by E. Calvin Beisner and J.C. Keister
How fast are Greenland and Antarctica losing ice?
If you trust the National Climate Assessment (NCA), you’ll think, “Very fast!” And that’s intentional. The aim is to provoke fear so the American public will support the Obama administration’s aim to spend $Trillions fighting global warming.
Here’s how the NCA (in Appendix 4, FAQ-L) depicts the rate of loss from the ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica:
Pretty steep declines, right? Downright scary.
But if there’s any way to depict trends guaranteed to be misleading, it’s depicting them in raw numbers without the context of proportion. The NCA should either have depicted the ice loss as percent—with graphs showing the whole span from 0 to 100—or as gigatons but spanning from 0 to the highest totals for the two locations.
What would the resulting graphs look like? To know that, you have to know the total mass of ice in both Greenland and Antarctica and the annual rate of loss. Neither is known very precisely, but working from widely accepted figures we ran the calculations. The results?
Greenland is losing about 0.1% of its ice per decade—that is, about 0.01% per year. At that rate, it will take a century for it to lose 1%.
Antarctica is losing about 0.0045% of its ice per decade—about 4.5/10,000ths of a percent per year. At that rate, it will take about 2,200 years for it to lose 1%.
Oh—and what would the graphs look like if drawn proportionally? Here you go:
No, the trend lines aren’t missing. They’re the red lines up at the 100% level of the graphs. Their slopes are so shallow that Greenland’s is barely perceptible—and Antarctica’s, not at all.
And the effect on sea level? Combined, about 1 millimeter per year—or about 3.3 inches by the end of this century.
Not quite so scared now?
But that’s not what the Obama administration intended. Now you know why it used the deceptive graphs.
E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., is Founder and National Spokesman of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. J.C. Keister, Jr., Ph.D., is a retired research physicist and mathematics professor and a contributing writer for the Cornwall Alliance.
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Presentation from:
Palaeoclimatology, oceanography and glaciology in the Helheim Glacier region
WORKSHOP
March 25 and 26 – 2010
Will we lose the southern dome? – the lesson from the geological past
Svend Funder
Natural History Museum
University of Copenhagen
Recent years’ rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet has shown that the southern dome is the ice sheet’s most vulnerable part. The southern ice sheet dome, the area south of c. 67°N, is a highland ice cap with its base c. 500 m a.s.l. It contains c. 15% of the Greenland ice sheet’s volume, equal to c. 1 m global sea level, and is characterised by very high accumulation and melting. Two of the most active outlets from the ice sheet, Jakobshavn Isbræ and Helheim Gletscher drain the saddle between the northern and southern ice sheet domes.
Can the southern dome’s response to past warming give us a clue to its fate in the future? ODP borings on the shelf have shown that the ice dome has existed, on and off, at least since the Miocene. Recent results from the DYE 3 ice core and other sources indicate that the dome
melted away, and gave way to forested mountains for the last time during marine isotope stage 11,
c. 400,000 years ago.
The southern dome, and of course the northern also, persisted in a reduced form during the warm Eemian interglacial (c. 125,000 years ago), when annual mean temperatures over Greenland were c. 5°C warmer than now for some millenia. During the last ice age the southeast coast of Greenland was one of the areas of major ice sheet growth, reaching the shelf edge at the last glacial maximum, c. 20,000 years ago, as shown by bathymetric studies. During the Holocene thermal maximum, c. 8,000 years ago, when annual mean temperatures were c. 2°C warmer than now for some thousands of years, modelling and GPS altimetry show that the southern dome was the most sensitive part of the ice sheet, retreating as much as 80 km behind its present front in some areas. After this, during the neoglacial the ice margin readvanced. In spite of the large scale changes in ice cover in this area, the Holocene isostatic history is peculiarly muted and characterised by low uplift. This can be interpreted in several ways, but does show an abnormal ice load history, when compared to other sectors of the ice sheet.
In general, the variable behaviour of the southern dome through the geological record contrasts with that of the much more resilient northern dome. Judged from this, we can expect a more direct and vigorous response to warming in the southern dome than in the much larger northern dome, but will it melt away for the first time in 400,000 years? – Probably not.
This is one of the many reasons so many of us call this whole thing a fraud.
Radionuclide decay dating of soil exposed around the margins of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet show that it quit retreating about 3000 years ago. Earth has been in a long-term cooling trend since then, at least, if not since the end of the Holocene Optimum about 5000 years ago.
This is not to say that the next glaciation is just around the corner, but this major repository of the planet’s fresh water is in no danger of disappearing, let alone even melting discernibly.
Those puny, puny ice losses for the end of this century assumes the trend continues. I question those losses in the first place. Where did they get those loss figures from?
Is there any possibility for room for error? The accuracy for Antarctica is amazing. Now back to other observations.
Good article, but it misses the bigger story.
I looked up the source of the data for ice melt. The title of Wouters et al 2013 is “Limits in detecting acceleration of ice sheet mass loss due to climate variability“. The abstract says
That is, previous claims of an acceleration in ice melt of the polar ice caps from GRACE are effectively declared statistically invalid. This includes following papers with the periods of data coverage:-
Velicogna 2009 – 2002 to 2009 data
Chen et al 2009 – Greenland only 2002 to 2009 data
Velicogna and Wahr 2005 – Greenland only 2002 to 2004 data
What is more, the headlines of a few years ago that claimed the Greenland ice cap was collapsing are also invalid. Without acceleration there is no collapse.
Posted more detail on this over at Judith’s. guest essay called SLR Tipping points maybe two weeks ago. The SLR alarm is much fuller of rich irony than just omitting total ice context.
BTW, add together the 1mm/year here, non- ice sheet glacial retreat (variously about 0.4mm/yr) plus ARGO estimated thermosteric rise (variously 0.6-0.8mm/year) and you define the closure problem. The total is substantially less than the sat altimetry measured 2.8mm/ year (ignoring modeled GIA, worse if it is included). It is possible all the numbers are off. Something sure is. Nice ‘all satellite’ example of the uncertainty monster.
Another way to relate all those gigatonnes of ice loss is against sea level rise.
It takes about 365 gigatonnes of ice to raise sea levels by just one millimeter. That means over 10 years the ice melt has contributed around one-third of the sea level rise recorded by the satellites.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
Put another way, polar ice melt is raising sea levels at the rate of 4 inches a century.
LaughingTarget: Thank you.
(Chemists think calcium carbonate is “slightly” soluble, and silicon dioxide is “insoluble”. Geologists know that SiO2 is “slightly” soluble and CaCO3 is highly soluble.)
So Obama wants to spend money on reducing the human impact on our planet. And this is a problem because..? Regardless of what you think about climate change, answer this – what is the terrible problem with trying to invest in our planets future, trying to make it a cleaner and healthier environment for us and future generations? No false data was presented.
Rud Istvan July 6, 2014 at 2:59 pm
You make a valid point about the measured sea level rise from satellites being far greater than polar ice melt. It can be theoretically accounted for by thermal expansion of the oceans. Further, it does not need any net heat uptake of the oceans, as thermal expansion of water varies greatly with temperature. All what you need is for a net heat transfer from the deep oceans towards the surface in the tropics, or a heat transfer from the polar regions towards the tropics of water near the surface.
Who WAS to blame? Man of course. Before 1950 AND 1950. It’s worse than we thought and we shoulda acted.
[A rare typo from your pen? “”1950 AND 1950” should be ?? .mod]
Were all those ice-bergs caused by the warmth or the cold? You decide.
I am sceptical of all the ice loss garbage. I suspect they are fiddling the figures, applying massive torture and bending the data. Even if they weren’t the numbers they give are just too small to tell us anything meaningful. And even if they are right there is nothing alarming in the numbers for the year 2100. I’m going for a beer.
you know how stupid this all looks…
..when you finally realize all they can do is extend a trend
Can Net Ice Gain (or net ice loss) be determined from the GRACE satellite?
Probably.
But, as rgbatduke noted above, ONLY if all of the corrections and assumptions and trends and errors are “corrected” correctly. Make an error? The results are wrong.
The most significant are the assumption about
(1) the initial states (masses and elevation above sea level) of the rock UNDERNEATH the ice domes above sea level on the continent of Antarctica and between the two high coastal ranges of Greenland.
(2) Once the exact shape of the rock underneath the ice domes is known, THEN you have to model/assume/guess/estimate the changes in height of the underlying rock correctly over time.
(3) Ice and rock are two different densities obviously, and those densities change over depth of the ice, depth of the rock below the ice, but “rock” itself has different densities. In different areas.
(4) You have to make measurements (or assumptions) about the shape of the ice dome above the underlying rock. The latter is “easy” compared to the first three: but, it is NOT simple.
To date, I am aware of only 4 deep core drills in Greenland that have been used to “calibrate” the assumptions needed in GRACE calculations. (The GRACE ice loss “figures” are not really measurements -> Measurements are only made between the relative distances between the two satellites over time. Every thing else is calculations based on estimates from those measurements – with error bars necessarily increasing at each step! ) Two drill holes are complete: They were near the two coastal mountain ranges on each side of Greenland. Another was in process, but incomplete somewhere in the middle of the icecap. A third was partially successful, but had to be abandoned. The resulting “map” of the rock underneath Greenland is like trying to determine whether the bed of the Mississippi River is going up or down after earthquakes in Memphis by measuring the mountain top heights twice: Once in the Appalachian, and the second at Denver Colorado. Then declaring a 100 year trend in river depth trend because the mountains moved!
Remember too that the “rate of Greenland ice loss” cannot explain such “gains” in ice cap depth as the airplane recovered under 270 feet of “new” ice after only 70 years exposure since it landed in WWII. Could that plane have “sublimated” or melted down through the ice? Well – no. Airplanes are very, very light, and their wings and fuselage provide a wide area upon which the aircraft will “float” after the wheels melt down.
And even less is known about rock depths and contours in the Antarctic!
Make the wrong assumption about the weight of the rock under the ice, the wrong assumption about whether that rock is moving up or down with respect to sea level? You cannot make conclusions about the rates of ice loss or ice gain above that unknown, moving rock.
One must not forget that the time that the Greenland ice cap is predicted to melt by the IPCC, (should AGW accelerate as predicted), is “millenia”. Millenia is the plural of millenium thus the IPCC is giving it a minimum of two thousand years and an open ended maximum.
One has to admit that this is a case of forward planning taken to an extreme! Even the Julian Calenda did not last that long.
Cheers
Roger
http://www.rogerfromnewzealand.wordpress.com
“Loss from the two Polar Ice Sheets”
??
When did Greenland become part of the polar ice sheet?
Manic, thermostatic SLR is the ‘ocean heat expansion’. I cited it, as measured by ARGO. And, since it is absolute temperature dependent ( seawater is densest at about 4C) the upper 700 meters ( roughly the thermocline) has to account for most of the thermal expansion.. Even though the deeper ocean has much more column, it has almost no temperature variation. that can be worked out both theoretically and empirically.
There remains a large closure problem. Is in the literature. The Three recent peer reviewed attempts to achieve SLR closure over short time periods within the last decade laughably disagree with each other enough to prove definitively the main uncertainty monster point. Not to mention proceed from net SLR being 2.4 or 2.5 rather than 2.8 ( they all had to ignore the GIA add even to get close.)
The best part from a ‘if the glove doesn’t fit you must acquit’ standpoint is that all three recent closure attempts necessarily posited SLOWING SLR, the opposite of what the CAGW meme asserts. Falsification through uncertainty. Still falsification.
The world is a big place. A millimeter is a tiny amount. Go from there.
Reading from my phone, so I can’t see if this has been discussed. The fact that the authors believe that Adam and Eve are the original humans does not lend authority to their argument. To believe that, one must have faith and reject geology. Nothing wrong with that. Except it puts one in the company of the consensus. I won’t comment further on this theological debate here on a science blog.
Steve Case says:
July 6, 2014 at 1:15 pm
===========================================================
I’d love to see a flash graphic of the before and after temperature profiles for Argo. I used to look at them BA (Before Adjustment). But now,PA, I never look though I am sure there is something interesting there. Lost confidence in it.
Lou says:
July 6, 2014 at 3:21 pm
So Obama wants to spend money on reducing the human impact on our planet. And this is a problem because..?
It’s a problem because the “problem” (according to IPCC) is HUGE and will require ZILLIONS od dollars.
Think of it as an insurance issue; if the cost of insuring against a particular event is greater than the cost of re of the event, don’t bother insuring. Businesses face these sorts of decisions daily and take appropriate actions, because it’s THEIR money that would be wasted. Governments, on the other hand, spend OUR money.
… lost control .. should read greater that the cost of repairing the damage resulting from the event…
ren says:
July 6, 2014 at 1:23 pm
=========================================
Ren, earlier today I was looking at Earth nullschool. I noticed a very active jet stream in the lower southern hemisphere. Would I be right in thinking that the flow is well above average?
These declines are so small that the error bands probably show that the estimates of change are not significantly different from zero.
The increase in sea ice in the Antarctic probably means that more ice is sliding down slope into the sea. This probably indicates that the mass of the Antarctic glaciers is increasing, but at a rate not statistically different from zero. After all the mass of sea ice is small in comparison with the mass of ice in the Antarctic glaciers.
Someone with better access to the data that I have should have a go at estimating how much of the annual Antarctic precipitation is represented by the increase in sea ice.
That would indicate whether or not it is PLAUSIBLE that the increase in sea ice is caused by an increase of snowfall over Antarctica.
An increase in cloudiness might suggest that Svensmark’s theory applies..
Maybe. However, it is certainly plausible. Nobody really knows, though. We do know that something (or more likely, some combination of somethings) creates a climate “set point” that it loosely oscillates about, and that that set point slowly wanders. We do not have even a semi-empirical or solid heuristic “theory” of how or why it wanders, and cannot dream at this point of predicting its motion (which depends in some detail on how the climate sloshes around in its vicinity as well as on some presumed set of external but unpredictable drivers like the state of the Sun). Then, the climate is a highly nonlinear, chaotic system and doesn’t really “need” any glib explanation for the glacial/interglacial cycle, or for bobbles such as the LIA and MWP and the modern warm period.
What we do know is that if one takes CO_2 levels over geological time as known from radiometric proxies, and plots it against global average temperature over geological as known from radiometric proxies and the fossil record, there is damn-all correlation between the two. This “anti-hockey stick” graph should be the cover art for AR6, which should be the last AR of the IPCC before the IPCC disbands, or repurposes itself looking for the advent of the next glacial episode, or whatever. If it had been plotted first, instead of last, the world would be a trillion or two dollars wealthier and maybe 30 million people (most of them children) who are the casualties of the ongoing “climate alarmism catastrophe” would still be alive.
But I do like your theory for at least part of the macro behavior for glaciation, when combined with albedo effects and the unknown but strongly correlated Milankovitch (orbital) effects and the possibility of some sort of aerosol feedback from isostatic rebound vulcanism and the variation of thermohaline oceanic circulation and who knows, long term variable behavior of the Sun acting as a de facto “trigger” when orbital factors destabilize the interglacial phase. There is no lack of possible causes, in other words, and they all probably contribute in a strongly coupled nonlinear dynamical system, or rather set of three coupled systems, two Navier-Stokes (ocean and atmosphere) and one magnetohydrodynamici (that is, even more unsolvable, the sun). As long as this system is uncomputable and heuristic models fail, we Do Not Know, even though people are eager to claim that we do.
rgb