is built on manufacturing misleading, inaccurate and erroneous headline grabbing articles unsupported by published science to support their flawed cause.
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Based on GRACE satellite data, the melting of Antarctic ice sheet is equivalent to 0.19 mm per year or 1.9 cm per century. LOL Sea level in most coastal areas around the world rise by 75 cm twice a day due to high tide. Why don’t the media report that with great alarm?
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v491/n7425/full/nature11621.html
@tommy E
But on my Mercator projection maps West Antactica is on the right.
Chad’s version was the best. I know the shape of the continent. I know where the Weddel Sea is. I know where the Ross Sea is. I know where South America is. Job done.
The versions involving the Prime Meridian were excessively wordy, but they helped me to understand why the bits were named West and East.
Discovery magazine is hyping this with the discredited Steig, et al. warming graphic:
http://news.discovery.com/earth/global-warming/west-antarctic-ice-sheet-has-begun-to-collapse-1405141.htm
Everybody seems to have forgotten the far more imminent threat (maybe in 100 years) of a lethal, devastating tsunami which will occur when when a slab of rock falls ,yes collapses, horror of horrors into the sea from the island of Palma in the Canary Islands .,Morrocco and North Africa will face tidal waves over 300 ft high , whilst some time later waves 164 ft high will hit the eastern seaboard of the USA at more than 500mph. Where is the alarm over this ?
http://rense.com/general13/tidal.htm
A sense of proportion urgently required.
OOOOOOPs I forgot , many prominent scientists and influential Government advisers , do believe that Man made CO2 may be directly attributable to creating this event, urgent meetings to set up funding by an IPCC group,with really really ,clever and more clever than you scientists, to investigate how mitigating emissions and carbon sequestration may help to prevent this cataclysmic event .
The cause of the collapse is attributed to intrusion of Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW) at the grounding line of the glaciers. Is there some contention that recent AGW has warmed this deep current in the last 50 years?
From wiki “Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW) is a designation given to the water mass in the Pacific and Indian oceans that essentially characterizes a mixing of other water masses in the region. A distinguishing characteristic is the water is not formed at the surface, but rather by a blending of other water masses, including the North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW), the Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW), and the Pacific Intermediate Water Masses.”
CDW is not formed from surface waters, so when was the heat deposited in the CDW?
Hmm . . . This may be Trenberth’s cue.
I have run across a few papers that show the West Antarctic Ice Sheet in this area has been cooling for at least 2,000 years. And this is from several ice-cores drilled here (using dO18 isotopes which is by far the best temperature proxy we have).
I just don’t know what to say. How can these people sleep at night.
The first one is actually from Eric Steig last year.
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n5/images/ngeo1778-f3.jpg
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~qinghua/pdf/23.pdf
And this one is a similar high resolution sampling over the last 2,000 years.
http://www.igsoc.org:8080/journal/57/204/j10J207.pdf
And then the PaleoArchive has another yearly resolution archive of the data for the last 100 years. It shows no real temperature increase over the last 100 years but a very warm 1940 period then cooling and the last few years up to the year 2000 are warmer again.
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/antarctica/west-antarctic-iso2008.txt
When combined with the actually “cooling” southern ocean, one has to conclude it is just a corrupt field which will publish anything that promotes the cause.
Re: Bill Illis
I thought this was an interesting paper attributing intrusion of CDW onto the continental shelf to tropical Pacific SSTs.
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~david/Steig_etal_2012.pdf
If one looks at the location of the active volcano discovered last fall you will see it’s melt water discharge would flow into the CDW directly upstream of these glaciers. Now, what did I do with my Occam’s Razor?
Please, the past tense of “mislead” is “misled”, not “mislead”. The word spelled “lead” but pronounced “led” is only the metal.
Ian M
Breaking news
Lennart Bengtsson Resigns from GWPF.
Apparently fear and derision , intolerance and the threat of exclusion from his scientific work have led him to resign.
How very sad that a person can no longer express an opinion without being vivisected by the warmists. This is seriously bad news all round.
Ah, yes, the joys of living on a spinning ball. While North and South are defined by our planet’s axis, East and West are relative to our current location, and so labeling locations with those terms ends up being more or less arbitrary.
RoHa, you got a geographic but not a geologic answer, that is also relevant to the media spin.
The Greenwich meridian also roughly corresponds to the transantarctic mountains. The East ice sheet is growing, and because of the underlying bedrock is stable except on the margins, just like Greenland. The WAIS sheet west of the mountain range slopes to the sea, so can ‘slide’ off via glacial creep.. It is doing so in three areas. The largest is the Ross Ice shelf, which is recently very slowly losing mass. That is why the Andrill program looked at the Ross grounding line. Stable last 4000 years, and no evidence of larger deterioration in the warmer Eemian. Second largest is the Ronne. It is gaining ice mass, so subtracting from SLR. Third is the collection of six much smaller glacier flows into the Amundsen sea. That is what NASA deceptively called major. In reality all six equal 10% of Ross plus Ronne. Thwaites is the smallest of these Six. It is the one which models said was unstable, and would ‘unstoppably’ collapse over the next perhaps 900 years IF present trend continued for that long. And that got projected to WAIS to gin up the four foot SLR nonsense in the MSM. All geologically and glaciologically wrong.
At the very least, NASA deceptively omitting key context, and the MSM knows little to nothing about Antarctica and is derelict in not reporting the record sea ice extent. Perhaps MSM fact check with experts like Prof. Turney and his Ship of Fools.
Ross, Ronne, and WAIS ‘tipping points’ are an essay for the next book fortuitously just completed last month. Now I have to substantially rewrite to incorporate this new nonsense.
I’m not a scientist but I want to understand if possible. Help me understand this Antarctica sea ice extent thing you just mentioned. I don’t get how you automatically presume that a growing sea ice extent proves AGW is not happening. I understand how intuitively one would think so, but science is constantly throwing counter-intuitive stuff at us. What exactly is the mechanism making the sea grow? It is already well below freezing there so saying its getting colder doesn’t explain it.
The Guardian article by Suzanne Goldenburg leads her story about the West Antarctic glacier melt with the subheading 4 meter sea level rise will happen. Her article is here:
wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/guardian_goldenberg_antarcticslr.jpg
Thank you, Larry, for this valuable review of the GRL and Science studies. Thanks also Rud for your comments on “context.” If you have links to relevant data on relative mass of the different WAIS ice shelves, please post in a follow-up comment.
My two cents here is that the inevitable demise of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is old news, although the acceleration in flow and grounding line retreat found by the GRL and Science studies is newsworthy even if hyped by the MSM.
Back in 1999, Science published a study by Conway et al. mapping Ross Ice Shelf grounding line retreat since the last glacial maximum (LGM). The researchers found that “most recession occurred in the middle to late Holocene in the absence of substantial sea level or climate forcing.” The researchers conclude that “the future of the WAIS may have been predetermined when grounding-line retreat was triggered in early Holocene time. Continued recession and perhaps even complete disintegration of the WAIS within the present interglacial period could well be inevitable.”
When might the “inevitable occur”? Conway et al. estimate that if the Ross grounding continues to pull back at the 1990s rate, complete disintegration occurs in about 7,000 years.
A chart from the study tracing Ross ground line retreat from the LGM to 7,600 yrs. BP, 6,800 yrs. BP, 3,200 yrs. BP, and the present is available on p. 95 of my critique of An Inconvenient Truth: http://cei.org/pdf/5820.pdf.
For those with a subscription to Science, the reference is: Conway, H., B.L. Hall, G.H. Denton, A.M. Gades, and E.D. Waddington. 1999. Past and future grounding-line retreat of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Science, 286: 280-283.
So you are saying it is all natural, nothing to be concerned about, we humans should just carry on as usual. You say the subjects studies are useful but then proceed to step on their message. The studies, or at least the report of the studies we are commenting on, seem to be saying the melting processes are speeding up due to AGW. If you are going to blow off the science, at least first state accurately what is being said. Then you all can move on to your stories about the hysterical media.
I know I’m prob going to get trashed for my ignorance but here goes anyway….. Warm water is undercutting the glacier, causing it to melt and slide easier into the ocean. Now…that melted water is flowing into the ocean where, over the past several years, it has frozen into record levels because fresh water freezes easier than salt water. My question is this….Where is the warm water coming from? If the sea ice is growing at a record pace, how is it that the water is melting the glacier. And again….take it easy on me…I’m new at this.
Kenny, I’m not a scientist but I think I get the jist of what is being said. The “feet” of the glacier and ice sheets reaches over the continent edge down to the bottom of the ocean serving as a bulwark holding the land ice in place. The warm water you speak of is the deeper ocean water these bulwark feet sit in. Relatively speaking, the deeper water has warmed more than the upper surface water has warmed. I guess that warmer, deeper water is part of the global ocean dynamics we hear about where the “missing” heat of the past 15 years has been going.
Climate Science needs a Six Sigmoidoscopy. Gage R and R, real statistics, etc, etc.
The headline “West Antarctic Ice Sheet’s Collapse Triggers Sea Level Warning.” has become really hard to find on NBC News. It was still in my browser history at “http://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/west-antarctic-ice-sheets-collapse-triggers-sea-level-warning-n103221”. The reporter, Alan Boyle, should be called out by name for submitting such a misleading headline, it’s akin to yelling “Fire!” in a crowded movie theater. A news organization like NBC News has such a far reaching influence they should as accountable as advertisers are for making false or misleading claims.
Yet more, this time from the New Yorker‘s blog:
Elizabeth Kolbert quotes Rahmstorf as saying in a tweet: “One of the feared tipping points of the climate system appears to have been crossed.” She also quotes the headline
of a Mother Jones article on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet thusly:
““This Is What a Holy Shit Moment for Global Warming Looks Like.”
She also snidely invokes the infamous precautionary principle:
Mind-boggling. Here is the link:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/05/the-west-antarctica-ice-sheet-melt-defending-the-drama.html
Chris, just because something sounds exaggerated to you should not be cause to say there is not one shred of information there to be worthy of consideration. It is an equal, or greater exaggeration and leap of faith to presume that everything these scientist are saying is bogus.
The National Post disappoints :
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/05/13/gary-clement-on-climate-change/
“The Ross Ice Shelf retreated 15 feet per day from 1900 to 1930. As far as I can tell, New York and LA are still there.”
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/05/12/should-sea-level-rise-include-sea-level-rise/
@matayaya
“What exactly is the mechanism making the sea grow? It is already well below freezing there so saying its getting colder doesn’t explain it.”
Sea ice melts on summer and grows on winter. If winter is colder than previous season, sea ice coverage increases. The melting on Antarctic land ice occurs mostly below sea level. Deep water is warmer than Antarctic sea surface. That’s why the sea surface is frozen but underneath is liquid.
To matayaya:
Except, sir, that the so-called GCM models, predicted a steady rise
of approximately 0.2 deg. centigrade/decade. That has not happened.
Since 1997, one of the major data sets–RSS–has quite literally shown
no rise for over 17 years. All the others have shown no statistically
significant rise for periods ranging up to, I believe, 21 years.
Now, notice one further thing. In 2008, when NOAA put out their
“state of the climate report”, they included the following statement:
In other word, on their own terms, the climate scientists at NOAA
have given a testable, falsifiable prediction for their models vs. reality–which
at least one of the major data sets has already met. To any scientist–and that’s
me, sir–that means that their modelling of the real world temperature is incomplete
or wrong.
How much warm water can exist under the Antarctic sea ice?
Answer none.
The water next to Antarctica has three different states.
– frozen sea ice at -1.9C (getting as cold as -30C when exposed to the air) and with little salt content;
– very cold -1.8C water with high salinity (32 psi) that has been expelled from the sea ice above it – the next 100 metres of water under the sea ice;
– very cold -1.8C water with very high salinity (over 35 psi) which makes this the coldest most dense liquid water on the planet (which means it immediately starts sinking and becomes the continuing flow of the Antarctic Bottom Water which sinks to the bottom of the ocean and spreads out at the very bottom of the southern oceans wherever it can flow to – and which eventually finds the lowest channels in the Pacific Ocean and flows into the northern Pacific somewhere (which we don’t really know).
The biggest source of Antarctic Bottom Water is in the middle of the Weddell Sea under the sea ice with another main source under the sea ice in the Ross Sea..
There is no warm water around Antarctica; there is only very cold sea ice, there is very cold less salty water and there is very cold more salty water.
Warm water is only in the imagination of climate-science-fiction-writers.
Now in the Arctic, there is a layer about 100 metres to 500 metres deep which is warmer but this has more to do with the stratification of the density of the water. Sea ice being the least dense, floating on top. High salinity cold water immediately under the ice sinking to the bottom, moderate density high salinity warmer water stuck in a layer, very cold -1.5C high salinity dense water at the bottom – Arctic Bottom Water – flowing out of the Arctic through 2 main 3000 metre deep channels which then flows out to cover the bottom of the Atlantic all the way down to about 15S (Antarctic Bottom Water which is denser than even this water is mostly below 15S in the Atlantic not having enough flow pressure to move beyond this latitude.
Actual Thermo-Haline Ocean Circulation System versus the myths of climate-science-fiction.
Are you saying there is nothing to the premise in the recent reports that Antarctica is losing glacier and land ice beyond normal give and take? Are you saying there is no trend of the global oceans warming that might have some impact on the Southern Ocean?
Maybe you can also help me understand how the increased Antarctic sea ice extent proves the global trend is toward cooling and not warming. How can getting a bit colder create more sea ice where it is already well below freezing?
You say thermohaline ocean circulation vs myth. So the top of atmosphere measurements showing more energy coming in than going out is also myth? I’m skeptical.