Guest post by David Middleton
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The thaw is happening far faster than once expected. Over the past three decades the area of sea ice in the Arctic has fallen by more than half and its volume has plummeted by three-quarters (see map). SWIPA estimates that the Arctic will be free of sea ice in the summer by 2040. Scientists previously suggested this would not occur until 2070. The thickness of ice in the central Arctic ocean declined by 65% between 1975 and 2012; record lows in the maximum extent of Arctic sea ice occurred in March.
The most worrying changes are happening in Greenland, which lost an average of 375bn tonnes of ice per year between 2011 and 2014—almost twice the rate at which it disappeared between 2003 and 2008 (see chart). This is the equivalent of over 400 massive icebergs measuring 1km on each side disappearing each year. The shrinkage is all the more perturbing because its dynamics are not well understood. Working out what is going on in, around and underneath a supposedly frigid ice sheet is crucial to understanding how it will respond to further warming and the implications of its demise for rising global sea levels (see article).
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375 billion tonnes per year… Oh my!
400 massive icebergs measuring 1km on each side disappearing each year… Oh no!!!
Wait a second… Those sound like big numbers… But how big are they compared to the Greenland ice sheet?
The USGS says that the volume of the Greenland ice sheet was 2,600,000 km3 at the beginning of the 21st century.
According to the “ice sheet goeth” graph, since 2001, Greenland lost about 3,600 gigatonnes of ice or about 3,840 km3 … That equates to a 16 km x 16 km x 16 km cube of ice (3√ 3,840 = 15.66). That’s YUGE! Right? Not really.
It’s not even a tiny nick when spread out over roughly 1.7 million square kilometers of ice surface. That works out a sheet of ice less about 2 meters thick… Not even a rounding error compared to the average thickness of the Greenland ice sheet.
- 2,600,000 km3 / 1,700,000 km2 = 1.53 km
The average thickness of the Greenland ice sheet is approximately 1.5 km (1,500 meters). 2 meters is about 0.15% of 1,500 meters.
From a thickness perspective, 2 meters looks like this:
Using The Economist ratio of 400 km3 to 375 gigatonnes, 2,600,000 km3 works out to 2,437,500 gigatonnes. When some actual perspective is applied, it is obvious that “the ice sheet goeth” nowhere:
Despite all of the warming since the end of Neoglaciation, the Greenland ice sheet still retains more than 99% of its 1900 AD ice mass.
Multiple Choice Quiz
Fill in the blank:
Alarmists are _________ perspective.
- a) allergic to
- b) ignorant of
- c) willfully ignoring
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What these ‘researchers’ need is a quick trip to the Total Perspective Vortex (so scary it has capital letters)
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Total%20Perspective%20Vortex
“The shrinkage is all the more perturbing because its dynamics are not well understood.”
Oh, my. It’s going to be a catastrophe because they don’t understand what’s going on. Give me a break!
This is exactly when we need Griff (BTW where has he/she/it been lately? Maybe took some vacation?).
Anyhow, Griff, besides being a polar bear expert, a de-certifier of polar bear experts (didn’t like Susan Crockford), Griff knows all about ice. Actually the less ice there is, the more he knows about it. And (this is very important) he/she/it is CONVINCED global warming only happens in the Arctic, not the Antarctic (or both).
Anyhow, we need him in this conversation.
Griff isn’t a troll… two different entities.
(in fact, I miss Griff so much, I’m going to post for him/her/it)
Ahem….
Actually, all the Greenland ice has already melted (this was reported in the Guardian just the other day). Greenland has been renamed “Ireland” and is now being farmed for the first time in human history (I would provide a link for this, but my notes from the Mother Ship didn’t include one).
The resulting sea level rise has been devastating. People in NYC used to go to Fire Island for fun & sun & sea. Well, there are no more fires, and sea has risen so much (you can actually hear it if you stand next to the water), the only thing above water is a long thin strip of what used to be mountain peaks. Interestingly, South Bay is just to the north of this.
Griff is my buddy… picking on him in abstencia isn’t cool.
Actually, I was shooting for troll ridicule.
Possibly Griff is absent due to lack of abstinence.
Is this the first post-election indicator that the Paris Climate Stupidity is walking dead? (From 13:30)
https://youtu.be/40iJUAHej14
“400 cubic km ice cubes per year!!!”
Nooooo! Think of the vodka! Won’t somebody please think of the vodka?
Shaken or stirred?
I’ll say C: Willfully Ignoring.
As long as there are scientists digging through permafrost to figure out how the Vikings lived there before when the permafrost wasn’t there,,,,,
For the quiz you forgot “d) all of the above”.
Great article. And since there are credible reports Greenland is gaining not losing ice mass, I think we can dismiss this report as yet more contrived lying.
Wow. Nice radar cross section. That’s some seriously cool reflectivity.
Actually, the report is intelligently written — with close reference to the Manual on Scientific Alarmism.
1. Predictions must be sufficiently scary to ummm … scare people. Check!
2. Predictions must be close enough to justify impetus for action. Check!
3. Predictions must be sufficiently remote so that those responsible won’t be around to be held accountable when the predictions fail. Check!
Note: “It’s worse than we thought” is so universally applied as to be unnecessary in any manual.
Come 2040, it will be miraculous if anyone can remember this prediction. However, with luck, the children of certain scientists will have made it through higher education. We have to think of the children.
The bigger they open their mouths, the larger chunks of humble pie they will have to swallow, sooner or later.
I am a hard copy subscriber to the The Economist. I am compiling an old fashioned scrap book of news paper clippings on ‘global warming’ to become a coffee table book for my children from which I hope they can learn something about a fundamental flaw in human nature that never changes: group think. Even the most intelligent are vulnerable.
Of late, hardly a weekly publication of the The Economist exists that does not include something on ‘global warming’ and its impact of destruction and pending gloom. They have swallowed it, hook, line and sinker. Pity, as it does still remain an excellent publication IMO.
Oh – and their other gripe is Brexit. Man, are they sour about that
weep for what the Economist once was, and what it has now become
New Paper: Greenland Gained Ice Between 1940s-2000s, Added Just 1.5 cm To Sea Levels Since 1900
http://notrickszone.com/2017/05/01/new-paper-greenland-gained-ice-between-1940s-2000s-added-just-1-5-cm-to-sea-levels-since-1900/#sthash.CAVuDbIi.dpbs
http://notrickszone.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Greenland-Ice-Sheet-Mass-Balance-Fettweis-2017.jpg
It may be rude of me to say this, but I am waiting for the moment when I run into someone having a panicky, hysterical panic attack over Greenland losing a chunk of ice (which becomes an iceberg) in the spring/summer calving season. If that ever happens, I do hope that I have a glass of ice water or iced tea to throw in that panicking idiot’s face. I know: that’s a rude thing to do. But I will enjoy it.
d) for deranged, dastardly, despicable, dishonest, disturbed, demented, delirious, disoriented, discombobulated.
Fill in the blank:
Alarmists are _________ perspective.
a) allergic to
b) ignorant of
c) willfully ignoring
d) mendaciously excluding
Glaciers grow only at the top – from snowfall that accumulates from year to year. Glaciers melt at the top and the bottom. Top melting is episodic and depends on variable we normally call ‘weather’ – temperature, sunlight, wind. Glaciers melt at the bottom from geothermal heat that slowly but steadily flows to the surface from deep in the rock.This heat is caused by the radioactive decay of minerals (mostly uranium and thorium inside the earth), and is for all intents and purposes constant over millennial time scales.Only geological processes over geological time scales can alter this heat flow. The maximum temperature of the rock on which the glacier sits is set by the melting point of water ice to 0 °C. The constant presence of ice water at the interface lubricates the downhill flow of the glacier. AFAIK, this process has not been empirically examined, and contributes an unknown (but probably significant) amount to the glacial melting process. On the other hand, water produced by surface melting can melt its way into the glacier when it can refreeze or join the subglacial rivulets or fill the microscopic pores left in the ice from the initial snowfalls, ‘aging’ the ice. into a less porous form.
Too many unknowns…some are unknowable.
Did one of these cubes fall on someone? I don’t think anyone was hurt.
‘SWIPA estimates that the Arctic will be free of sea ice in the summer by 2040. Scientists previously suggested this would not occur until 2070.’
Anyone who reads realclimatescience.com knows this is a felonious lie. They have been predicting it would be gone every year for the last 10 years. NOW! Not 2070.
Lately the Economist has gone off the deep end on science and politics. I’m canceling my subscription.
For god or evil statistics is always used to present numbers in a biased way since you use the numbers and grafs to put an emphasis one some part off the data. That way it is allways important to do a reality sheck as done in this article and it goes both ways. Even if the data presented in a graf is correct as fare as you now, it is importen to do every sheck you can to ensure that it really is so.