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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It’s futile and therefore wasteful. See http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/04/message-to-the-president-data-shows-co2-reduction-is-futile/
What has that to do with reducing CO2 emissions? The manufacture of renewables dirties the planet–and so does the disposal of them, when they reach the end of their lifespan. And the resistance to building coal-power plants in developing countries means that the planet will be dirtied by the burning of dung, firewood, and kerosene.
Goldminor
Look at the polar vortex.
http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/10hPa/orthographic=29.71,-82.75,276
Below apparent blocking by ozone.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat_a_f/gif_files/gfs_t70_sh_f00.gif
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/blocking/real_time_sh/500gz_anomalies_sh.gif
It’s simple: the plots given are not based on thickness. GRACE attempts to estimate mass changes by observing changes in the gravity field. So: if total mass of sea ice increases while land ice decreases for a net decrease in mass, that could account for the estimated decline.
Or, as others have pointed out, it could be experimental error. I don’t think that in either case, warming is the only explanation. And “losing mass” could mean other factors as well; I would guess those are less likely than a loss in ice mass. There could, for example, be some sort of replacement of denser crustal rock with less dense rock. Possibly there are other possible explanations for that as well.
Upshot is: GRACE isn’t measuring ice thickness or even ice mass. They’re just inferring the amount of ice mass based on fluctuations in the observed gravitational field.
There is no “correct” way to graph — except for intentional deception. The graphs above clearly and accurately display different quantitative aspects of the same phenomenon.
1mm per year from a focused source gets added to the mms per year from other sources, which may have the same cause as the focused source. The totals could be important.
In percentage terms, the total loss of Miami isn’t much compared to global gdp. Similarly, the percentage loss to US gdp caused by auto accidents isn’t that great. Nothing useful is implied by those small percentages.
But I’m still terrified! Of Global Warming Alarmists and their effect on the low-info voter types.
What a sad state of affairs we find in the field of climatology!
How can two opposing views be right? The National Climate Assessment (NCA) implies a serious loss of ice. Yet the real world observational data held by the National Snow And Ice Data Center, funded by NASA, shows otherwise.
Is it any wonder that the field of climate science is perceived to be a joke?
Someone is right and someone is wrong. When nobody can agree who is ultimately right, it shows there is a major problem in this field.
It seems to be the case that while some people are more interested in the politics of climate science in in pursuit of achieving international agreement over fossil fuel energy use, others are genuinely trying to act in the best interests of science.
And there lies the heart of the problem!
Link, please. It’s a big website, is NSIDC.org.
“”””””…….mellyrn says:
July 6, 2014 at 3:20 pm
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.)……..”””””””
And crystal growers even grow quite large (kilogram sized) single crystals of SiO2 out of aqueous solutions (at high temperatures and pressures (not by Geological standards) and it takes months.
So Obama wants to spend money on reducing the human impact on our planet. And this is a problem because..?
The amount of money in question and the lack of efficacy of such measures.
1. To convert between units like gigatonnes of ice, cubic miles of ice, and millimeters of sea-level, I have a collection of handy conversion factors here:
http://sealevel.info/conversion_factors.html
It is important to realize that you have to melt a lot of grounded ice to significantly affect sea-level. Melting an entire cubic mile of ice which is grounded above sea-level would cause global sea-level to increase an immeasurably tiny 0.0105 millimeter.
2. They’ve cherry-picked their evidence.
Most sources agree that Greenland is losing ice mass (very slowly). But it’s not actually clear that Antarctica is losing ice mass. Calculations from GRACE data indicate it’s very slowly losing mass. But ICESat measurements indicate that it’s very slowly gaining mass. All we really know for sure is that it’s very close to being in balance.
ICEsat measurements indicate that, on the whole, Antarctica is gaining, rather than losing, ice mass. Shepherd 2012 concluded that Antarctica ice mass change since 1992 has averaged -71 ± 83 Gt/yr, which means they don’t know whether it’s actually gaining or losing mass. Zwally 2012 concluded that Antarctic ice mass gained +43 ± 16 Gt/yr (over five years), or +120 ± 50 Gt/yr (over 19 years).
The range of those numbers when the error bars are added is from +170 Gt/yr to -154 Gt/yr, which is equivalent to just +0.47 to -0.43 mm/yr sea-level change. In other words, although we don’t know whether Antarctica is gaining or losing ice mass, we do know that the rate, either way, is so low that it is having very little effect on sea-level.
3. Even if Antarctica is losing ice mass, on net, it’s not at all clear that CO2 or even climate is the cause. The cause might be volcanic activity, at least in part:
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2014/0610/Subglacial-volcanoes-melting-West-Antarctic-Ice-sheet-say-scientists
4. There’s a lot of confusion between grounded ice (ice sheets and glaciers) and floating ice (ice shelves, like the one at the Amundsen Sea Embayment, and sea ice).
That confusion is exacerbated by the similarity of the terms: ice sheets vs. ice shelves.
The melting, formation, disintegration, or growth of sea ice and floating ice shelves does not directly affect global sea-level (ref: Archimedes). It’s only possible impact on sea-level is by affecting the rate at which glaciers uphill from the ice shelves flow toward the sea.
When grounded ice melts or slides into the sea, it does affect sea-level, but the effect is reduced if the ice is grounded below sea-level, i.e., if the rock upon which it rests is below the waterline. In that case, the ice is “partially floating,” so the effect on global sea-level when it melts or floats away is reduced.
5. At current melt rates, it would take about 2000 years for Pine Island Glacier to melt, and over 3000 years for Thwaites Glacier to melt.
The anthropogenic “pulse” in CO2 levels, and its slight resultant warming, will be much shorter than that. Compared to the multi-millennium time scales involved in ice sheet changes, it is very short, indeed. It is doubtful that mankind can sustain current fossil fuel consumption rates and CO2 emission rates for even the next 100 years, and about half of all the CO2 we produce is already being sequestered by the biosphere and the oceans.
Mankind will have to find other energy sources within the next century, to sustain civilization. (Right now, one of the most attractive alternatives to fossil fuels is thorium-based nuclear power. It offers the prospect of nearly limitless, affordable energy. But it is quite possible that other energy sources may end up being even more attractive, before fossil fuels become too dear.)
Unfortunately, such energy sources will not add CO2 to the atmosphere, and as CO2 levels fall, so will agricultural productivity.
6. The rate of global sea-level rise is extremely low, and hasn’t increased in over eighty years.
In fact, it is so tiny that in many places it is dwarfed by land movement. At about 20% of the best tide gauges (which measure long-term sea-level trends) the trend is down (sea-level is falling), because the land is rising faster than the sea.
7. There is no evidence that anthropogenic GHG emissions have increased the rate of sea-level rise at all.
That is the single most important fact that everyone needs to internalize. About 80% of the anthropogenically-driven increase in CO2 levels has happened in the last 2/3 century, yet there’s been no acceleration in sea-level rise in over 80 years.
8. That lack of acceleration in sea-level rise is despite the fact that there are two anthropogenic factors which should have been expected to cause a slight acceleration in sea-level rise: reservoir impoundment (which peaked with the Aswan High Dam in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and has slowed dramatically since then), and groundwater extraction (which has accelerated). Both of those should have caused an increase in the rate of sea-level rise over the last 40 years.
The fact that the rate of sea-level rise has nevertheless failed to increase at all strongly suggest that aggregate melt-water contribution to sea-level rise is slowing, rather than increasing.