Guest essay by Rolf E. Westgard
![global.daily.ice.area.withtrend[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/global-daily-ice-area-withtrend1.jpg)
In his 2007 Noble Prize acceptance speech, former Vice President Al Gore warned that the “Arctic ice could be gone in as little as seven years.” Last week, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution reported:
“The North and South Poles are not melting.” In that report, oceanographer Ted Maksym noted that polar ice “is much more stable than climate scientists once predicted and could even be much thicker than previously thought.”
That Woods Hole study was confirmed by today’s NOAA Arctic radar map which shows the Arctic Ice Cap at more than 4,000,000 square miles, larger than on any December 28 in the past five years. Reaching the North Pole requires either a dog sled or a nuclear sub; Al Gore’s cruise ship will stay in the tropics. At the South Pole, Antarctic ice coverage is at the highest extent since radar measurement began 35 years ago.
NOAA’s Arctic Report Card; Update for 2014 provides similar data for the Earth’s other big ice sheet, Greenland. Data from the GRACE satellite and other sources has shown an annual average Greenland ice loss of more than 300 billion tons until 2013. That loss has now dropped sharply by 98% to 6 billion annual tons since mid 2013. A loss of 300 billion tons adds about one millimeter to sea level rise.
All this frigid data parallels the 17 year pause in global land and sea surface temperatures as reported by NASA, NOAA, the UK Climate Research Unit, and the University of Alabama Huntsville Remote Sensing Systems program. That pause is occurring despite our annual release of more than 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide(CO2) from burning fossil fuels, especially coal. Half of that CO2 release stays in the atmosphere. But CO2 remains a trace gas, as the atmosphere weighs several quadrillion tons, and a quadrillion is a million times a billion.
There are good reasons to limit coal burning, even if its CO2 emissions may be primarily plant food. Burning coal releases toxic products like mercury, sulfur, arsenic, soot, and unburned coal ash. But unfulfilled dire warnings coming from UN agencies about the effect of CO2 emissions are contributing to public skepticism about global warming. Global warming ranked 19th in a recent Pew Poll list of 20 issues which concerned the public.
In the most recent UN IPCC report, lead author Dr. Mark Howden said,
“There’s increasing evidence that climate change is also impacting on agriculture, particularly on some of the cereal crops such as wheat and maize. The negative impacts are greater and quicker than we previously thought.”
Farmers continue to ignore the IPCC. The US Department of Agriculture notes that world agricultural production set all-time records for all three major cereal crops in 2014, with rice output up 1.1 percent, wheat up 11.2 percent, and corn up a whopping 14.0 percent over 2013.
So hang on to that winter coat, our future as a tropical paradise may take awhile.
Reblogged this on the Original "Mothers Against Wind Turbines™" and commented:
Al Gore….determined to prove….that he is a moron!
…and that he is a fraud and a traitor.
Sigh. The IPCC exists to exist, nothing more. The fact that their alarmist twaddle is being shown to be false almost every other week now doesn’t change that fact one bit. in fact, it starts to work in their favor, as they can start to talk about the heat building up in the system (witness the El Nino that didn’t; warmer oceans to cry alarmist on now).
One day, the world will stop listening to the IPCC… but only because something more horrible (and immediate) is happening. One only has to look at CNN today at the almost pornographic images of the Paris killers arriving and then leaving Charlie Hebdo to guess what that might be.
Neil, you forgot to add after ‘(and immediate)’ the words ‘AND REAL!’
Either that, or it will . . . just fade away.
”wheat up 11.2 percent, and corn up a whopping 14.0 percent over 2013”
The problem with such a large year to year gain is if there’s even a slight drop from 2014 to 2015 it will be heralded as the beginning of the end of agriculture.
The key to interpreting the production data is the price data. The relevant question is: Is a crops production is falling due to low prices, or is it falling while prices remain or continue upward?
Farmer’s respond to market conditions to plant more profitable crops when they can shift. One or two grain crops cannot be used to understand the dynamics of the global market on food production.
John, Historical US Corn Grain Yields were flat at about 25 bu/ac until about 1940. They have been on a linear rocket ride up since then due to mechanization, fertilizer, and science. Yield is now at about 160 bu/ac, and continuing to increase at about 2 bu/ac/year with no end in sight.
See: http://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/yieldtrends.html
And it’s important to note that these yields are sustainable as low and no-til methods continue to improve, and the ability to use chemicals much more selectively is improving in giant steps.
Eh? What’s that? Has someone been adding that extra ethanol to your beer?
Cows, like the other ungulates across our land, primarily are fed on graze. Cows benefit especially from fresh grass, but are content chewing their cud from dried cuttings.
“Who discovered we could get milk from cows, and what did he THINK he was doing at the time?”
With apologies to Billy Connolly……
“The negative impacts are greater and quicker than we previously thought.”
Name one. Actual data appears to indicate otherwise.
I have to cut my grass more often.
rather, you GET TO cut your grass more often… see? (heck, we’re pretty much year-round mowing here in SE Texas anyway.)
“I have to cut my grass more often.”
Say, isn’t that a positive feedback mechanism?
Yikes! More grass = more cutting, anything used to cut/control your grass = more CO2 (or methane) = more grass?
Oh no, it IS worse than we thought…
AND to get a clean mower under deck, mow dead grass……….
That’s a good thing – you use it as mulch in potato hills, in compost bins as brown inputs and, to be honest, the thing I’ve noticed about the grass the past two years is the incredible increase in worm casts in late autumn/early winter when the rains arrive.
The negative impacts can be seen in our greening biosphere. The negative impacts can be seen in our record World cereal production in 2014 [FAO].
Even tropical forest flowers are responding negatively. Is there no end to the belief that the effects of co2 is bad for vegetation?
Letter To Nature
Stephanie Pau et. al. – Nature Climate Change – 23 May 2013
Clouds and temperature drive dynamic changes in tropical flower production
…..Here we quantify cloudiness over the past several decades to investigate how clouds, together with temperature and precipitation, affect flower production in two contrasting tropical forests. Our results show that temperature, rather than clouds, is critically important to tropical forest flower production. Warmer temperatures increased flower production over seasonal, interannual and longer timescales, contrary to recent evidence that some tropical forests are already near their temperature threshold4, 5. Clouds were primarily important seasonally, and limited production in a seasonally dry forest but enhanced production in an ever-wet forest. A long-term increase in flower production at the seasonally dry forest is not driven by clouds and instead may be tied to increasing temperatures. These relationships show that tropical forest productivity, which is not widely thought to be controlled by temperature, is indeed sensitive to small temperature changes (1–4°C) across multiple timescales.
doi:10.1038/nclimate1934
I have to listen to my wife complain because she has to cut the grass more often.
This is spectacularly good news for Al Gore – now he can jet around even more, and, apparently, eat even more without damaging a darn thing.
May he not die of grain poisoning.
I live in Chiang Mai and a few weeks ago a couple of devout CAGW disciples from Oregon arrived at my favourite coffee shop. The pair were aghast that the streets of Chiang Mai were not full of solar charged electric vehicles and scoffed derisively at my “third world ignorance ” of the catastrophe that the rest of the world all knew about.
When I told him the Antarctic ice was not reducing but indeed expanding, his derision leapt to even greater heights.
His wife on the other hand must have decided that I might not be 100% crazy and agreed to take a look at WUWT – bingo!
The light can be switched on for some 🙂
Chiang Mai! It’s been many a year since I was in Thailand. Beautiful place, beautiful people.
You’re a lucky guy.
[PS: excellent job turning them on to WUWT. It’s clear they have never been exposed to any kind of debate, where both sides are discussing the situation. When that happens, very often the scales fall from their eyes.]
Also point out to him this observation from the 1960s satellite observations.
“Al Gore, Wrong Again”.
Well duh! Someone tell me when he has ever been right.
Let me search for that on the internet thingy he invented…
we have to give credit where credit is due. Read Walter Isaacson’s “the Innovators” in which he writes that [1] Gore never said that he invented the internet and [2] Gore was very active as a senator in putting the legal framework in place that made the www possible.
Other than that, I am not a fan and his own ‘truths’ are becoming increasingly inconvenient.
while he didn’t use the word “invent”, he did say “I took the initiative in creating the Internet” which puts forth the same basic idea – that Gore is responsible for the existence of the internet. So hanging your defense of Gore’s statement on semenatics doesn’t work – he still took credit for something that was created independent of him (indeed, the internets creation actual pre-dates his time as a senator).
Unrelated to climate, but related to Al Gore and the Internet.
Al Gore and his cronies investigated the French MiniTel system in the early 1990s, which was a text-based version of the “internet” whereby you could bank, trade stocks, post memos, email, visit X-rated text-based stories, etc. Any person in France could own a MiniTel. I lived there at the time.
On the other side of the Earth at the University of Illinois (and other plaxces), I worked with the folks in the late 70s and early eighties on “ARPANET” which was funded by DARPA, Xerox, government grants, etc. and we had the “Plato” system which linked most universities with graphics-based plasma panels so we could play games, email, trade files, etc. over modems, just like the internet of today, but pretty slow. But basically this was something the military wanted as a “web” whereby a message and datawould get through regardless of the strands of the “web”.
So Al stole a headline on technology that was long in the making at universities and the government while he was green behind the ears and sensationalizing everything he did to get recognition. Politicians are actors and liars. What else is new about Al Gore and the IPCC and lies about the Arctic melting: headlines, lectures for pay and jets.
You have to understand Congress-speak. When a congresscritter says “I created …”, what he means is he remembers being awake when a vote was taken to spend other people’s money (OPM) on a bill claimed to promote the item under discussion. With that definition in mind, Al Gore is perfectly entitled to say he created the internet.
Actually, that was in the old days when people were more ethical. These days what a congresscritter means by “I created …” is he vaguely recalls that somewhere in his ghost-written autobiography produced just in time for his last campaign is a statement to that effect.
Pretty soon it will get worse and a claim made in a Twit from some random follower (not necessarily real) will be cited as proof of actual accomplishment.
PMSL you must mean the Manbearpiggernet huh ?
Well duh! Someone tell me when he has ever been right.
His opening joke in Inconvenient truth. I find that democratic candidates tend to have a poorer sense of humor than their GOP counterparts, but every now and then they came up with a good one.
Old Sam Donelson tells us that he once interviewed Jimmy Carter at a methane recapture project (in India, I think), i.e., a large pit filled with manure. Sam asked Carter, “If I fell in, would you pull me out?” Carter replied, “Of course I would, Sam. After a suitable interval.”
FDR was also very good, on occasion. (I note that when FDR made a quick joke, it was referred to as a “quip”. And if Reagan made pretty much the same joke, it referred to as a “one-liner”.)
Not only is Al Gore wrong again so is Dr. Viner.
14 January 2014
Snow and gales bring disruption to UK
http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/80259000/jpg/_80259470_025408055-1.jpg
CORRECTION
The date for the BBC article and photo should be 2015
When he dropped out of Divinity school.
The secret lies in the magic weasel words “could be”. They avoid definite predictions like plague. You don’t expect from them many falsifiable claims, do you? All their peer reviewed ‘scientific’ articles are filled with weasel words.
Having done sciency stuff for a living for a few years, I can attest that weasel words are par for the course in both good and bad science. True science involves (1) pointing out the likelihood of all other possibilities, (2) not letting the MSM get away with putting only things that might occur into the headlines as if factual. It’s not just the words; it’s the intent behind them.
I’m inclined to believe that the arctic has fallen into a cycle where black carbon and other pollution helps to melt much of the ice in the summer, allowing the pollution particles to sink, and new ice forms in winter, to be covered again with a new layer of pollution repeating the cycle.
scot,
Bingo. Albedo reduction/particulate pollution on the ice has *always* been the issue. The climate profiteers so no advantage in speaking to that until the apocalypse meme was firmly planted.
Yes, there is NASA/Zender (2009) and Sand (2013). Anyone know any others? There’s at least one more.
I think the ice melts due to increased heat resulting from all the decomposing polar bear carcasses…whoops – that’s wrong…the ice increase results from increased albedo caused by a vastly increased polar bear fleet.
The fact that supposedly scientifically educated adults still can’t even agree on something as black & white as sea ice extent and polar bear population (to the nearest 5,000) is beyond ridiculous. This is a lesson in how scientific discussion was conducted in the middle ages.
Scot,
That hypothesis makes a prediction that is testable. That is that multiyear ice should be decreasing and then become non-existent.
NSIDC has not yet included/updated the 2014 melt season data , but here is their latest graphic.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2013/04/Figure52.png
The 2013 data showed a small but meaningful uptick in multiyear ice from the low in 2012. 2014 melt season was on track with 2013, so it is likely that, when the data is updated, multiyear ice again increased further going into current northern winter 2014-2015.
How can you look at those data and not acknowledge that there has been a significant decline in multiyear ice? Ice coverage has declined tremendously since the 1980s for every age category. You can’t make any conclusions about the long-term trend based on a slight uptick in one or two years.
Why are you bringing up Arctic ice area? From today’s sea ice areas, the newly-exposed Arctic Ocean LOSES more heat than it gains 8 months of theyear. Less sea ice = MORE heat loss from the Arctic due to increased evaporation, conduction, convection, and radiation losses. Now, slightly more heat is gained late April, May, June, and July than is lost through increased heat transfer, but … by Sept 22, the ever-increasing Antarctic sea ice is receiving FIVE TIMES the solar energy per meter than the Arctic sea ice is receiving!
SO, WHY are you mentioning Arctic sea ice extents?
Yes, multi-year ice has declined significantly since around 85-87, that is obvious from the plots I posted above. I thought that went without saying, guess not. I certainly didn’t say the opposite, or that it hadn’t. But that is also now trending upward again with the recovery of ice extent too. Where it goes from here is the Big Question.
Just because one can find support for one hypothesis, doesn’t necessarily negate others, like an interplay between AMO and PDO. We simply have far too little observational (satellite era) data to know what is driving the Arctic ice pack coverage and carry-over ice between seasons.
Also it is clear the still 1-sigma low ice extent at the current time is due to a below average ice coverage in the Bering Sea and Sea of Okhotsk.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png
The current minimal of sea ice in the southern half of the Bering Sea during the long cold winter is best viewed as a feedback response, that is, a heat ventilation response that is dumping the anomalous ocean heat that in-flowed from the North Pacific, under the warmer than average SST from the high pressure system (aka the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge, in the Gulf of Alaska) that dominated that region of late. That pressure pattern kept funneling warmer than average warm into the Bering Sea, where that heat is now being ventilated by its exposure to the cold Arctic night.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/images/sst/sst.daily.anom.gif
The North Pacific ocean heat anomaly (and the lingering heat of an El Nino that didn’t quite make it), is now being dumped into the cold Arctic night sky where it can be radiated to space.
I just have to chuckle at the NSIDC (Julienne Stroeve’s work) putting the Future Projections from the IPCC CO2 emission scenarios into a future ice model. How can that ice model be viewed as credible when the underlying GCM RCP scenarios have utterly failed to materialize?
Joelobrian,
You say there has been an uptick in the last two years so we can’t predict what the future trend will be. That’s like saying October 16th and 17th were warmer than the 15th so we can’t be sure November and December will be colder than October. The long term trend is what is important and that is certainly downward for Arctic sea ice.
The time scale between days (diurnal, i.e. weather) and years makes a huge diff. So stop with the rivial arguments trying to compare days to years.
I find it curious that NSIDC hasn’t found time to update those multiyear ice graphics with 2014 data. They most assuredly have it. If the 2014 data was favorable to GW alarmism (continued the downward trend), I feel certain they would have updated them already.
I commend to everyone’s attention the slight rebound from 2008 to 2011 when the recession likely reduced pollution from industry.
There is one last, very important point that needs to be made on the multi-year ice plot.
In the records presented (i.e. the satellite era 1983-2013), nowhere is the biennial trend zero (year to year comparisons). Not in the 80’s, 90’s, 00’s, nor this decade so far. No one year is like the previous year nor the next year in the record.
The obvious implication: The Arctic sea ice pack IS the Earth’s primary heat radiator in a feedback-regulator system of global temp control. It is in constant dynamic, year to year, adjusting its ice extent which changes the dissipation of ocean heat content during the winter cold night nights when the water is either exposed or covered in an ice blanket.
When honest climate scientists once again are able to speak freely, they may likely talk of where the temp anomalies of the 1980-2005 and OHC of that base period went. Possible answer: It went out the Arctic as the Arctic ice extent responded with less ice to release ocean heat to space during the winters. After the sun’s high magnetic activity of the 1970-2000’s subsided, then so will the Arctic ice “recover”.
this image is from March 2013, The March 2014 data is at http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2014/04/
Also it is clear the still 1-sigma low ice extent at the current time is due to a below average ice coverage in the Bering Sea and Sea of Okhotsk.
That may be because of the Wester Pacific Oscillation is in warm phase. When the Pacific Decadal Oscillation goes into cool phase, the WPO goes into warm phase. So that will impact ice, even during a negative PDO.
I think then the Atlantic Decadal Oscillation flips to negative, we will see some recovery on the Atlantic side. The AMO (and the others of the “big six”) tend to follow the PDO, but by how much always varies.
Luke, it’s possible that the uptick in the last 2 years is the bottoming out. Time will tell.
HockeySctick – September 18, 2014
“Arctic & Antarctic sea ice extent demonstrates the bipolar seesaw theory of climate”
People we are living in the “Modern Warm Period”. The “Modern Warm Period” began around 1850 it has been growing warmer ever since just like it did during the “Minoan Warm Period”, “Roman Warm Period” and the “Medieval Warm Period”. These events have been going on ever since the start of the last glacial period “Dansgaard–Oeschger event” and “Bond event” on an about 1470 year cycle.
Our time and money would be much better spent trying to understand why they occur and how to mitigate the harm caused these normal climate changes.
The IPCC and AGW theory are on their way to fast becoming obsolete.
If there was any truth that global warming was causing the Sea Ice to melt then the SAME thing would be happening in the Antarctic,, which we all know is clearly not the case. One could make the argument that Antarctic Sea Ice has/is increasing faster then Arctic Sea Ice has declined especially in the past few years.
This is just another AGW claim that is going down in defeat just as so many of their previous claims have already done from the tropospheric hotspot near the equator never occurring to the lack of an increase in El Nino events to the atmospheric circulation not becoming more zonal but rather more meridional ,to name a few of the stand outs.
In case anyone doubts what you say here is the IPCC in their own words.
“If there was any truth that global warming was causing the Sea Ice to melt then the SAME thing would be happening in the Antarctic”
No, that is an overly simplistic view. The two poles are very different. The north, an ocean surrounded by land, the south, a continent surrounded by water. There are two hypotheses to explain the increase in ice around Antarctica:
1) Ozone levels over Antarctica have dropped causing stratospheric cooling and increasing winds which lead to more areas of open water that can be frozen (Gillet 2003, Thompson 2002, Turner 2009), and
2) The Southern Ocean is freshening because of increased rain and snowfall as well as an increase in meltwater coming from the edges of Antarctica’s land ice (Zhang 2007, Bintanga et al. 2013). Together, these change the composition of the different layers in the ocean there causing less mixing between warm and cold layers and thus less melted sea and coastal land ice.
Luke, (replying to Matt G)
Odd. I thought the ozone hole over the Antarctic had been steady the past few years.
OK. Why don’t you have any evidence of those increasing winds that have moved the ice pack? The wind charts I’ve have followed showed no such pattern. Oh – It makes a good theory. But there is no evidence of increased winds outward from the pole.
Antarctic sea ice has been expanding since 1992. It has been expanding even faster since 2011 – in a few years (8-12 at current rates) it will be far enough out that Antarctic sea ice will block the shipping around Cape Horn. your “wind” theory must account for ALL of the changes, or it is not valid.
Oh wait. “Less melted sea and coastal land ice” – Thought all of the land ice was melting … Never mind. Your words don’t fit your narrative though.
Why don’t you show some calculations for that assumed “dilution” of the Antarctic ocean waters?
How much more dilute can you show measurements of the actual ocean water over time?
I’ve never seen ANY Calculations of sea water dilution from ANYONE. (ONE frozen run off from ONE glacier underwater in ONE location that was 3 meters wide? And this is supposed to show that 2.06 MILLION sq kilometers of “excess” Antarctic sea ice is caused by only 70 x 10^9 tons of assumed “meltwater”?)
14.0 x 10^6 sq kms of sea ice only 100 meters deep = 14.0 x 10^6 x 10^3 x 10^3 x 100 = 14.0 x 10^14 m63 of seawater.
Dilute that with 70 x 10^9 tons of “assumed” – NOT MEASURED! – freshwater.
Show us that the freezing point of the waters around Antarctica have changed enough to freeze an area the size of Greenland last June.
You disagree?
So, how much area is being diluted with freshwater runoff?
How deep is the salty ocean water being diluted?
How is that freshwater runoff evenly and smoothly getting ALL AROUND the continent – when only a few glaciers on the western peninsula are actually melting faster?
the Antarctic sea ice anomaly is steadily – continuously! – getting larger through EVERY season of the Antarctic year – winter freezing, spring and summer thaw, fall freezeout …. Just how come the freshwater runoff is continually increasing EVERY SEASON of the year when temperatures are -30 and -35 3/4 of the year over 97% of the continent – and have NOT been increasing?
I will not call you a liar. You may actually believe what you are saying – certainly you are only repeating what others have said many times. Perhaps even some of them believe what they are saying as well.
But you are NOT telling the truth about Antarctic sea ice.
Well, he said “could”.
Of course, manbearpigs “could” fly out of his backside whistling Dixie, but that’s not likely to happen either.
When do the lawsuits and criminal prosecutions for the fraud Al Gore has perpetrated begin?
As soon as his CA beach house floods with sea water.
Why then? Is he going to sue himself?…. right he probably would!
OK, Arctic Ice has served its time as the canary in the mine. What’s next?
They didn’t give up when Kilimanjaro didn’t play out, when hurricanes didn’t multiply or when the global temperature stopped sky-rocketing… they just found another dead polar bear to flog.
So, what’s next?
Is “Ocean Acidification” still on the table?
Maybe.
But it was always ridiculous; pH 7.9 is not acidic by any means.
They try, but with ocean acidification they have a problem. It’s easy to test. Put coral, or even the most “sensitive” creatures you want into an aquarium and change the PH. They have done this many times and don’t get the catastrophic results they want.
What If all of the predictions could come true, shouldn’t we do all we can, to stop the damage?
We’ll build a new society with new energy technology and have jobs, jobs, jobs.
From climate justice flows social justice.
Think of the children.
(I’ve done a better Al Gore imitation, but it’s late.)
Well the preacher kept right on saying that all I had to do was send
Ten dollars to the church of the sacred bleeding heart of Al Gore
Located somewhere in Los Angeles, California
And next week they’d say my prayer on the radio
And all my dreams would come true
Is ice extent really measured using radar?
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=84499
AS on can see the decline in Arctic Sea Ice is having NO impact on albedo.
best lay off the self-abuse son, its starting to affect your vision.
AS on can see the decline in Arctic Sea Ice is having NO impact on albedo.
Your point is correct. But it does appear that the effect of soot is quite significant. And it may be contributing to some of that open ocean, for that matter. It’s a fairly current problem, because it has been such a long time since a country that far north (I.e., China) has been undergoing basic industrialization. Note that the decline in extent picked up right around Y2k, in the middle of a nasty La Nina. And then the temperature trends flattened. Yet more ice was lost at this time than prior. That suggests an outside factor, and that factor is soot.
Is it not true that stack scrubbers reduce or eliminate the effluent nasty stuff resulting in only CO_2 and heat leaving the stacks?
Depends on where it is burnt. In the US and Europe, the standards are much stricter, thus scrubbers are used and are effective. In China, the answer to that question is found in the air quality around major Chinese northern industrial cities. That answer is no.
From an article on Scienceline about “An Inconvenient Truth”:
http://scienceline.org/2008/12/ask-rettner-sea-level-rise-al-gore-an-inconvenient-truth/
“His narration tells the audience that, due to global warming, melting ice could release enough water to cause at 20-foot rise in sea level ‘in the near future.’ ”
Near is a relative term of course. So when Al tells his wife he is going to fix that leaky toilet “In the near future” I wonder if she knows he means within the next 10,000 years.
Al Gore’s wife Tipper, who comically tried to ban wholesome country singer John Denver because she thought Rocky Mountain High was referring to drug use.
Maybe that was the reason for the divorce.
But surely we will be well into the next glacial period by then. We’ll be high and dry. maybe under a kilometer of ice.
I hope I’m not appearing to be too picky about this but is it possible to get a direct link to the source of this report. This post simply links to a previous WUWT post which, in turn, links to the Daily Express (a UK tabloid newspaper). It’s fair to say that the Express is not the most trusted source of information and I doubt that the Woods Hole Institute have communicated with the Express directly.
I’d wouldn’t expect blogs like WUWT, which is supposed to represent the leading edge of sceptical thinking, to be relying on a relatively down-market newspaper for it’s sources of information.
Would a citation from “Nature” help? try this:
http://www.nature.com/news/robot-reveals-surprisingly-thick-antarctic-sea-ice-1.16397
Yes, but what you find there is:
1. It isn’t Wood’s Hole that reported
The North and South Poles are not melting”,/i>
It was Benny Peiser who said that. And the Maksym report was about Antarctica only.
Not really. I am aware of the Antarctic study but the opinion piece goes further than that. The Antarctic study doesn’t tell us anything about the Arctic or Greenland or even the Antarctic ice sheets which are still losing mass.
Nick Stokes reply confirms what I suspected.
http://www.express.co.uk/news/nature/548516/North-South-poles-not-melting-Dr-Benny-Peiser Google is your friend.
Gosh, John, I so ashamed.
I hope WUWT soon lives up to your great expectations…
Sounds like you come from a very rigorous background.
PS: BTW, some of us can even research stuff like the link you wanted all by our selves.
Good question, John. The study is paywalled here at Nature Geosciences, you can read it for $32. Alternatively, it is discussed in Nature magazine itself here.
The critical information, however, is the same in both places as in the Daily Express. This is that rather than being about one metre thick, the Antarctic ice is about three metres thick … and not only that, it’s larger than at any time in recent history.
Go figure.
w.
CO2 is bi-polar. When temp are elevated at one pole, they are depressed at the other.
I read the Antarctic recent sea ice high extent as a climate system trying to regulate itself to stay warm as OHC withers in the Southern Ocean.
That is not necessarily the case… you are making an assumption there that seems to be based on behaviors (e.g. current changes that flushed ice out) that have nothing to do with temperature that are now seen to have been significant if not leading influencers of Arctic Ice Extent.
Have you ever heard by the way off a little Latin saying that goes ‘post hoc ergo propter hoc’? Might want to look it up prior to your next causal assignment post.
Wills
This blog post goes beyond the Antarctic sea ice thickness findings. I know about this study and it relates specifically to more accurate measurements of Antarctic sea ice thickness . The article above, though, includes quotes such as
The only place I can find this quote is on WUWT or the Daily Express. Since the main contribution of the Express to journalism in the UK in recent years has been it’s non stop stream of crackpot theories relating to the death of Princess Diana, most people don’t tend to rely on anything it reports.
The Antarctic ice thickness study is interesting but doesn’t actually tell us very much. To use an analogy: Consider the level of a lake which measurements show is rising year on year. Let’s say that previous best estimates of the depth of the lake are 100ft but a study has now found that the lake is only 80ft deep, i.e. there’s less water in the lake than we previously thought. But does this actually change the conclusion that the level of the lake is rising?
I have. This article (and The Express) goes way beyond what the Maksym study found.
AS Nick has pointed out here and I pointed out in a previous thread here the statement in the original post:
“Last week, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution reported:
“The North and South Poles are not melting.” In that report, oceanographer Ted Maksym noted that polar ice “is much more stable than climate scientists once predicted and could even be much thicker than previously thought.””
Is incorrect, the statement was by Peiser not Maksym!
The subject of the Nature Geosciences was the measurement of near-coastal regions of Antarctica which had been previously inaccessible for measurement. The conclusion was:
“Our surveys indicate that the floes are much thicker and more deformed than reported by most drilling and ship-based measurements of Antarctic sea ice. We suggest that thick ice in the near-coastal and interior pack may be under-represented in existing in situ assessments of Antarctic sea ice and hence, on average, Antarctic sea ice may be thicker than previously thought.”
Most of the seaice in the Antarctic is first year ice, only ~2 million square km remain at the end of the melt season down from ~16 million square km
John is questing for citations yet a few lines from Nick Stokes is gospel. Is this a comedy routine?
John Finn
“Thick and deformed Antarctic sea ice mapped with autonomous underwater vehicles”
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2299
“Underwater Robot Sheds New Light on Antarctic Sea Ice”
http://www.whoi.edu/news-release/SeabedAntarctic
Here is the abstract
Read it. It doesn’t say anything about the “poles”. It provides a possibly improved estimate of Antarctic SEA ice thickness.
Finn see this for Antarctica sea ice extent in the 1960s – Nimbus satellite.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/13/al-gore-wrong-again-polar-ice-continues-to-thrive/#comment-1835234
After reading the exploration attempt of the arctic circle by De Long, I’m not keen on the cold. Pretty darn brutal.
http://www.worldcoal.org/coal-the-environment/coal-use-the-environment/improving-efficiencies/
it is not that hard to remove almost all of the soot. Carbon dioxide capture is a waste because it is a beneficial gas.
Nothing Al Gore says merits attention- except, maybe by a prosecutor.
Or his wife who he cheated on with a female researcher from the ironically titled Inconvenient Truth
Or have you heard Rocky Mountain High performed by the late country folk singer John Denver which Tippa tried to ban because she thought it refereed to recreational drug use.
wow. Your posts are even less relevant than mine. Good job!
Quote: “There are good reasons to limit coal burning, even if its CO2 emissions may be primarily plant food. Burning coal releases toxic products like mercury, sulfur, arsenic, soot, and unburned coal ash.”
A more logical phrasing would be:
“There are good reasons to limit coal burning without modern flue gas cleaning technology…”
If you burn the stuff with modern cleanliness standards then this liberation of fossil carbon is very beneficial for nature and mankind because of the reasons you mentioned yourself: Better plant growth with smaller water supplies and consequently a much improved food harvest and a progressing greening of the half deserts.
(And don’t be afraid of ocean pH chance! This scare mongering is equally wrong as the heat catastrophe hype or the alleged disastrous sea level rise.)
So just relax and sing with Ellie Goulding this excellent carbon liberation song:
(And enjoy the nice symbolical CO2 bubbles in the video 🙂
http://youtu.be/sXtpLjffj5Y
Not to mention it’s many uses. From and India site.
Various known applications of flyash that we have been able to identify are given in the following:
As a resource material
Alumina
Magnetic Carbon
Cenospheres
Mineral Fillers
Enhanced Pozzolana
Other Minor and trace items
As a raw material
High wear resistant ceramic tile
Glazed floor and wall tiles
Mineral Wool
Ash alloys
Synthetic wood
Decorative glass
Fire bricks
Fire abatement applications
Adsorbent for toxic organics
Foam insulation products
Ceramic Fibre
Distemper
Oil well Cement
Domestic cleaning powder
Continuous casting mould powder
Ultra light hollow sphere for arid zone cultivation
http://tifac.org.in/index.php?option=com_content&id=655&Itemid=205
How does Cowtan and Way explain all this ice after claiming the Arctic is warming at about eight times the pace of the rest of the planet?
Keep the ice records. Soon they will be fiddling with the past to keep the grant money flowing in.
Could that be a signal of cooling, considering also the recent Great Lakes ice trends and record ice in Antarctica?
Or, is this just short term noise in the normal inter-glacial warming trend?
Cooling you say? Oh, that’s just weather.
I just find it odd that after screaming about record warmest decade, hottest year on the record blah, blah, that global sea ice and Greenland ice spiral meltdown seems to have stuttered to a halt and Antarctica’s extent is going the other way. The IPCC says most models projected a decrease in Antarctica’s sea ice extent. Maybe warmists will learn what ‘climate change’ means.
IPCC PDF
http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/report/WG1AR5_SPM_FINAL.pdf
Here is Greenland’s accumulated surface mass balance. Notice the increase in August since 2011 – 2012.
http://beta.dmi.dk/uploads/tx_dmidatastore/webservice/b/m/s/d/e/accumulatedsmb.png
Greenland monthly ice mass anomalies since 2002
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/images-essays/fig3.3-tedesco.jpg
Your “stuttering to a halt” is that little ‘flattish’ section right at the end of the graph.
John Finn, the graph starts in 2002.
Do you have a reference to what Greenland’s ice mass was in the 70’s or the 30’s?
John Finn, how do we know that since 2002 it’s not part of a natural cycle? Time will tell. Read these.
Why do you not ask the same question of Jimbo (the previous poster)? Jimbo notes that that accumulation is greater than in 2011-12.
Thanks John Finn. I asked if you might have a source of older ice mass anomalies, nothing more.
It’s been my understanding the Greenland has seen warming periods in the recent past. Since this is an often talked about topic and I’d like to gather the fact. From my searches, 2002 appears to be the start of measurements? I’d like to confirm that as fact, or find a source of previous estimates.
Jimbo, anyone?
Paul,
I have something still in moderation. Over 1 hour now I think.
Is all this an excercise on how to turn data into propaganda via graphs? Bravo
@ John Finn
Thanks for telling us where your graph came from:
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/greenland_ice_sheet.html
It appears to be entirely based on GRACE measurements and therefore probably worthless. (GRACE measures gravity – not ice)
Funny thing about that “Arctic Report Card” exerpt from the NOAA (government-paid) propaganda/alarmist/CAGW-funding site.
From its “Tundra Greenness” section:
So the tundra is getting much greener, much darker recently (because of greater CO2 in the atmosphere causing MUCH MORE growth over longer periods of the year!) and yet is also having shorter growing seasons (gee, is it getting colder up there instead?). A darker tundra (60-70 north latitudes IS consistent with the warmer temperatures between 60-70 north, but constant summer time temperatures up where the ice is (latitudfes 70-80-90 north) as measured by the DMI since 1959.
Now, about that Antarctic sea ice increasing since 1992. Seems a few days ago just the “excess” Antarctic sea ice was 1.7 million sq kilometers. About 3/4 the size of the ENTIRE Greenland ice cap. So, an actual – this year it happened! – real world “excess” reflectivity of sea ice 3/4 the size of Greenland at latitude 60 south can be ignored, but theoretical ice cap losses at 60 north latitude that are theoretically going to result in Greenland ice changes in 800 years (at today’s rates) are a disaster in 2100. If they happen at all.
Have they ever made anyone return their Nobel Prize? Al Gore would be a good first. I’d say they should make the IPCC return theirs too but I’d rather just see that organization dismantled.
Al Gore should consider himself fortunate that he doesn’t have Pinocchio’s problem. Otherwise the former VP’s nose would probably stretch half-way to the Moon by now–many further.
OOps… meant maybe further.
“Reaching the North Pole requires either a dog sled or a nuclear sub;”
You forgot the Top Gear vehicle 🙂
[Top Gear drove to the “pole” but it was the north magnetic pole. Now a bit further towards Russia however. Guess they need to drive again? .mod]
Didn’t they try a dirigible at one point in time? They should have taken Al, it would have stayed up for- ever with all the hot air!
Reblogged this on Public Secrets and commented:
How dare Nature continue to deny The Goracle?
“Burning coal releases toxic products like mercury, sulfur, arsenic, soot, and unburned coal ash.”
Not entirely correct. As a western Canadian farmer I can tell you that sulfur is an “essential” nutrient that we in fact spend a lot of money on every year to replenish. Without it you won’t grow much canola or produce much protein in wheat. Out here we could use more of it, along with more CO2.
Seems Sulfur is not in short supply in western Canada — at least the pure form.
http://pulitzercenter.org/sites/default/files/styles/overlay/public/07-11-14/canada1.jpg
Blueberries need it too. Well, mine do.
@John, were and what is that?
asybot,
Sulfur.
Use Google Earth and the coordinates below
57.042130, -111.654552
In its elemental form, sulfur is yellow:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/44/Sulfur-sample.jpg/1024px-Sulfur-sample.jpg
http://www.businessinsider.com/there-are-mountains-of-sulfur-growing-in-the-oil-sands-just-waiting-for-demand-to-increase-2012-4
And also garlic.
Don’t forget garlic.
Reaching the North Pole requires either a dog sled or a nuclear sub …
Or a Toyota Hilux and the financial and tactical support of the BBC.
Top Gear: Polar Special
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Gear:_Polar_Special
What, there’s a dome over the whole thing, excluding aircraft?
@Brandon
This is but one example of failed predictions. Please, please, please, address the issue and explain in coherent detail why these (and all others) predictions have failed. You say you have the science. Please show it.
they failed because they are wrong. had they been right, they would not have failed. this then provides a method by which we can establish the difference between what is right and what is wrong. this method is called the scientific method.
there is nothing more required to understand science. if your theory can reliably predict something that is hard to predict, science says you are onto something. if it fails to predict reliably science says you are wrong, no matter how many excuses you might dream up.
this typically is hard for politicians to understand, as they routinely promise anything you ask for, and have a never ending supply of excuse why someone else is the reason you never got what you were promised.
Indeed,
A number of years ago, I remember reading about volcanoes seen erupting on the floor of the Arctic Ocean. Has there been any more sightings of these volcanoes, or others? They probably wouldn’t change the amount of Arctic ice, but at the time it was thought there would be more of them.
Arsenic, the word, appears 3 times (now 4) above.
It is useful to know that most rice, especially those types promoted as healthy, contain this element. So, …
Ban rice and keep CO2.
And taking off from another theme ( – Gore did not – ) Sarah Palin did not say “I can see Russia from my house.”
… proving, once again, that 97% of what we think we know is wrong.
It’s worse than that Jim. ‘Sheena Easton’, ‘Ellie Goulding’, ‘Billy Connolly’, ‘John Denver’, and ‘Top Gear’ also appear – on the same thread within a WUWT topic. Who would have thunk it?
Actually, just had a thought. If some on here are playing Celebrity Bingo, then I have probably just given someone a complete line. Are the mods aware of what Celebrity Bingo is? We atheists used to play Christ Bingo on the Christian forums. Highly amusing, when you have nothing else to do.
I read the article in Nature by Williams, Maksym et al and it does not say : ““The North and South Poles are not melting.”
That is a statement by Dr Benny Peiser of GWPF ( a social scientist) which appears in the Express story and is not a conclusion of the Woods Hole research Team.
Also the quote that polar ice “is much more stable than climate scientists once predicted” is not from the researcher but from reporter Levi Winchester who wrote the Express article.
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution press release is here: http://www.whoi.edu/news-release/SeabedAntarctic
The Nature Geoscience paper can be reached via a link at the bottom of the news page here: : http://www.nature.com/news/robot-reveals-surprisingly-thick-antarctic-sea-ice-1.16397
What the paper did say is that using the robot submarine they were able to measure parts of the Antarctic sea ice cover they had not been able to measure before and those sections were thicker than the areas they had previously been able to measure with drilling and shipboard measurements, Thus it seems there may have been a sampling bias in previous Antarctic sea ice measurements. Further under-ice surveys will be needed to get a more accurate measure of the Antarctic pack than was previously possible,
Exactly.
I’m sceptical of ‘catastrophic’ AGW and I’m more than happy to shout from the rooftops anything that debunks ‘alarmist’ theories but, in all honesty, there isn’t a great deal for sceptics too excited about and certainly nothing in the Ted Maksym study.
The current rate of warming does suggest climate sensitivity is at the lower end of IPCC estimates – which is good – but even that relies on a small and non-increasing TOA imbalance.
If solar cycle 25 is substantially lower than solar cycle 24, we all will be learning more about ice and how the oceans can cool from the Arctic ocean downward and the Antarctic upward..
Is there a draft in here..seems a bit chilly..
The limb is getting brittle Dr. S….
Just looking at IJIS, 2015 is in third place behind only 2007 and 2011. May have a new low this year.
“Half of that CO2 release stays in the atmosphere.”
How is this possible? How could Mother Nature choose to sequester half, only half, always half, of our additions to Her natural production of CO2? There is no way, no how, totally impossible. Something else must be happening.
Anyone, please, fault my logic. No one has yet…
“How is this possible? How could Mother Nature choose to sequester half, only half, always half, of our additions to Her natural production of CO2? ”
==========================
I have made the same argument. Mother Nature should sequester a percentage of total CO2 in the atmosphere, not a percentage of only human CO2.
So for example, from 1950 to 2015, CO2 went from 300 to 400 ppm. The rate of sequestering should only have gone up 4/3. However, in 1950, when CO2 was 300 ppm, human CO2 production was about 1.5 billion tonnes/yr. Today it is 10 billion tonnes/yr. A ratio of 20/3, or which mother nature sequesters 10/3.
So, while CO2 partial pressure has increased by 4/3, sequestering has increased by 10/3. In other words, sequestering is increasing 2.5 times faster than CO2 is increasing.
Something doesn’t add up, because this doesn’t fit the water draining in and out of the bathtub model. The drain is growing faster than the water flowing in.
” There are good reasons to limit coal burning, even if its CO2 emissions may be primarily plant food. Burning coal releases toxic products like mercury, sulfur [US spelling, NOT mine], arsenic, soot, and unburned coal ash ….”
This is a gross generalisation , not all coal fired generation plants are equal, and even though some of these gasses and solids may escape even the most modern technologies there are vast improvements and real world research and engineering i under way.
We should be carefully about the Greenland ice sheet. The ice loss is negligible in 2014, but if you check the graph yousee that the downward trend has not yet stopped; we need some few years more to see if it has slowed down or stopped.
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/images-essays/fig3.3-tedesco_sml.jpg
Anyway, it’s not dramatic. If the satellite data show the reality, the yearly ice loss adds 1 mm Ocean rise per year. Up to 2100 this would be 8.5 cm or treeandsomething inch. But what about the antarctic ice sheet?. It’s around the South pole and it’s way colder there. Snow is collected, and the only loss is that from the ice sheets drifting down into the ocean.
The full noaa page is here:
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/greenland_ice_sheet.html
Thanks for the link, Johannes. It starts out by saying …
Whoa, 2.85 cubic kilometers of ice … I always get nervous when a document hasn’t been proofread. Doesn’t make the rest wrong, just means I have to look real hard at every number.
Assuming that they mean 2.85 MILLION km3 of ice, that’s about 2.65E+15 tonnes of ice … and the loss that they show so dramatically above is about 3E11 tonnes lost per year.
Which means that one hundredth of one percent of the ice has been lost per year, or about a tenth of a percent over the period of the record shown above.
And no matter how dramatic they try to make it, with their plunging chart and all, I just can’t get excited over the loss of a tenth of a percent per decade … in my book, that’s stability, not instability.
w.
Oh, yeah, one further detail … the modern estimate of the Greenland ice sheet volume is 2.93 million km^3, not 2.85 million.
This means that IF the ice loss continues for 250 years, by then we’ll be down to their estimated 2.85 million cubic km of ice … 250 years to get to where they say we are today.
Can’t make this stuff up, folks.
w.
As I mentioned a few days ago , the abrupt drop in Arctic ice seems (from your ref charts ) to have occurred around 25th Dec, whilst a corresponding sharp increase in the Antarctic ice occurred at almost exactly the same time ( within a day or 2).
If this not a coincidence , given that the 2 areas are at opposite ends of the globe , and opposite seasons, and given also that , according to the references obtained from an earlier thread about penguin populations the Antarctic sea ice is wind dependent , could there be an instrumental reason for the 2 sudden changes in sea ice.
I am assuming , ignorant of the technical details , that the same satellite is monitoring both poles. Has there been an orbital correction or some recalibration , etc that has affected both sets of data , but in opposite ways ?
Hang on a minute, Willis. You are letting this article off the hook. It clearly tries to make the point that reduces mass loss this year is significant and that the downward trend has changed, e.g.
There’s no evidence that the downward trend has changed and the smaller loss, unless sustained, is nothing more than natural variation.
It can’t be ‘natural variation’ because CO_2…
W,
There is the “How to Lie With ….” folder with subfolders:
Statistics, Graphs, and so on.
A couple of years ago Dr. Roy showed a CO2 chart drawn with different but equally valid spreads on the x and y axes. The line went from rising at about a 45 degree angle to flat.
The ice loss chart shown above is of the 45 degree death march category. One “sees” something dropping so sharply that it is clearly going to go splat very soon now.
It takes only a few moments to redraw this chart with a y-axis an inch high and an x-axes as wide as a monitor (say 20 inches). That alone still shows the line approaching the x-axes, but convert the vertical axis to actual amount rather than the + versus – (as now drawn) and, lo and behold, the newly drawn line will disappear, being pressed tightly against the upper border.
From “go splat” to “that ain’t going to happen” in three easy steps.
Yikes, at the rate it’s melting it will be all gone in only ~12,000 years!
UN IPCC report, lead author Dr. Mark Howden said,
““There’s increasing evidence that climate change is also impacting on agriculture, particularly on some of the cereal crops such as wheat and maize. The negative impacts are greater and quicker than we previously thought.”
Howden should be made to explain how he reached these conclusions.
Yesterday WUWT highlighted a PhD study that concluded that the mitigation costs of climate change should be made much higher “than previously thought” . One feature of the analysis included the effect of climate change on agricultural yields , but once one started to follow up the references and citations it became clear that the true situation is very complicated and the variables of temperature , CO2 enrichment, water stress and the anticipated new strains from eg Monsanto ( supported by US Govt) make any simple generalised claim such as that by Howden quite ridiculous.
Plebs we may be in the eyes of the Howdens of the world , but we are only ignorant if we wish to be . Google is a mighty weapon.
‘Al Gore, wrong again’ worlds shortest and most accurate news story ?
Still would be a more accurate word than again.
Those are good reasons to manage coal burning, not limit it. Limiting is a subset of managing.
Where is coal burning unmanaged, aside from a uncontrolled fire at a coal mine?
Ever since the Arab Oil Embargo the US government has promoted coal for energy production. Over a period of 40 years companies, state and local governments and individuals have invested billions based on directives from the government. The EPA now proposes to punish these investors by limiting energy production from coal.
It is not the general public that will pay the cost. It is specific areas of the country that have invested in coal produced energy and coal production that will pay the price of EPA regulations. They very people that invested based on 40 years of government policy are now going to penalized for implementing government policy.
The very policy that the government put in place, those people that helped carry out the policy will now be penalized. The message here is clear. Help carry out government policy and you will be penalized in the future when the government changes.
May I favor all with this little poem?
Global Warming?
G..one are your days, trepidation now swarming!
L..urking with obscurity comes a new age of warning.
O..h you must listen and your questions must fold.
B..ehold I’m Al Gore; it’s your future I’ve foretold.
A..rmed with my models, indubitable facts have been forming.
L..eer not elsewhere; it’s your fault the climate’s warming.
W..eep all in disgrace, keep burning your coal.
A..las, I exclaim, you’re surrendering earths soul!
R..epent from this sin, withdraw the temptation.
M..ark it forbidden to a developing nation.
I..’ve reaped its rewards, in plain sight for all to see.
N..egating the others makes no difference to me.
G..ather your senses, remain but slightly sober.
? ..All I am asking, that you simply start over.
The phantom editor strikes again: Please change “Noble” to “Nobel” in the first line. Apologies, etc., for the minor nature of this comment.
Ian M
Have I been banned or what ?, none of my stupid comments have shown up on any thread for the last hour ??
Mods ????
Just let me know.
I’m no scientist but wouldn’t warmer oceans create more evaporation. The trouble with the ice ages that the Gulf Stream was diverted or stopped. From fresh water coming from the Arctic at first. Plus our orbit! It soon froze up again and so did most of the Northern Hemisphere. Year of Living dangerously is still running on SBS once a week, and quite honestly just the few minutes I watched it I was completely unconvinced, not from just their data appraisal but they way it was presented. Scientists don’t talk that way! They were trying to sell an outdated hypothesis.
Where is the ice melting in Antarctica?
http://www.uni-koeln.de/math-nat-fak/geomet/meteo/winfos/synNNWWantarctis.gif
There is no where there warm enough for ice to melt even now in mid-summer. These comments about ice melting in Antarctica are cringe-worthy and far from any truth when you actually visit the place. Please remember even with air temperatures of 1,2 or 3 c, the ground often is below freezing with no ice melt. The ice is not melting more around Antarctica recently in the nearby ocean or it would have shortened in size, not increased. Even the temperatures around the most exposed Peninsula is still not warm enough at the moment.
Matt G, take a look at some actual data. When it comes to Antarctic ice and sea levels, sea ice is not the most important thing to measure. In Antarctica, the largest and most important ice mass is the land ice of the West Antarctic and East Antarctic ice sheets.
Between 1992 and 2011, the Antarctic Ice Sheets overall lost 1350 giga-tonnes (Gt) or 1,350,000,000,000 tonnes into the oceans, at an average rate of 70 Gt per year (Gt/yr). Because a reduction in mass of 360 Gt/year represents an annual global-average sea level rise of 1 mm, these estimates equate to an increase in global-average sea levels by 0.19 mm/yr.
Here is the reference
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/338/6111/1183
Nonsense. you are dead wrong. In mid-September, when both the Arctic and Antarctic are exposed to the same levels of solar radiation daily, today’s rapidly expanding Antarctic sea ice receives FIVE TIMES the solar energy that the Arctic sea ice receives.
yes, for four months of the year, the Arctic receives more energy in late April, May, June, and July. But by August 22, that “excess” 1.5 million sq km’s of Antarctic sea ice is already reflecting more energy back into than the Arctic is absorbing.
You claim the Antarctic land ice is melting, but where? That small 3% of the Antarctic that is the western peninsula? Or the rest of the continent ice-covered areas that are cooling slightly the past 50 years? What area are actually melting, and what is your evidence they are melting?
The Antarctic sea ice area is exposed to solar radiation between 67 deg south latitude and 57 south latitude all year as it ossilates between minimum and maxium extents. The Arctic sea ice? It is up between 70 north and the pole: At its minimum in September, the MOST the Arctic sea is exposed to the sun is 10 degrees for a few fleeting minutes at noon? By late October, the whole of the entire Arctic sea ice is exposed to only darkness 24 hours per day. And, that newly exposed open Arctic ocean LOSES more heat by evaporation, convection, conduction, and LW radiation when the sea ice cover is gone.
Less Arctic sea ice? More cooling.
More Antarctic sea ice? More cooling.
The link above I gave was for towards a period at end of WInter, but just an example where during Summer is less cold. Temperatures still are around the -30’s c near the pole and around very briefly 2/3 c in the warmest Peninsula region.
The warmest region of Antarctica below where current mid-summer temperatures are still well below freezing at ~2000 m.
http://www.yr.no/place/Antarctica/Other/Antarctic_Peninsula/
Luke January 15, 2015 at 2:16 pm
The ice sheets are always moving towards the deep ocean and melting well away from Antarctica itself.This loss of ice has nothing to do with melting on Antarctica itself or near it’s coast. The increased weight of ice accumulations on the shelves cause the the ice to spread out/flow very slowly from the continent towards the ocean. The gravimetry data sets are far from accurate and should be treat with caution.
http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/glaciers/questions/move.html
“The sheer weight of a thick layer of ice, or the force of gravity on the ice mass, causes glaciers to flow very slowly. Ice is a soft material, in comparison to rock, and is much more easily deformed by this relentless pressure of its own weight. Ice may flow down mountain valleys, fan out across plains, or in some locations, spread out onto the sea.”
Yes, I know that ice flows downhill and eventually ends up in the ocean but in the past that loss has been replaced by snow accumulation which over time compresses into ice maintaining an equilibrium. Recently, however, the ice sheets have lost ice at a greater rate than it has accumulated.The west Antarctic is losing mass at the rate of 70 Gt per year! Do you really think the gravimetry and other methods are that far off?.
Do you really think the gravimetry and other methods are that far off?.
Yes, especially over continents and near the poles. Human error can be large when using a model to estimate surface mass balance.
http://gfzpublic.gfz-potsdam.de/pubman/item/escidoc:8704:3/component/escidoc:8703/0607.pdf
Particularly shows when this recent paper demonstrates ice mass stable or increasing over most of continental Antarctica.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X14005068
Scientists are measuring mass loss and elevation of glaciers and ice sheets with satellites and the two approaches are giving consistent answers. There is almost no chance of “human error” when using satellite measurements. If you think the models they use to develop the estimates are wrong, I encourage you to examine the data, the computer code and submit a paper to a peer-reviewed journal. That is how science progresses.
From Pritchard et al 2010
Strong summer melt on the Antarctic Peninsula also precipitated recent ice-shelf collapse and prompted rapid dynamic thinning of tributary glaciers at up to 70 m a–1. Thinning continued for years to decades after
collapse and propagated far inland.
http://www.igsoc.org:8080/journal/56/200/j10j221.pdf
That Al Gore it is perfect moron it was obviouse from the very begining.
About the mesurements; all are very wrong for one reason: the past(yesterdey ) never will be today and tomorrow. Therefore what they mesure.
The problem it is with the Internet:
the only achievement I could agree with, it is the fact that the stupidity and ignorance now it is evident because outthere it is an axiom which tell us “the intelligence on Earth it is CONSTANT=1, what it is growing it is the number of people using the internet now a days” with other words the stupidity grows to equal the infinity.
If we want the Earth as a Disneyland so be it! Nothing can stop the infinity to never realize what the \Nature it is !
Surely it is not a car or H-bomb or plastic food you are eating with such obiouse dameges for your brains I could easely see. Every 4 years you elect the same morons or worst to “lead ” you ! ..
Please consider this: try to think by your self, and never follow your imbecile leaders !
RACookPE1978 January 15, 2015 at 6:41 pm
Luke, (replying to Matt G)
There are two hypotheses to explain the increase in ice around Antarctica:
1) Ozone levels over Antarctica have dropped causing stratospheric cooling and increasing winds which lead to more areas of open water that can be frozen (Gillet 2003, Thompson 2002, Turner 2009),
Odd. I thought the ozone hole over the Antarctic had been steady the past few years.
OK. Why don’t you have any evidence of those increasing winds that have moved the ice pack? The wind charts I’ve have followed showed no such pattern. Oh – It makes a good theory. But there is no evidence of increased winds outward from the pole.
Try reading this:
http://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo1627.epdf?referrer_access_token=lM1bFQos-akUzmU4pLW9htRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0OPXhlq5DA-8Svq5TI0QqkJfnOtHuQZVVHKD9vb6Kgo9VuH0gvMMlQSTGJp2OBYDpw%3D
And this:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/07/new-paper-shows-negative-cloud-feed-associated-with-sam/
Southern Annular Mode Index:
http://www2.ucar.edu/sites/default/files/news/2011/sam.jpg
Phil.
Thank you for replying. From your link to the 2012 article:
From UCAR:
The Southern oscillation (SAM) index has been steadily positive since the early 1990’s – indicating that it indeed matches well with a steadily increasing Antarctic sea ice anomaly DESPITE a steadily increasing CO2 levels, which are supposedly causing a global temperature change amplified by the cold polar temperatures that supposedly are going to melt the sea ice. Fine.
But, those very words describing the SAM above do NOT include the very wind changes that are being used to rationalize the increasing Antarctic sea ice. In fact, the positive modes “inhibit” release of air from the Antarctic polar land mass. “In the SAM’s positive mode, the ring is stronger and further south, inhibiting Antarctic air outbreaks”
in other words, the excuses contradict one another. Yes, the 24 year long increasing SAM index is co-related to a 22 year long increase in Antarctic sea ice, and a steadily decreasing Antarctic land air temperature. All three contradict ANY assumption that increasing levels of CO2 are to blame for global warming, and all three contradict ANY assumption that an increasing level of CO2 is causing ANY change in Arctic sea ice extent!
You lost me in your last sentence when you were talking about processes in the Antartcic and then finished with “and all three contradict ANY assumption that an increasing level of CO2 is causing ANY change in Arctic sea ice extent!” How do specific changes in wind speeds and temperatures limited to the antarctic have anything to do with the arctic ice loss? Just to be clear do you 1) agree that there has been a steady decline in arctic ice cover over the past 30 years, and 2) do you agree that as ice cover diminishes in the arctic that heat absorption in the arctic ocean increases? Given that and the fact that Kinnard et al 2011 have shown that the decline in arctic ice cover is substantially greater than anything we have seen in the past 1450 years, how do you explain the decline in arctic ice? Natural variability doesn’t cut it, this is well beyond the natural variation that has been observed in the past 1450 years.
OK. Why don’t you have any evidence of those increasing winds that have moved the ice pack?
You stated the above which the increased SAM clearly contradicts, I suggest you read up on the Coriolis effect.
No. The article quoted shows Antarctic winds, but they are outbound (flowing towards the equator away from the continent) strongly in only three places, and are very weakly flowing in a fourth area. That wind pattern – which was analyzed actually “backwards” by tracking the Antarctic sea ice movements between only 5 months of the year – does not explain the constant, all-season, year round increase in Antarctic sea ice for the past 22 years since 1992. For more than 60% of the continent shores, the winds are on-shore or parallel to the shore blowing the sea ice tighter together and reducing its average area.
Further, the article provides “data” for only a few year’s movement (2010 – 2012) which does NOT explain the “change” required to explain why the Antarctic sea ice is increasing earlier – because NO earlier data is provided for comparison or as a means to set a trend. Since recent Antarctic sea ice anomalies are producing reflective areas as larger as Greenland, it would seem important to find out “why” and “what will happen” if this trend continues.
It is interesting to see the “consensus hand wave” of admitting that Antarctic sea ice is ‘a few percent larger” – but at minimum the the past years’ “anomaly” are regularly 50% to 100% the size of the past entire sea ice minimum. And that Antarctic sea ice anomaly is closer to the equator evrey day of the year than the edge of the Arctic sea ice ever is. Something to reflect upon, no?
If you want cleaner coal, Wyoming has plenty of it, especially now that the EPA is closing our coal-fired power plants. Personally, I’d like to see them converted into modern clean natural gas-fuelled plants with their output run into four-season greenhouses, giving us the ability to start exporting food instead of importing it. Matt Mead is still, judging by his state of the state address, still learning to prepare for public speaking, so it might be asking too much for him to understand first year organic chemistry.
http://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/arctic-sea-ice/
CheckYourFacts:
But your NASA link above did not show the all-time record high sea ice extent around Antarctica last June. An “excess” sea ice area as large as Greenland, and an ever-increasing positive Antarctic sea ice trend since 1992.
Your NASA link above did not mention that Antarctic sea ice at its maximum in September (when Arctic sea ice is at its minimum) is receiving 5 times the solar radiation as the Arctic sea ice is receiving.
Your NASA link did not mention that – for seven months of the year – the Arctic ocean at the edge of the Arctic sea ice loses more heat energy from increased evaporation, increased convection, increased conduction, and increased LW radiation when NOT covered by sea ice than it gains from the sun. More Arctic sea ice loss? Seven months of the year = More heat heat lost to space!
So, what is NASA trying to hide by promoting propaganda and hiding half of the sea ice in the world? Why are you worried about Arctic sea ice loss? It only means a colder planet>
I think this cartoon captures the essence of this entire subject. See “Ice Capades” at http://www.maxphoton.com/ice-capades/
[Good graphic! .mod]
Thank you! While I’m here, gentle readers might also enjoy this cartoon: A Comment on Anthropogenic Climate Change at http://www.maxphoton.com/anthropogenic-climate-change/