From the “settled science” department and former chief alarmist Jay Zwally, who for years had said the Arctic was in big trouble (only to have his prediction falsified), comes this Emily Litella moment in climate science: “Never mind!”. Curiously, WUWT reported back in 2012 about an ICEsat study by Zwally that said: ICESAT Data Shows Mass Gains of the Antarctic Ice Sheet Exceed Losses. I surmise that with the publication of this second study, the original is now confirmed. I suppose John Cook will have to revise his “Denial 101” video on Antarctica now.
From the NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER via press release:
NASA study: Mass gains of Antarctic Ice Sheet greater than losses
The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice.
According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008.
“We’re essentially in agreement with other studies that show an increase in ice discharge in the Antarctic Peninsula and the Thwaites and Pine Island region of West Antarctica,” said Jay Zwally, a glaciologist with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study, which was published on Oct. 30 in the Journal of Glaciology. “Our main disagreement is for East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica – there, we see an ice gain that exceeds the losses in the other areas.” Zwally added that his team “measured small height changes over large areas, as well as the large changes observed over smaller areas.”
Scientists calculate how much the ice sheet is growing or shrinking from the changes in surface height that are measured by the satellite altimeters. In locations where the amount of new snowfall accumulating on an ice sheet is not equal to the ice flow downward and outward to the ocean, the surface height changes and the ice-sheet mass grows or shrinks.
But it might only take a few decades for Antarctica’s growth to reverse, according to Zwally.
“If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate they’ve been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years — I don’t think there will be enough snowfall increase to offset these losses.”
The study analyzed changes in the surface height of the Antarctic ice sheet measured by radar altimeters on two European Space Agency European Remote Sensing (ERS) satellites, spanning from 1992 to 2001, and by the laser altimeter on NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) from 2003 to 2008.
Zwally said that while other scientists have assumed that the gains in elevation seen in East Antarctica are due to recent increases in snow accumulation, his team used meteorological data beginning in 1979 to show that the snowfall in East Antarctica actually decreased by 11 billion tons per year during both the ERS and ICESat periods. They also used information on snow accumulation for tens of thousands of years, derived by other scientists from ice cores, to conclude that East Antarctica has been thickening for a very long time.
“At the end of the last Ice Age, the air became warmer and carried more moisture across the continent, doubling the amount of snow dropped on the ice sheet,” Zwally said.
The extra snowfall that began 10,000 years ago has been slowly accumulating on the ice sheet and compacting into solid ice over millennia, thickening the ice in East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica by an average of 0.7 inches (1.7 centimeters) per year. This small thickening, sustained over thousands of years and spread over the vast expanse of these sectors of Antarctica, corresponds to a very large gain of ice – enough to outweigh the losses from fast-flowing glaciers in other parts of the continent and reduce global sea level rise.
Zwally’s team calculated that the mass gain from the thickening of East Antarctica remained steady from 1992 to 2008 at 200 billion tons per year, while the ice losses from the coastal regions of West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula increased by 65 billion tons per year.
“The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away,” Zwally said. “But this is also bad news. If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for.”
“The new study highlights the difficulties of measuring the small changes in ice height happening in East Antarctica,” said Ben Smith, a glaciologist with the University of Washington in Seattle who was not involved in Zwally’s study.
“Doing altimetry accurately for very large areas is extraordinarily difficult, and there are measurements of snow accumulation that need to be done independently to understand what’s happening in these places,” Smith said.
To help accurately measure changes in Antarctica, NASA is developing the successor to the ICESat mission, ICESat-2, which is scheduled to launch in 2018. “ICESat-2 will measure changes in the ice sheet within the thickness of a No. 2 pencil,” said Tom Neumann, a glaciologist at Goddard and deputy project scientist for ICESat-2. “It will contribute to solving the problem of Antarctica’s mass balance by providing a long-term record of elevation changes.”
###
Source: http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-of-antarctic-ice-sheet-greater-than-losses/
In a piece at Nature News, Zwally has said:
“Parts of Antarctica are losing mass faster than before,” says Jay Zwally, a glaciologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of a paper to appear in theJournal of Glaciology1. “But large parts have been gaining mass, and they’ve been doing that for a very long time.”
The findings do not mean that Antarctica is not in trouble, Zwally notes.
“I know some of the climate deniers will jump on this, and say this means we don’t have to worry as much as some people have been making out,” he says. “It should not take away from the concern about climate warming.” As global temperatures rise, Antarctica is expected to contribute more to sea-level rise, though when exactly that effect will kick in, and to what extent, remains unclear.
Gee, thanks.
The study:
Mass gains of the Antarctic ice sheet exceed losses
Source: Journal of Glaciology doi: 10.3189/2015JoG15J071
Abstract:
Mass changes of the Antarctic ice sheet impact sea-level rise as climate changes, but recent rates have been uncertain. Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) data (2003–08) show mass gains from snow accumulation exceeded discharge losses by 82 ± 25 Gt a–1, reducing global sea-level rise by 0.23 mm a–1. European Remote-sensing Satellite (ERS) data (1992–2001) give a similar gain of 112 ± 61 Gt a–1. Gains of 136 Gt a–1 in East Antarctica (EA) and 72 Gt a–1 in four drainage systems (WA2) in West Antarctic (WA) exceed losses of 97 Gt a–1 from three coastal drainage systems (WA1) and 29 Gt a–1 from the Antarctic Peninsula (AP). EA dynamic thickening of 147 Gt a–1 is a continuing response to increased accumulation (>50%) since the early Holocene. Recent accumulation loss of 11 Gt a–1 in EA indicates thickening is not from contemporaneous snowfall increases. Similarly, the WA2 gain is mainly (60 Gt a–1) dynamic thickening. In WA1 and the AP, increased losses of 66 ± 16 Gt a–1 from increased dynamic thinning from accelerating glaciers are 50% offset by greater WA snowfall. The decadal increase in dynamic thinning in WA1 and the AP is approximately one-third of the long-term dynamic thickening in EA and WA2, which should buffer additional dynamic thinning for decades.
Full study: OPEN SOURCE
zwally-antarctica-study (PDF)
Did he actually concede that skeptics have been right about Antarctica all along and then have the nerve to refer to “Climate deniers” in a scholarly journal? Do I have that right?
Very unprofessional.
Big difference between a skeptic and someone bent on a big conspiracy. A skeptic asks for evidence. A conspiracy nut denies the evidence when shown. Climate deniers are nuts, not skeptics.
Sam Keola,
You do realize that many thousands of people have been convicted of criminal conspiracy, don’t you? And isn’t something like a drug cartel or mafia “a big criminal conspiracy”? What exactly makes one a nut for believing people conspire . . It seems to me one would have to be a nut to deny such things happen.
Anyone who denies there’s a climate would have to be nuts, so we’re in agreement on that. And all here seek evidence for manmade global warming. Got any?
Sam Keola,
Post a definition of a “climate denier”.
Memo to Jerry Brown: Your grant for high speed rail funding is being recalled. You have 30 days to refund the money or interest and penalties will apply.
” Craig Loehle
November 1, 2015 at 4:05 pm
“The planet has been recovering in fits and starts since the LIA” Not really, because due to Milankovitch cycles, the LIA should still be going on. Unless that is, you know of an event which has disturbed the orbital cycles of the Earth.”
Wow, so our CO2 emissions are keeping the planet out of little ice age conditions!!??
That’s very good news for mankind! 🙂
(Note: That was not Dr. Loehle, it was a banned sockpuppet stealing his identity. The faker’s comments have all been deleted. -mod.)
To be fair, Zwally isn’t just known for his “nearly ice free” goof. He was among the many that under-predicted Greenland’s resilience to climate change. In fact, just a decade ago, he was claiming Greenland-melt was in the “worse than we thought” category.
This is all comforting, if true. But I don’t believe for a moment that the satellites can hold an orbit stable to 0.23 millimeters per year, and still have their data corrected to that accuracy after allowing for that orbit drift.
Good point. Measurement accuracy claims are generally off by an order of magnitude. Surface temps have been adjusted many times where the adjustments now are as big as the trends. Sat Temps have been through many adjustments, too, including recent switch to UAH 6.0. Claims of ARGO’s accuracy are laughable. Does anyone really believe ocean temp can be measured with floating buoys to within .01 deg? ARGO proponents claim it is actually much better than that. Sea Level measurement is wildly uncertain.
Bottom line…our climate is so stable we can barely measure any change with sophisticated modern instruments. That’s good news.
This letter regarding what was going on before the satellite era is interesting. It appeared on page 23 in the UK’s ‘Sunday Telegraph’ newspaper, on Tuesday October 1st 2013, and came from Captain Derek Blacker RN (retd), Director of Naval Oceanography and Meteorology 1982-84:
“SIR – I was a meteorologist during the Seventies when glaciers in Europe and other continents in Europe had been growing for the previous ten years, and pack ice had been increasing during winters to cover almost all of the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland. Scientists were then warning that the Earth could be entering another ice age.
The current deliberations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have conveniently overlooked this. Before insisting that humans have been the main cause of global warming an explanation of this apparent anomaly should be promulgated.”
In connection with this letter, a look at information supplied by the Icelandic Meteorological Office is also of interest. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, “heavy sea ice was quite common along the coasts of Iceland, but in the 1920s a drastic change occurred. Sea ice along the coasts of Iceland became an uncommon characteristic and almost a forgotten phenomenon around the middle of the century. An abrupt change occurred in the mid-1960s. Heavy sea ice distribution occurred almost each year following, but since 1980 widespread and long-lasting sea ice off Iceland took place (sic) at rather irregular intervals.”
Nothing is as simple and cut and dried as the warmists would have us believe!
It seems to suggest that there may well be some natural oceanic cycles at work.
A pity that the possibility of multidecadal natural cycles and variation was not rigorously investigated by Climate Scientist before predicting their current round of scare stories.
watch for the edits and rewrite of this article, once Obama hears about this.
I hope all the ice does disappear from Antarctica, because I was told that it is going to be the only inhabitable continent by the end of this century:
http://web.archive.org/web/20100817023019/http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/why-antarctica-will-soon-be-the-ionlyi-place-to-live–literally-561947.html
I’ll bet that page will soon meet the same fate as http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html
Menicholas states
“Compared to storms and tides, the sea level rise in a hundred years does not amount to enough to even get anyone’s ankles wet.”
Sea level rise is having an effect on flooding along the east coast of the US right now. Take a look.
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/publications/NOAA_Technical_Report_NOS_COOPS_073.pdf
So, a government-paid agency claims that a measured “sea level rise” of less than 1/2 inch has caused greater flooding damage to the US? To justify 1.3 trillion in new taxes for their government-paid bureaucrat bosses and 30 trillion in carbon futures trading for the global banking industries?
How many government-paid writers can you buy for 92 billion dollars?
Interesting that you and others here have no trouble accepting the results of a government paid agency study when it is consistent with your beliefs (Zwally’s paper) but you reject it when it doesn’t (NOAA publication cited above). One more thing, sea level has risen about 8″ since 1880. I’m not sure where you got the 1/2″ value.
I guess this is true, I saw a news article on AOL of all places. Wow! That’s got to be a huge blow to the propaganda machine with icebergs crashing off and seashore flooded. Oh the fear factor! I guess they could show thermal expansion like gorilla rising from the sea to swamp cities…
I find it amazing: as each building block in the global warming structure fails, as more predictions fall by the wayside, disciples become ever more certain of the Divinity of the Cause.
This all dovetails nicely with http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html = FOUR! OH! FOUR!
BWAAAAAHAHAHAHA!
I find it amazing that days after the release of this paper and there is NOTHING, nothing about it in the main-stream news. Is it not news that Antarctica is gaining mass and perhaps the scientists are wrong with their models? If Antarctica had been losing ice it would have been front page news – EVERYWHERE.
It’s not the data, it’s the side.
Sceptical Science has gone quiet as well, c’mon John us moon hoaxers want an answer!
Ron commented: “….I find it amazing that days after the release of this paper and there is NOTHING, nothing about it in the main-stream news….”
It has hit several on line MSM outlets so you should see it tonight on TV news and tomorrow in the newspapers. Surprised me!
He shows his true colors when refers to “climate deniers”. It must be wonderful being able to dismiss all fact-based criticism of one’s work as a pathological form denial. I’m going to try it at work and refer to my boss as an “awesome denier.”