Can we puny humans produce enough energy to melt the huge icecap? Some math helps.
Guest essay by Julius Sanks
When discussing climate with people who do not have technical backgrounds, I have learned much of the climate discussion is a foreign language to them.
Phrases like “Dalton minimum” or “Atlantic multidecadal oscillation” make their eyes glaze over. Once, after I explained what causes wind, the reply was, “my head hurts.” So, I no longer try to explain atmospheric science. Besides, I am an engineer, not a meteorologist. I have had better luck by sharing simple examples that let people reach conclusions on their own about human versus natural influence. Telling them I can show them the math if they want to see it adds credibility, because few, if any, alarmist publications intended for the general public include any math to support their claims. Describing the energies that drive weather, and therefore climate, is a good way to do this.
So, I take them through a few examples of how much energy is involved and how miniscule human activity is by comparison. Done properly, this lets a non-STEM person grasp the huge amounts of energy involved.
One of my favorites is Anthony’s essay that debunks the Hiroshima equivalent alarmism:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/23/getting-cooked-by-hiroshima-atomic-bomb-global-warming/
Another excellent example is the amount of energy in an average hurricane. According to NOAA-OAR-AOML, an average hurricane releases 200 times the world’s electrical energy production just to produce the clouds and rain.
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/D7.html
There are about 70-100 tropical cyclones per year worldwide. Seventy storms would average 14,000 times the world electricity production every year.
These types of examples are good for communicating with nontechnical people. They let people relate atmospheric physics to their own life experience and everyday understanding of the world in which they live — even if that understanding might be skewed or incomplete.
And then there’s the ice. We are supposedly melting the ice; the literature is filled with papers making this claim. These papers invariably whine about human activity warming the planet, but they never seem to get around to discussing how much energy is actually required, or how it gets to the ice. But do humans really generate enough energy to melt significant amounts of ice?
A case in point is from a recent Grist article:
Ice Apocalypse
Rapid collapse of Antarctic glaciers could flood coastal cities by the end of this century.
By Eric Holthaus
November 21, 2017
In a remote region of Antarctica known as Pine Island Bay, 2,500 miles from the tip of South America, two glaciers hold human civilization hostage.
Stretching across a frozen plain more than 150 miles long, these glaciers, named Pine Island and Thwaites, have marched steadily for millennia toward the Amundsen Sea, part of the vast Southern Ocean. Further [sic] inland, the glaciers widen into a two-mile-thick reserve of ice covering an area the size of Texas.
There’s no doubt this ice will melt as the world warms. The vital question is when.
The glaciers of Pine Island Bay are two of the largest and fastest-melting in Antarctica. (A Rolling Stone feature earlier this year dubbed Thwaites “The Doomsday Glacier.”) Together, they act as a plug holding back enough ice to pour 11 feet of sea-level rise into the world’s oceans — an amount that would submerge every coastal city on the planet. For that reason, finding out how fast these glaciers will collapse is one of the most important scientific questions in the world today.
…Antarctica is a giant landmass—about half the size of Africa—and the ice that covers it averages more than a mile thick. Before human burning of fossil fuels triggered global warming, the continent’s ice was in relative balance: The snows in the interior of the continent roughly matched the icebergs that broke away from glaciers at its edges.
Now, as carbon dioxide traps more heat in the atmosphere and warms the planet, the scales have tipped.
A wholesale collapse of Pine Island and Thwaites would set off a catastrophe. Giant icebergs would stream away from Antarctica like a parade of frozen soldiers. All over the world, high tides would creep higher, slowly burying every shoreline on the planet, flooding coastal cities and creating hundreds of millions of climate refugees.
All this could play out in a mere 20 to 50 years—much too quickly for humanity to adapt.
…There’s a recurring theme throughout these scientists’ findings in Antarctica: What we do now will determine how quickly Pine Island and Thwaites collapse. A fast transition away from fossil fuels in the next few decades could be enough to put off rapid sea-level rise for centuries. That’s a decision worth countless trillions of dollars and millions of lives.
Source: https://grist.org/article/antarctica-doomsday-glaciers-could-flood-coastal-cities/
Holthaus is in fact reporting on a piece that appeared in Nature. The original is here: https://www.nature.com/news/antarctic-model-raises-prospect-of-unstoppable-ice-collapse-1.19638
Now, 11 feet [3.353 meters] of sea level rise is a lot of water, which means a lot of melted ice. How much ice? And how much energy is needed to melt it? We can use some high school physics in a Fermi analysis to establish a benchmark of sorts that nontechnical people can understand. To do this, we need to agree on some basic numbers and then use them to examine the situation in Antarctica.
This assumes the ice is at standard temperature and pressure (STP — essentially air pressure at mean sea level and temperature at 32°F/0°C). More on that later.
First, let’s examine some basic volume and mass definitions. Some values are rounded.
1 liter of water has a mass of 1 kg, by definition.
Freeze it and the volume increases. 1 kg ice is 1.09 liters, or 0.92 kg/liter.
One cubic km = 1012 liters.
So 1 km3 of ice = 9.2×1011 kg. This is our basic unit of mass for melting the ice.
A generally accepted value for the total ocean area is 3.618 x 108 km2. Raising this surface by 1 mm requires 361.8 Km3 of additional water.
Raising the ocean by 3.353 meters requires 361.8 Km3 X 3353 mm = 1.21X106 Km3 of liquid water, which comes from 1.32X106 Km3 of glacial ice.
How much energy is needed to melt 1.32X106 Km3 of ice?
The question is important because, regardless of ice thickness, whether it is on land or is a shelf, wave action, collapse due to instability, or temperature gradients, there is a specific amount of heat energy that must transfer into any mass of ice before it can melt. This is basic physics, and it holds regardless of how the heat transfers (e.g., advection, conduction, etc.). The only debate, then, is how much of that heat comes from human activity versus natural forces, and how did human activity cause its portion of the heat to arrive at the ice? And if Holthaus’s article is correct, the ice will melt in 20 to 50 years. This gives us a rate of heat transfer, and that can give us insight into how credible it is to blame human activity.
So, now it’s on to the energy:
It takes 333.55X103 J to melt 1 kg of ice.
Doing the math, we see it takes 3.07X1017 J to melt a cubic km of ice. This is our basic unit of heat energy for melting any large amount of ice in Antarctica, or anywhere else.
Now, back to the two glaciers. We have determined how much ice is involved in that 11-foot ocean rise: 1.32X106 Km3. To melt it, the ice must receive 1.32X106 Km3 X 3.07X1017 J, or 4.05X1023 J. This is true regardless of what process gets the heat to Antarctica. A steady melt would require 2.03X1022 J per year to melt it in 20 years, or 8.1X1021 J per year to melt it in 50 years.
We can argue until the cows come home about how that much heat can reach the glaciers. But for our nontechnical friends, it’s interesting to compare the energy requirement with how much energy humans produce. In other words, if humans set out to deliberately melt the Thwaites and Pine Island Glaciers, could they even do it?
It should be noted the Antarctic ice sheet is only 2.74 percent of the planet’s surface. If human output excites the atmosphere evenly, a reasonable consideration is only that percentage of energy is directly acting on the ice. But let’s attack the problem more directly.
According to the US Energy Information Administration, in 2016 the world produced 84.412479 quadrillion (84.412479X1015) BTU. That converts to 8.906X1019 J, consisting of fossil fuel (the largest component), nuclear, and renewable. And if we used all of the world’s energy to do nothing but melt the ice, we could not do it in 20 years, or even in 50 years. We could do it in about 4,500 years. Here is the math:
4.05X1023 J ÷ 8.906X1019 J = 4,547.5 years.
https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/#/?f=A&start=1949&end=2016&charted=4-6-7-14
That’s just to melt two glaciers. What would it take to melt all of Antarctica?
Per the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), Antarctica contains about 30 million km3 of ice.
https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/quickfacts/icesheets.html
So, for Antarctica, we need 3.07X1017 J X 30X106 km3 = 9.21X1024 J to melt everything.
How many years would it take?
9.21X1024 J ÷ 8.906×1019 J/year = 103,413.43 years.
When talking to your non-STEM friends, just round it off to 100,000 years. This number, and Anthony’s Hiroshima analysis, makes me think human influence on the weather, and therefore climate, is so miniscule it cannot be measured with existing technology.
But these durations are clearly minimum numbers, and not very good at that. Why? Because they rely on some invalid assumptions:
- It assumes all the ice is at STP. This cannot be true. Average surface temperature is approximately -49°C, so the energy “well” is much deeper than at STP. Specific heat of ice is 2108 J/kgK or 103.3 kJ to raise the temp of each kilo of ice to 0°C. That does not include the heat of fusion, 333.55 kJ/kg. Therefore, it takes additional energy just to warm the ice to a melting point. Not much is known about temperatures deep in the ice, but NSIDC’s THERMAP data indicate temperatures are below 0°C, at least down to 500 meters. Deep in the ice, there is enormous pressure, but the temperature is unknown. H2O’s phase diagram shows eleven different types of ice and numerous triple points. If exotic types of high-pressure ice are present, it’s likely their mass per unit volume differs from type I ice at STP. That would mean the energy requirements differ for exotic forms of ice. https://nsidc.org/data/thermap/
- Obviously, it is not possible to apply 100% of our energy to melt the ice. We would be limited to a much smaller amount, with correspondingly longer times to melt.
- The ice will try to re-freeze. This causes a feedback loop, extending the melting program. We can only prevent this by keeping water and air temperatures in contact with the ice above freezing. That diverts energy from doing the melting.
I know, I know. This is a very simplistic analysis that ignores the complexities of actual heat transfer. But that’s the point; non-STEM people can follow it if they know a little math.
And yes, the alarmists would argue human emissions are indirectly causing heat to transfer to Antarctica, and this type of analysis is therefore irrelevant. So what? They must show how human emissions transfer that heat, and how much heat is being transferred.
My goal here is to show the enormous energy levels involved and how ridiculous it is to blame humans for any significant ice melt. That’s my hypothesis; let the alarmists come up with the null.
Now let’s build some power stations and melt Antarctica!
H/T to Grady Gillis for sharing some ideas, and especially for saving me from a very basic unit conversion error.
Julius Sanks is an engineer and manager with experience developing weather forecasting systems and environmental satellites.
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Where did the heat come from to melt the Laurentide Ice Sheet then, in less than 10,000 years? And it was a lot more ice than Antarctica is. Just asking?
I believe there is big round yellow thing in the sky that dwarfs man’s energy production.
More high latitude insolation due primarily to axial tilt:
https://www.livescience.com/6937-ice-ages-blamed-tilted-earth.html
Large amounts of ice in low-temperature areas tend to evaporate more than melt. If there was an extended time of low precipitation, much of that ice sheet probably just turned directly to vapor.
Based upon observed iceberg surges from the LIS, ie Heinrich events, and other evidence as to its retreat and advance, weather over and around it have been modeled, to include precipitation:
http://polarmet.osu.edu/PolarMet/paleonwp.html
Except, your hypothesis has the ice absorbing enough energy to initiate two immediate phase changes; from ice to water, from water to vapor.
That requires more than 7 times the energy than to simply melt the ice.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0sXIlANK5yc/T0Z5CtXqe4I/AAAAAAAAAFs/p1bi5AjtdgU/s1600/Water+Phase+Changes+2.png
Sublimate
Where did the heat come from to melt the Laurentide Ice Sheet
===========
At the time CO2 levels were low. And the IPCC tells us that CO2 controls warming. So from this we know that when CO2 levels are low we will get warming.
Yet the Team shamelessly attribute the melting of the NH ice sheets to a rise in CO2. Seriously.
From ~180 to 260 ppm, which of course occurred because the planet was warming. The CACA Team confuses cause and effect.
Can’t make this stuff up. Oh, wait, they do make it up. Never mind.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/23/a-shift-in-climate-forcing-led-to-demise-of-laurentide-ice-sheet-9000-years-ago/
Intensely amusing ferdberple! +100
I consider myself a skeptic (to say the least). However, I find the current article quite distasteful.
You have created a strawman to demolish, while ignoring Alarmist arguments. Alarmists say that the CO2 that we produce (even though it’s a small fraction of all CO2 produced) causes more of the sun’s heat to stay on earth, rather than being lost back into space.
The heat that the Alarmists say stays on earth is MUCH larger than the energy we produce ourselves, certainly enough to melt these glaciers. I think they are wrong, but your presentation hasn’t aimed at countering their argument. Shame on you.
USIssuesCom,
I think what Julius has presented here has merit for the following reasons: 1) it gives non-technical people a feel for just how massive the ice sheets are and how much energy is stored in them. This is done by relating it to the energy humans consume – at least as a starting point. 2) It lays groundwork for a different foundation of looking at the claimed problem – and that is energy vs. temperature. Others, myself included, have expanded the discussion in posts here to include analysis of the possible impacts of additional stored thermal energy in the system – whether from CO2 heating or otherwise.
As it relates to what the public is fed, there is a lot of hand-waiving in the “science” around climate. On top of that there are claims that just fail the scrutiny of basic physics. I think it is fair to say that what drives a lot of people here is the desire to find a way to apply basic science – or the math and science they do know, to an otherwise extremely complex subject with a lot of unknowns. Can we rule-in or rule-out scenarios in the Alarmist’s Narrative?
Perhaps more will come out in the discussion to show I’m wrong – but so far my analysis shows there is no physics pathway to catastrophe. (I’m referring to my posts further down in the discussion).
William
Thank you!
usissuescom is having a hissy fit because Julius Sanks wrote an article that puts the amount of man-made energy into perspective. According to usissuescom, Sanks is only allowed to write articles on themes approved by usissuescom, failing which Sanks is to be shamed.
Sanks also wrote about science illiteracy. We’re not all as bright as Sanks and it might take us some time to do the necessary calculations, but being literate on basic climate science we have at least heard about stuff like Stefan-Boltzman and Beer’s Law. Therefore we would be able to calculate to within an order of magnitude how much retained energy it takes to raise the earth’s black body temperature by 1K. Knowing this, we would then be able to disparage or commend Sanks using reason and science. But that would never have occurred to usissuescom because it is easier to hurl insults based on insinuation and the presumption of one’s own moral superiority.
I must admit that while wrong in so many ways, it is very, very tempting to say to usissuescom, “shame on you.”
Earthling2 has never heard of sublimation, in which water ice does not MELT into water. It sublimes into water vapor as does dry ice, also known as frozen carbon dioxide.
It requires specific conditions, yes, but it happens a lot more than is taken into account.
@Sara;
If by “specific” you mean “special”, not really. Ice will sublime to water vapor at any temperature as long as the relative humidity is below 100%. My in-laws live in Montana and at their location it snows lightly but steadily 3 or more days a week during the winter. They don’t get completely buried because the outside air relative humidity is around 30% and the snow converts directly to water vapor.
D,J, no, I didn’t mean ‘special’, just specific. In the normal spring, in farm land, I will see ice remains in roadside ditches. The air will be thick with water vapor, but not enough to form a fog, because the ice is slowly eroding into water vapor. I think it’s a specific temperature, maybe 32.6F – something like that. I never tested the air and ice temperature differences to get a reading. I should have done that in high school.
But I also see it on a day like today, when the air temperature is just slightly above freezing and the snow that fell last night is subliming into the air without creating runoff.
Thanks for your feedback, though.
It happened a lot during english winters! I would hang out the washing and it would freeze into stiff boards but gradually dry anyway. That was sublimation. Towels came in dry, fresh and soft…lovely. I miss seeing that much where we live now in Australia…it can happen here though…we do sometimes get temps down to -5/-6C.
To Annie (below): Many years ago we lived in Superior, WI, where winters can be severe and temperature shifts come suddenly as winds shift from northeast (directly from Lake Superior) to southwest (from mainland Minnesota). Our neighbors told us once of having hung out some wet sheets while the weather was breezy but above freezing, say 40 degrees F. A cold front surged through, the temp dropped very quickly to maybe 10 DF, the winds immediately froze the sheets, and they broke! Pieces of white cloth, stiff with ice, snapped off, blew away, and landed somewhere in the next block. Is the story true? I don’t know; it happened before we moved there. Knowing Superior weather as I do, though, it sounds at least plausible.
The day we moved to Superior, about the tenth of June, was hot and humid–low 80s–with a light southwest breeze. Across the highway, next to the lake, workmen were naked to the waist, hefting loads and moving things. My wife and I had stopped by the police barracks in eastern Superior to get Wisconsin driver licenses and plates. The process took about an hour. When we came out, the workmen were cursing a blue streak! The wind had changed and was now coming in, gusty and strong, straight NE from the ice still lying in Lake Superior. The temp was now in the low 40s and felt much colder. I’m sure that wind was also helping the ice to melt, but it had already taken months and was by no means done. As far as I know, humans had nothing to do with it . . .
If you want to experience sublimation put water into an ice tray then put it into a deep freeze and forget about it for 6 months. When you come back to it most, or all, of it will have sublimated and you will have no, or little, ice to put in your whisky. Personal experience just 2 weeks ago.
Who is No1?
the Gulf Stream?
Earthling2..
Where did the heat come from to melt the Laurentide Ice Sheet then, in less than 10,000 years? And it was a lot more ice than Antarctica is. Just asking?
Hypothesising:
Sea level was +/- 50 metres below present ( they say.. not many tide guages around back then). Ergo smaller oceans, say 50% of Earth’s surface v 71% now. Less ocean surface area–>less heat absorbed–> reduced evaporation –> less snow. Larger ice free land surface area –> more heat absorbed–> higher surface (air) temperatures over land. Any way you cook it always seems to boil down to water is the climate control knob.
Regards
Bahamamike
It certainly wasn’t from humans!
Simple enough that even Bill Nye could understand …..But of course he and the rest won’t ….
Their paycheck might evaporate .
Its ALL ABOUT THE MONEY AND WHO CAN LIVE OFF OTHERS VIA ENFORCED TAXATION.
The rent seekers know they are spivs. They just cannot find anything else to do with their lives that pays them to produce nothing.
Spiv is one of my favourite words. My favourite word is another 4-letter one, but I shall not write it here. And no, it is not fork.
Love the word spiv. Describes politicians perfectly. And those on the global warming gravy train, and many others like them.
I’m sort of fond of ‘trougherati.’ though I didn’t make it up. I think someone here or on Bishop Hill originated it.
Pete Fumberger
Spoon?
Do I win a prize?
🙂
Drat
One letter too many.
Spoo perhaps?
Pete Fumberger
file perhaps?
I would sincerely doubt this “…Simple enough that even Bill Nye could understand…”.
ALL you have to ask the Alarmists is a simple question. WHAT is the average DAILY temperature of the Continent of Antarctica? The answer is MINUS 59 degrees F. You would need to raise that average daily temp almost 100 degrees F to melt the ice cap. How much do they expect the temp to rise in the next 100 years? 2 to 4 degrees C. DUH, even the dumbest alarmist should be able to firgure that one out.
Can Humans Melt the Antarctic Icecap?
Give me the budget and I can do it.
We have the mining technology to separate a few cubic km of ice, say 5. Stick a jet engine on it and send it to the equator. Recover the jet engine (it will be the first to be melted free if you direct the waste heat back to the ice).
Repeat.
1.32 x 10^6 Km^3 is a lot of ice. But give me 50 jet engines (one a week) and I can send all that ice to the equator in under six years.
I’ll have it melted in a quarter century. And most of the energy used is renewable, solar!
Interesting and I confess I had not thought of it, because the alarmist claim is we are melting the ice in situ, not shipping it to warmer climes. Are you sure about the math? Dividing the ice into units of 5 km^3 yields 264,000 chunks of ice. Dividing by 52 (52 weeks in a year) results in 5077 weeks, or about 97.5 years if you use one engine per week. Nor have you addressed the energy involved to actually cut and move the ice or. Or to maintain the engines, or replace them. And what is the energy to return them for another run? And I have a question: given the ice is moving and per the original article is maybe 2 km deep, how exactly do you cut it up into chunks suitable for your jet engines? I’m seriously interested in the mining technology you mention, because it’s so different from building satellites.
After the first couple, the tropics are going to start cooling noticeably. That will slow the rate of melting for all of the later ice cubes.
Move Antarctica to the tropics and it will melt in only 5 million years. In the meanwhile a large chunk of the tropics is going to be sitting at 0 C, with much of the world even colder.
Citation please. I think they usually claim we ‘melt’ the ice, without specifying or knowing where.
I think this headpost was really bad, because only fools think Antarctic ice is ever melted in situ. The Zwally incident shows how difficult it is to measure the changes in Antarctic ice, let alone measure its amount. So let’s just look at the sea level. It is not speeding up so much…
I am puzzled by your request. I provided a cite in my essay. Thwaites and Pine Island Glaciers are supposedly melting in place. That’s in situ by definition. They aren’t being shipped anywhere for future melting. There is considerable wailing in the literature about Thwaites. Note the quote in my cite that it is supposedly the “doomsday glacier.” Evidently the world will end if it ever disappears.
Top of the head calculation by me was wrong, it seems.
I need about 900 jet engines.
To be honesat, I did say others had to give me the budget so I wasn’t being that precise.
M Courtney
Another problem, most of the ice is on land how are you going to separate that and move it?
For that you need REALLY big jet engines.
Nah, Ice slides. It’s well lubricious.
That’s quite a folly. Each jet engine will produce quite a bit of water and a lot more steam. Unless you have the very specialized technology to capture and relocate the melt and steam, the steam will condense out of the air in a matter of seconds. I think you underestimate the effort.
How much solar energy does the world receive?
One EJ is 10^18 joules
So, 9 x 10^24 / 0.4 x 10^21 = 20 x 10^3 (x 1.5 hours)
It would take about 30,000 hours for all the available solar energy to melt all the ice in Antarctica. That’s only a few years. Sheesh!
By the same token, if we devoted all the world’s energy to melting Antarctica, we could do it in a mere 20,000 years.
Of course if you were, somehow, able to concentrate all of the insolation falling on the planet unto Antarctica for 3 1/2 yrs, what do you suppose would happen to all the liquid H2O on the rest of the sunless Earth?
It would receive a crust, a few meters thick, of solid DHMO. It could take a long(!) time to melt… geologically long.
Commiebob
…”It would take about 30,000 hours for all the available solar energy to melt all the ice in Antarctica. That’s only a few years. Sheesh!”…
That’s a little over three years. By focusing all the sun’s energy on Antarctica, (under 5%of Earth’s surface) how much ice would accumulate on the other 95% without of sunshine for 3+ years??
Cheers
Bahamamike
“EACH DAY HUMBLE SUPPLIES ENOUGH ENERGY TO MELT 7 MILLION TONS OF GLACIER!”…
The mass of the Antarctic ice sheet is about 24,292,550 Gt. 24.3 million billion tons. At ExxonMobil’s 1962 rate of 7 million tons/day, they could have melted itin just 9,507,847 years.
(Is a /sarc tag necessary?)
[Yes, the mods require the /sarc tag. We have found that it will actually be 9,507,846 years. .mod]
The moderator has a sense of humor. Whoda thunk it?
There is a first for everything! (sarc!)
Hansen’s back radiation of 342W/sq.m could melt a 3.353m high by 1m square block of ice in only 104 years!
Factoid: 24.3 Million Billion tonnes is approximately 1000 times the amount of ice in the Arctic on 4/15/2015.
Which is a eleventy gazillion Olympic size swimming pools… 😎
Med,
Where’s the /sarc tag? /sarc
Too much wine. Med = Mod. 🙁
I noticed the same error. Glad you corrected it.
It has been reported before that if all the present and known (unexplored) reserves of all fossil fuels were burnt all at once and the resulting heat energy directed at the Antarctic ice cap it would melt only 0.3% of the ice. Not much chance of a big melt is there?
Why not just point out that Antarctica is well below freezing nearly everywhere nearly all the time. And by well below freezing you mean minus 30 or 40. Then point out that the time between snow falling in the interior and calving into the sea as ice bergs is years decades or even centuries later and that world temperatures have nothing much to do with it. Any ice mass balance change is a function of how much snow falls and how much ice calves into the ocean many years into future.
Antarctica melting is one of the bigger canards that never seems to get challenged.
He who controls the language controls the debate.
Steve Case’s reply seems profound, because for ice to melt, it has to be above freezing. So, where in Antarctica does the temperature ever stay above freezing for any length of time, over a large enough land area, to a great enough depth, … to allow melting to occur for any significant volume?
I’m vaguely remembering something about liquid water in ice cracks, at a temperature well below freezing, but I think even this is not significant to count as any melting worth considering alarming.
… off to look up temps of Antarctica now.
Yup. The West Antarctic Peninsula and bits of the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Ocean coasts soar to -5 to 0 degrees C in summer.
Robert Kernodle – at 4:08 pm
Thanks for the response.
From my file of tag lines and smart remarks:
if I can help
Northern Hemisphere North Pole Summer av T 0 c Winter -40 C
This is probably why the Arctic sea ice melts in summer –But
Southern Hemisphere ie Antarctica
South Pole Summer -28 Winter -60c
At sea level Summer -12c Winter -45C
ie It would take a great lot of heat to even get Antarctic summer sea level temperatures just up to oc But Eric Holthaus is a piker just focusing on two islands He needs to think big like one of our academics did in an article in the Melbourne Age a couple of years back who opined that all the ice in Antarctica would be gone within a decade.
Its that kind of crap that the poor old public have to go on as they don’t and cant be expected to read learned journals
Antarctica is so far away and beyond their ken that if a professor says its likely to melt fairly soon that’s what they will accept
Makes you wonder why the MSM doesn’t exercise some editorial fact checking of the most basic kind before publishing such tripe.
No wonder there are 3 weather stations alone in the West Antarctica peninsula which comprises 2-3% of the total land mass whereas there are only 10 in the rest of the continent. Gavin Schmidt directs his agency to harp on how West Antarctica is warming. NASA never tells you that the other 10 stations have shown NO warming in their 60 odd year histories. As for the west Antarctica warming apparently it is because of undersea volcanos the same thing that is melting Greenland from underneath.
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2014/06/10/why-the-west-antarctic-ice-sheet-is-really-melting-and-no-not-climate-change/
However even though Greenland is melting from underneath and always has, Dont worry new snow and ice added from the top will keep Greenland ice nice and cozy for the next 100000 years. The same will probably happen in West Antarctica as well or those 1.5 million penguins that they just found will have to go on a long march.
How about covering the edges of Antarctica with soot, over enough area to get the desired 11 feet of sea level rise?
Bear in mind that during the Holocene Climatic Optimum, sea level was about two meters higher than now, without benefit of 400 ppm of CO2. Rather CO2 was probably about the same as “pre-industrial” levels, ie ~280 ppm.
No no- follow the gourd….
The shoe, Follow the Shoe!!!
The shoe, Follow the Shoe!!!
“…..According to the US Energy Information Administration, in 2016 the world produced 84.412479 quadrillion (84.412479X1015) BTU. That converts to 8.906X1019 J, consisting of fossil fuel (the largest component), nuclear, and renewable. And if we used all of the world’s energy to do nothing but melt the ice, we could not do it in 20 years, or even in 50 years. We could do it in about 4,500 years. Here is the math:
4.05X1023 J ÷ 8.906X1019 J = 4,547.5 years…..”.
Ummmm….the next major ice age is going to be here by then, isn’t it? Color me unconcerned.
Even as a non-scientist, it is posts like this that keeps bringing me back to WUWT. It is postings like this that makes the alarmist AGW narrative a little more silly and harder to swallow every day. Keep up the great work Eric, Anthony and all other posters.
OOps, thank you Julius Sanks for this post.
You are welcome!
Yes, it would take a long time to melt the Antarctic ice with a blowtorch. But we have found a better way. Putting CO₂ in the air has created a radiative forcing of about 2 Wm⁻². Earth area 5e14 m², 3.15 e+7 sec in a yera, gives a heating of
2 * 5e14 * 3.15e+7 = 3.15e+22 Joules/year
On your figures, it would take 9.21e+24 / 3.15e+22 = 283 years to melt the lot if that heat can be applied.
Well, I won’t see it, but the forcing won’t stay at 2 Wm⁻² either.
How did you calculate this, Nick? Is your calculation based on the assumption that all warming since 1850 or 1880 or some particular date is due to increased CO2? Are you pretty sure that this is the case, that CO2 took control of weather in 1850?
A simple lie of omission, not your first, not your last…
Nick,
Read the latest WUWT post by Dr.Antero Ollila,” Challenging the scientific basis of the Paris Agreement.”
You quote the RF of CO2 added to the atmosphere as 2 Watts per square Metre.
Go to the Notes under Figure 1.
According to AR5, Theo RF in question was 2.29 Watts per square metre in 2011, increased to 2.44 Watts per square metre in 2016 by NOAA.
This RF figure has gone from .58 Watts per square metre in 1950 (UNIPCC) to the 2.44 Watts per square Metre in 2016.
Now look at the second equation detailing the RF calculation for 8.5 Watts per square metre used for COP21.
The base line scenario for COP 21 is the worst case scenario RCP8.5 of the IPCC.
Why don’t they use your preferred RF?
Nick,
Erratum: My third paragraph should read “ …. the RF in question was….”, not “ ….Theo RF in question was…”
Herbert,
I’m not sure of your point here. Yes, I rounded the current (2016) forcing down. The values you quote would give a shorter melting time. The RCP8.5 scenario envisages a forcing of 8.5 Wm⁻² in 2100, not now.
Herbert,
Please ask Nick to answer my question too. Somehow, he never does…
From CD above: “…..According to the US Energy Information Administration, in 2016 the world produced 84.412479 quadrillion (84.412479X1015) BTU. That converts to 8.906X1019 J, consisting of fossil fuel (the largest component), nuclear, and renewable.
You say: Earth area 5e14 m², 3.15 e+7 sec in a yera, gives a heating of
2 * 5e14 * 3.15e+7 = 3.15e+22 Joules/year
Your claim is CO2 produces 353.7 times more energy in one year than the entire world?
3.15E22 / 8.906E19
Please explain how a J over Sardinia effects the ice in Antarctica?
“Please explain how a J over Sardinia effects the ice in Antarctica?”
The effect of GHG forcing is gradual but persistent. Mixing time in the atmosphere is measured in days within a hemisphere, a bit longer between hemispheres. Antarctica is a sink for heat – transport processes (air, ocean) will get it there.
Antarctica is a sink for heat –
=====
The big FAIL in all these calculations is the lapse rate. Antarctica isn’t cold simply because it is at the South Pole.
Nick,
Serious question. I’m not questioning your math (or the previous calculations because I’m not going to go through them), but your estimate of heating is 3.15e+22 Joules/year. based on this, you divide 9.21e+24 / 3.15e+22 to get 283 years. My question is, if all of this heat directed at Antarctica to melt it in 283 years, what happens to the rest of the planet during this time? If this heating is averaged over the entire planet, how much heating is actually happening in Antarctica and how long would melting take?
Phil,
I’m following the same approach as the article, which was sub-headed
“Can we puny humans produce enough energy to melt the huge icecap? Some math helps.”
We can produce enough energy, with GHG. The question is whether it can be transported to where it can be effective. As I said above, heat is pretty mobile generally, and the Antarctic sink is always there. However, there are local barriers; mainly, the low thermal conductivity of ice, and also circulation patterns around the continent.
I agree the article calculation is stupid but so is your calculation Nick, you have every joule of heating hitting Antarctica. Can I suggest you at least make the calculation homogeneous Antarctica is 9% of total Earth surface so for a back of envelope calculation apply 9% of the heat only. I suspect it’s less than that because although it will sink heat there it doesn’t see much heat hence why it’s frozen in the first place.
The reality is that even that small correction takes your time out to 2000+ years and that is probably one of the least things I would worry about for the coming 2000 years.
The timelines on CAGW are enormous and it is pointless to panic about it, we have monitoring in place and if it becomes a problem real scientists and engineers will deal with it.
Oh the other interesting number is Antarctica sea ice would lift sea level by 70m (70,000mm). Assuming the absolute worst case of the 2000 years that means sea level rise reaches 30mm per year or just over 1 inch per year which as extreme as it is would give you many decades to work on moving and adjusting.
“if that heat can be applied”
Any suggestion how to concentrate the heat from the whole planet in West Antarctica? Particularly since Antarctica is rather isolated from the rest of the world climatically.
“Any suggestion how to concentrate the heat”
Heat is mobile, and it moves down temperature gradients. In fact, in moving from hot to cold it can drive heat engines, as with Hadley cells, say. Much Arctic sea ice melts every summer, and it isn’t just because of the Arctic sun. A lot of heat is transported from the south.
Apparently I miss the point. I don’t believe in the CAGW dogma, but on the zealots’ terms, the energy that would be needed to melt the ice caps would not come from human activity directly.
The extra heat is supposed to come from a change in the amount of solar energy that is trapped by the atmosphere. The source of the energy is the sun and the human activity is to modify the atmosphere in a way that is supposed to trap a higher percentage of the sun’s energy. I don’t think we doubt that there is a little more CO2 in the atmosphere than would be there at equilibrium at current ocean temperatures? What we doubt is that the feedback effects have been accurately modeled. The large positive feedback of water vapor and the large negative feedback of cloud formation, among others.
By analogy, imagine that you have a valve on a fire hose. By putting a small amount of effort into rotating the valve, you may unleash an awesome flow of water. The kinetic energy of the flowing water doesn’t come from the human doing a tiny amount of work turning the valve, it comes from the potential between the high and low pressure regions on either side of the valve. Adding CO2 is supposed to be like opening the valve.
If the author is trying to claim that humans are incapable of generating the amount of energy needed to melt the ice caps, it seems that this will be a weak argument that they can swat down with ease. It’s obviously true, but it’s also irrelevant. So I am missing the point? Please explain.
As I said, it’s a simple Fermi analysis to explain how much energy is involved to people who do not have scientific backgrounds, so they can understand how much ice is there and how much energy is involved to melt it. Of course the actual mechanisms that move heat to Antarctica are different. I have no interest in trying to debunk predictions based on computer models I cannot access. But at the end of the day, if an alarmist claims human activity, and only human activity, will melt Thwaites and Pine Island to raise the ocean 11 feet in 20-50 years, the person must explain how human “emissions” affects the weather to the point that 4.05X10^23 J reaches those glaciers.
I confess that I barely skimmed the content after seeing the headline “Can we puny humans PRODUCE enough energy to melt the huge icecap?”
The headline practically begs the alarmists to scoff at the premise that humans need to produce the energy that would melt glaciers, otherwise it can’t happen. I don’t mean to be overly critical, but I think this is more likely to give ammunition to those who claim “skeptics” just don’t understand the science.
I’m about as sympathetic a reader as you will find to any argument disputing CAGW. If it strikes me as indefensible, how is it going to be treated by the hardcore CAGW faithful? I get what you’re trying to say now, but I am sure that you can’t rely on the storied goodwill of the CAGW alarmists to overlook your flawed headline and read all the way to the end.
The “point” is a red herring — a hypothetical situation posed in order to disprove that it is false.
Your account above is the correct situation.
“The extra heat is supposed to come from a change in the amount of solar energy that is trapped by the atmosphere”
Solar energy isn’t “trapped” by the atmosphere. It is almost exclusively “trapped” by the ocean and lost to space by way of the atmosphere. What GHG do is to (very) slightly increase the thermal gradient required to convect the heat from the ocean to TOA.
“Can Humans Melt the [Antarctic] Ice Cap”?
No.
But maybe the Arquillians could.
https://youtu.be/Aa1V2X6PO2M
Of course whst the alarmists are claiming is that we wicked humans have triggered an avalanche of feedbacks that will melt the ice and ruin the climate.
Which on the face of it is also bunkonium.
That avalnche of feedbacks has never existed and has yet to even partially show up.
Have the Warmians ever specified what they mean by “feedbacks”?
I ask because I have yet to see anything that qualifies as feedback.
Grants of taxpayer money are the primary feedbacks of ‘global warming’…
However, my experience is that even with data they CAN understand, they just throw up their hands and walk away with a “Well, we gotta do SOMETHING”…..
“Miniscule” is not a word.
True, but “u” is next to “i” on a Qwerty keyboard.
Sorry, my bad. It’s “minuscule,” and it’s in the OED Compact Edition (1971), Volume I, page 1806. Etymology goes back to 1893 for the relevant definition. What is your source that it isn’t a word? And regarding Sara’s question about what motivated this, no, it has nothing do do with dinosaurs. It just occurred to me to wonder what it would really take to melt the ice and whether it’s credible that humans are doing it. And thank you for the complement.
Thanks, Julius, for your response to my question. It’s an interesting article.
Math confuses a lot of people (like Warmians) because unless they can use a calculator, they don’t “get” it.
103,413.43 years to melt all of the Antarctic ice, huh? Well, if we silly humans (/sarc) haven’t gotten busy colonizing other worlds by then, the planet will most likely have returned to full ice cover, so it’s a moot point, isn’t it?
Is this exercise inspired by the findings of the fossilized remains of dinosaurs and other critters in the dry interior valleys of Antarctica?
It’s moved a couple of times due to plate tectonics. That’s the reason I’m asking, and at one time, did have a tropical or subtropical climate (ouch! that word!), but where I live now used to be the delta that fed into a shallow interior sea a very, very long time ago. I have a shrimp fossil I found on a field trip down to Braidwood, IL.
That’s a good article, and if it makes a Warmian’s eyes glaze over, fine by me. The length of time is most important, never mind the caloric levels required. My guess is that by 100,000 years from now, we’ll be in the midst of another glacial maximum and/or colonizing other worlds because – well, Earth is SO old hat by then. Such a backwater planet!
The solar system will have moved a good distance in relation to the rest of the galaxy, too, so the night sky will be different. And then there’s that whole thing about plate tectonics and volcanism, which may be far more active with the magnetic poles flipping, as they’re starting to do. That’ll make some serious changes the Greenbeans don’t take into account.
Antarctica was on the Equator in the late Precambrian, 650 Ma:
http://scotese.com/images/650.jpg
And at SH mid-latitudes during the Cambrian:
http://scotese.com/images/514.jpg
Then moved partially north of the Equator again in the Ordovician:
http://scotese.com/images/458.jpg
Then back to mid-latitude SH again in the Silurian:
http://scotese.com/images/425.jpg
And kept slipping farther south during the Devonian and Carboniferous:
http://scotese.com/images/390.jpg
http://scotese.com/images/306.jpg
To reach near its present position in the Permian:
http://scotese.com/images/255.jpg
Despite being near the South Pole, it had dinosaurs in the Mesozoic Era because climate was so warm then, as during the Cretaceous.
http://scotese.com/images/094.jpg
The early Cenozoic Era (Paleocene and Eocene Epochs) was also warm, which is why marsupials fossils are found there, uniting the mammals of South America with those of Australia:
http://scotese.com/images/050.jpg
But its present glaciation began in the Oligocene, c. 34 Ma, when deep oceanic channels opened up between Antarctica and South America and Australia, creating the Southern Ocean.
Hey, I think I found where my house is now on the Late Permain map. Thanks!!
The end of the Permian would have been unpleasant, no matter where your house might have been.
Chimp,
Thanks for those. I have a degree in geology (from the third quartile of the last century) and studied plate tectonics. Most diagrams in textbooks at that time were essentially basic line drawings. Don’t know your reference, but these are much more visibly understandable.
Phil,
They’re from Scotese’s Paleomap Project, and probably aren’t cutting edge any more.
http://scotese.com/
Tectonics was in its infancy in the third quartile of the last century. We keep discovering new plates, largely thanks to GPS measurements. For instance, the Sunda Plate used to be thought of as the SE corner of the mighty Eurasian Plate, but it was fairly recently discovered to moving independently of Eurasia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunda_Plate
The junctions among plates large and small there help explain the terrible earthquakes and other shocks to which the region is prone.
The short version would be that Antarctica has been at high southern latitudes consistently since the Carboniferous, slipping out of the temperate zone during the Devonian. Before that, it was largely tropical, sometimes partially in the NH. Previously in the Proterozoic Eon, it spent some time completely in the NH.
But while Pangaea and Gondwana broke up after the Triassic Period, Antarctica largely stayed put, as South America, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, India and Madagascar broke away from it.
The world is unlikely to warm enough soon in geologic time to melt all that ice, so the continent might have to move north again for the sheets to melt.
Chimp,
Thanks for that. My interests used to be (I guess you could say, still are) in structural geology and Ig/met petrology. Went off in a different direction but still enjoy discussions or comments that relate to geology (great distraction from the dismal “climate science”).
Phil,
Unfortunately “climate science” is even corrupting geology, at least of the academic and government varieties. Petroleum and other private, not so much.
To me it’s exciting that we can now directly measure continental drift and not just infer it from maps, rocks and fossils. And we can date sea floor spreading from the submarine ridges.
Well maybe Antarctica will melt after all if the plate tectonics move it to the equator in 300 million years from now.
Alan,
Some predictions for tectonic movements out to 250 million years in the future show Antarctica still at high southern latitudes, but at least one does indeed see it drifting northwards into the tropics.
Julius. Thanks for clarifying alarms by simple perspective.
PS Recommend clarification of “by definition”. Yes the km was originally defined by 10,000 km from equator to pole. Then the kg was set as the mass of 1 litre of water at its melting point.
However, more accurate measurement found water had its maximum density at 3.98̊C. At its triple point of 273.16 K, liquid water has a density of 999.793 kg m^3 at the pressure of 611.655 Pa. Mass was set by the Pt Ir kg artifact.
The New SI will redefine mass based on constants.
See: GLP 10 Good Laboratory Practice for the Purity of Water NIST 2017
https://www.nist.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2017/03/29/glp_10_20170326.pdf
See The IAPWS Formulation 1995 for the Thermodynamic Properties of Ordinary Water Substance for General and Scientific Use
http://www.teos-10.org/pubs/Wagner_and_Pruss_2002.pdf
Draft Resolution A: On the revision of the International System of Units (SI)
https://www.bipm.org/utils/en/pdf/CGPM/Draft-Resolution-A-EN.pdf
I don’t think it matters because the seriously huge numbers about ocean rise from glacier melt and total ice in Antarctica are estimates with unknown error, and are many orders of magnitude higher than any revised definitions of the metric system.
If you melt that much ice, it will absorb a lot of CO2. Adding that much below-4-degrees water to the oceans will cool them, increasing the draw-down of CO2.
Crispin,
An interesting point, adding another difficulty to those who would stokes the fires of man made global warming!
JS, to me this is an interesting article … making me think about that southernly nether region of our “mortal coil”, about which typically I do not give much thought.
Of note: for general perspective, high school geography informs us regarding some comparative landmass measurements:
[1] the Antarctica landmass, as shown in the foto above, is net 13,000,000 km2 … and I will estimate that, including all of its peripheral ice shelves, sheets and etc, the total ice-covered area is about twice that [26,000,000 km2]
[2] in comparison, Russia, the largest continental land mass on our planet and one with which I am a bit more familiar, totals out at net 17,000,000 km2
Note to self: Antarctica is a LARGE area!
[3] in further comparison, Greenland [a part of the Danish kingdom], which is also covered largely with ice, and, from which the great majority of northern Atlantic icebergs are calved, has a geographical landmass extent of 2,200,000 km2.
As a non-climatologist, I am stressing my imagination regarding the realization of a plausible climate model which could result in the melting of substantial volumes of Antarctic ice … given a landmass of this extent … at its particular range of latitude … where much of life on the remainder of the planet could survive such a “heat wave”.
Hmmm … maybe I just need to think a bit more outside of my box.
Again, very interesting article. Thanks much.
Johnny Cuyana
Going to politely disagree with you there: You’ve underestimated the areas.
Antarctica is 14.0 Mkm^2 in land area, 98% of which is permanent ice fields. (Only the coastlines of the Peninsula are ice-free.)
This 14.0 Mkm^2 of permanent land ice is surrounded by 1.4 Mkm^2 of shelf ice – which is NOT reported in the totals of the “sea ice” around the outside of the land ice and shelf ice.
Now, the variable sea ice around Antarctica is increasing – been increasing near-constantly since 1992. (2016 and 2017 were below average, but Feb-March-April 2018 have already exceeded the day-to-sea ice extents of 2017 by more than 1/2 the area of Greenland.) Antarctic sea ice varies between a low of 3.0 Mkm^2 to an average high of 18.7 Mkm^2.
Aside: In June 2014, it is useful to remember that just the “excess” sea ice around Antarctica exceeded the entire area of Greenland!
(Greenland is actually 2.06 Mkm^2 in area, with the southern coastal mountain ranges ice-free part of the year. 95% of Greenland is ice, snow, or ice caps. The Antarctic sea ice anomaly in June 2014 was 2.16 Mkm^2.)
So, the total ice on and around Antarctica is 14.0 + 1.4 + 18.7 Mkm^2 = 34.1 Mkm^2 (at average sea ice maximum in September each year). (Peak Antarctic sea ice maximum was 20.2 Mkm^2 sea ice extent in Sept 2014.)
True, this is an area larger than Russia.
And Canada.
Combined.
It is also an area larger than all of the other land masses and islands south of the Equator.
Combined.
On another side note, it is interesting to notice that every other continent is reported with land areas to the decimal place of the square kilometer. Antarctica is so poorly mapped that its land area has to be “rounded off” to the nearest digit of millions of square kilometers. But nobody is taxing that unmapped land, and nobody can claim it for use or mining, so – as a recent Secretary of State phrased it – “What difference does it make?”
wait until the Chinese start declaring that Marie Byrd land is theirs because no one has claimed it. 1.6 million km2
RACook1978, thanks for the additional precision … and improved perspective.
Indeed, Antarctica is a very large area of land, ice and etc; a combined area larger than I had estimated. My numbers were off the top of my head and estimated from the foto; where, perhaps, in retrospect, I should have done an online search.
The point of my original posting — in response to the topic of this article — was/is that, for such a truly large area, my imagination was being stressed on how one identifies a plausible climate model that could explain a truly massive ice melt over said area. Your improved precision … increases my stress level. [Haha!]
Again, thanks for reading my post and providing your useful comments.
The huge East and little West Antarctic Ice Sheets cover an area of almost 14 million square km and contain 30 million cubic km of ice.
Around 90% of the fresh water on the Earth’s surface is held in these ice sheets, an amount equivalent to 70 m of sea level rise in the world’s oceans. But this water has been locked up in the ice for 34 million years, and is liable to remain so for millions or tens of millions more. The Carboniferous Ice Age lasted about 100 million years.
maybe we could bottle it
Glacier water does fetch a premium.
Papers from the scientists studying those two areas reported, quite plainly, that ALL the melting is occurring deep under water, from warm water coming from somewhere unknown — and has been in process for 300 to 1000 years. This was discovered with new underwater drone technology.
Later papers extolling further development of the drones, allowing much deeper exploration, found that geothermal vents under the ice sheets had been discovered since the earlier papers were published. These put out a large amount of “surprising warm” water.
All three papers were featured in this blog a couple or so years ago.
Funny, I have put my brother to sleep more than once when talking to him over the phone about climate related thoughts.
I’ve considered having my brother put to sleep. But my parents won’t let me.
(Mark, yer BAD… ☺)
MarW,
Glad my wine was on my desk and not in my hand! 🙂
“A generally accepted value for the total ocean area is 3.618 x 108 km2…”
“Now, 11 feet [3.353 meters] of sea level rise is a lot of water,…”
If the ocean only went up 1 meter you would need 3.618E8 km^3 so your volume needed to fill is too low I think.
the surface area (3.618E8 km^2) X the depth (3.353m) gives 1.213E9 km^3 not 1.21X106 Km3.
Therefore, using standard alarmist wording “It is worse than you think”.
You are not computing your units correctly. km^2 X meters ≠ km^3, but you claim it does. Units must be consistent. So you convert 3.353 meters to km, which is 3.353X10^-3 km. The unit computation becomes km^2 X km = km^3, and the arithmetic final order of magnitude is 10^6, not 10^9.
So, if I understand correctly, this is about convincing people of an idea by using some math even if that math really has no bearing on the question, it’s just used to dress up the argument. This is a lovely illustration of why it’s so important to be skeptical of “skeptic science.”
The issue the writer focuses on is the melting of the glacier. The press release says, “collapse.” These are very different ideas, and the whole energy argument presented is moot.
Much of the melt is from contact with warmer ocean water. If there weren’t a lot of melt somewhere, Antarctica would be growing at a rate equal to all the precipitation is receives (minus evaporation). So, it’s a balance, more or less – melt and accumulation. However, the balance is not evenly distributed. The worry, as I understand it, is that a large chunk that is now above sea level will break off, making sea levels rise rapidly. No one knows when this might happen, only that it’s a risk. “As early as…” is one of those silly phrases journalists use.
When you hear an alarmist whining that the math isn’t appropriate, that’s your first clue that they don’t actually understand the math, but are desperate to prove that we are all going to die anyway.
Yes, warm water will melt ice, but there is a limit to how much warm water exists. As the ice melts, it rapidly cools the “warm” water until the water reaches the point where it can no longer melt ice.
There is no risk of a large section of the Antarctic, or any other glacier breaking off. Not now, not in the next 100K years.
And since in a 100,000 years most of North America will be covered in very thick ice I daunt we will be worrying about rising sea levels
To prove humans are causing the collapse, the alarmists must show how much energy is actually needed to trigger the collapse, how that energy actually causes the collapse, and how human activity has moved the energy to the ice. I see nothing in alarmist writing to explain that. They generally whine about temperature gradient but do not go into the reason the gradient exists. Because they know everyone understands temperature, but few understand heat transfer. As a comparison, consider Larsen A and B breaking off. Was that actually due to human activity, or was it due to simple structural failure as the ice pushed farther and farther into the ocean? Have any alarmists disproved the structural failure hypothesis?
Julius Sanks
“I see nothing in alarmist writing to explain that. ”
Just because you don’t see something in writing doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. For a start, you could read the article.
For those who wish to keep their ideas, there’s not much incentive to look at the evidence for other ones, is there?
A “structural failure” in a glacier? You mean do they develop cracks? Yes.
Kristi, I actually read that paper. If it’s the one I’m thinking of, DeConti and Pollard were discussing the Aurora Ice Sheet. it whined about temperature but said nothing, absolutely nothing, about energy transfer. Temp gradient affects energy transfer but it is not the only variable. WUWT contributors had already challenged it, so I looked for something else. And my comment addressed the possibility that structural failure, not human activity, caused the Larson A and B ice shelves to break off and float away. Perhaps “collapse” was not the correct word. But as those shelves calved, there was much wailing by people who thought that would be some sort of catastrophe.
Kristi, ah, now I see you were referring to the paper I cited. Yes, I read it. I never post any link I have not checked for myself. That said, I’m pretty sure it refers to the Deconti & Pollard paper about Aurora Ice Sheet.
Julius,
It’s not really important whether it’s humans or not if it’s likely to happen. But the idea of trying to quantify the amount of energy necessary to do it doesn’t seem very helpful. For one thing, it would be extremely difficult, given that the ice can lose mass through evaporation, which requires a great deal of energy, or melting in the air or in the water at a range of pressures. And still, how would you deal with the scenario in the paper, in which ice melts, ponds, and drains into cracks, enlarging them, so that one day the glacier finally melts enough at its toe in the sea that it cracks under its tremendous weight. Whoosh.
No one can say that Larsen A or B broke off because of humans, but it caught scientists off-guard because they weren’t expecting it to happen as soon as it did.
We still have a lot to learn about Antarctica. Tough place to study.
Kristi Silber,
I’m just curious in what your (or the press release’s) definition of “collapse” is. Sections of Antarctic ice shelves have broken off recently, but have been doing so for centuries (or millennia). No ice sheet (either east, west, or Greenland) has collapsed as a result. Are you saying that the “whole energy argument presented is moot” because of something said in a press release?
Phil R,
From the article in Nature,
“DeConto and co-author David Pollard, a palaeoclimatologist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, developed a climate model that accounts for ice loss caused by warming ocean currents — which can eat at the underside of the ice sheet — and for rising atmospheric temperatures that melt it from above. Ponds of meltwater that form on the ice surface often drain through cracks; this can set off a chain reaction that breaks up ice shelves and causes newly exposed ice cliffs to collapse under their own weight.
“They found that by including all of these processes, they could better simulate key geological periods that have long puzzled scientists. Before the last ice age began 130,000–115,000 years ago, for instance, sea levels were 6–9 metres higher than today — yet atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels were about 30% lower. And 3 million years ago, when CO2 levels roughly equalled today’s, the oceans may have been 10–30 metres higher.”
Kristi Silber:
“Much of the melt is from contact with warmer ocean water.”
Warmist’s claim this warmer ocean water is human caused via emission of CO2 into the atmosphere. Please explain how atmospheric CO2, whether human sourced or natural, can warm the ocean under an Antarctic ice shelf. If you can explain a mechanism for tropical waters to become warmer due to human caused extra atmospheric CO2, what is the transport time for these warmer waters to be carried to the Antarctic? Has enough time passed since CO2 passed 350 ppm (the claimed “safe” level of CO2) for significant quantities of warmer water to have been carried to Antarctica yet? Would much warmer water produced get caught up in El Nino currents and thereby release the extra heat into the atmosphere?
I thought Global Warming Theory was that increased atmospheric CO2 would return some extra escaping IR radiation back toward the surface. This was supposed to result in a little extra bit of surface warming, which would result in a little extra H2O evaporation. It is the extra water vapor that is supposed to produce a significantly warmer atmosphere. So I ask, How does warmer air move extra heat into the ocean?
If the extra heat is going into evaporation of water, it is not going into the oceans. Since extra water vapor would result in increased cloud cover, less sunlight would then reach the surface of the ocean. Since sunlight is the main source of warming for the oceans, extra clouds would result in cooler oceans. Extra water vapor would also result in extra snowfall in the interior of Antarctica (and Greenland), sequestering extra water for a very long time. Cooler oceans and increased ice is a recipe for lowering sea levels.
I don’t think extra CO2 has the effect the theory claims.
SR
To top it all off, to have extra evaporation you would need to show that atmospheric water vapour has increased. Hansen the then director of GISS for NASA had a H2O measuring project for 20 years. After he couldnt show any increase he shut the project down in 2009. The bottom line is H2O is a global constant in the atmosphere. CO2 does not force more water vapour. The Global warming hoax falls like a melting ice cube in a glass in the tropics.
When they claim that the oceans have warmed, the alarmists never give their “estimates” in terms of temperature. There is a reason for this, when they convert their scary energy measurements to temperature, it works out to just a few thousandth’s of a degree. They idea that a few hundred probes, individually accurate to a tenth of a degree can be used to measure the temperature of the entire ocean to a thousandths of a degree is so ludicrous, that only a climate scientist would be able to make it with a straight face.
Finally, to my point. Just how much extra melting is a thousandth of a degree supposed to cause.
Warm air makes the ocean warmer (or lowers the water’s release of heat to the air). Kind of like a kiddie pool on a warm day vs. a cold day, even in the shade. That’s my understanding.
CO2’s temperature effect is on the atmosphere, and the rest follows from that in a giant, complex system that has elements of chaos as well as patterns, rules and predictability.
Please do not confuse temperature and heat; they are not the same. Air does not warm the ocean. The ocean controls air temperature close to the surface. The the ocean’s specific heat is about 1000 times greater than that of the air. So the air cannot hold enough heat to influence the ocean’s heat. That is why temperature changes in coastal regions are generally more mild than inland, away from the ocean’s influence, and why there is a daily land and sea breeze.
KS,
Antarctica’s ice sheets did not “collapse” during the integlacials much warmer and longer-lasting than the Holocene. It’s simply not going to happen, not matter with how much life-giving plant food humans enrich our air.
A model divined that the little West Antarctic Ice Sheet could have collapsed during the Eemian, but there is no actual evidence that it did:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/02/10/study-asks-how-stable-is-the-west-antarctic-ice-sheet-then-says-doom-ahead/
But in any case, the vast East AIS is rock stable.
Kristi Silber April 17, 2018 at 2:37 pm:
“Warm air makes the ocean warmer (or lowers the water’s release of heat to the air). Kind of like a kiddie pool on a warm day vs. a cold day, even in the shade.”
Odd example. Kiddie pools are used for relief from summer heat. In my experience, a kiddie pool in the shade loses heat even on the warmest day, via evaporation. It’s why many real pools have plastic covers. Sunlight warms water, but contact with air only cools open water. (Yes, tap water often comes out below room temperature, and then warms to near room temp if left out in a glass. But that warm room air is warming the water via heat conduction through contact with the glass. That’s why a cool beverage warms faster in a metal “glass”. If warm air only contacts the surface of the water without interacting with the water’s container, evaporative cooling predominates over conductive warming.)
Nor does downwelling IR from atmospheric CO2 warm the ocean, as that IR is absorbed by the surface
molecules, resulting in increased evaporation. (Sunlight warms the ocean, and the kiddie pool, because most of the spectrum of sunlight penetrates below the surface.) The evaporated molecules carry heat away from the water.
Also, lowering the water’s release of heat to the air would matter only if the water was being heated by some other means. Since extra CO2 in the atmosphere won’t increase the sun’s output, there are 2 main possibilities for extra heating of the oceans :
1. Reduced cloud cover via a warmer atmosphere. However, Global Warming Theory postulates catastrophe via increased atmospheric water vapor, except in deserts. No extra water vapor, no catastrophe. Increased water vapor means more cloudiness. (Just at a higher level in a warmer atmosphere.) Of course, deserts lack an ocean for sunlight to warm.
2. Increased glacial melt water entering the oceans. However increased glacial melt water entering the ocean in the past is blamed for causing global cooling by interrupting transport of warm subtropic water to higher lattitudes. I note that the concern over melting the Antarctic ice shelf turns on warmer water reaching the Southern Ocean.
So I ask: How, according to Global Warming Theory, does increased atmospheric CO2 increase the temperature of the polar oceans? Without such a mechanism, humans need not worry about CO2 emissions melting Antarctic ice.
SR
Sanks: “Air does not warm the ocean.”
…
If the temperature of the air above the surface of the ocean is higher than the ocean surface temperature, heat will flow from the air to the ocean.
Without getting into the calculus of heat transfer, a tiny amount of heat energy will transfer along the temperature gradient. Not enough to matter, because of the huge differences in specific heat. The ocean transfers far more heat into the atmosphere than air to ocean.
In most places, air temperature is colder than SST most of the time.
Sanks: ” a tiny amount of heat energy will transfer along the temperature gradient.”
…
Thank you for acknowledging that air can warm the ocean.
Re: “So, if I understand correctly…”
You didn’t.
“The worry, as I understand it, is that a large chunk that is now above sea level will break off”
You don’t understand it. It won’t “break off”. What can theoretically happen is that a glacier that is based on rock below sea-level can, if more than 90 % of the ice height at the glacier front is below sea-level, and the depth to bedrock increases faster inland than the thickness of the glacier does and there are no thresholds or pinning points calve out rapidly (meaning within a few thousand years or so).
Note that this is theoretical. There is no convincing data that it has ever happened. If it it had it should have left some humunguous IRD deposits it the Southern Ocean, like Heinrich Events on steroids but nothing like that has ever been found.
J Mac,
“Re: “So, if I understand correctly…”
You didn’t.”
Well, that’s helpful. I appreciate that you didn’t insult me, anyway.
tty, you must have been reading a different Nature article than I. This is the link I followed.
https://www.nature.com/news/antarctic-model-raises-prospect-of-unstoppable-ice-collapse-1.19638
KS, the post makes a valid point. As for Thwaites and PIG collapse in the Amundsen Embayment, see guest essay Tipping Points over at Judy Curry’s Climate Etc or on ebook Blowing Smoke. For a more recent equivalent see guest essay Totten Glacier at Judith’s. Its all based on bogus assumptions. You seem an intelligent but sadly misinformed person. Those essays will correct some of the misinformation.
ristvan,
What is the point of calculating how much energy it would take to melt a chunk of glacier, when the worry is that it might crack and split and fall in the ocean? That’s one thing I’m talking about, but no one has commented on my most important point: The writer is explaining how to argue a point by making it SOUND “sciency” and mathematical and therefore trustworthy, when it’s a bunch of nonsense. It’s just numbers, without any connection to the processes that actually happen. The forces acting on Antarctic glaciers are not the same as seeing how many joules it takes to melt a giant ice cube at a given air temperature. The writer wants to convince people a large sea level rise is ridiculous when no one (with any sense) argues that it’s because Antarctica will simply melt.
To me this is the same as distorting the truth in order to argue your point. Evidently that’s okay with a lot of people here.
Kristi, it’s clear you have completely missed my point. I was only trying to compare human energy production with the energy required to actually melt a large amount of ice. Nor do I think you understand how glaciers behave. They are on land. As they get more H2O at higher altitudes they flow downhill. When they end up over water they create ice shelves. They do this on lakes as well as on the ocean. When the ice shelf is large enough, it calves due to mechanical failure. If they suffer from more heat and less moisture they shrink, generally uphill, because the glacier’s toe is thinner than the ice above. I have never heard of any glacier to “crack and split and fell into the ocean,” as you put it. And thanks for your ad hominem attack by claiming my math is “nonsense.” I made no claim about temperature; yet you accuse me of it. I did not claim sea level rise is “ridiculous;” yet you accuse me of it. If my math is “a bunch of nonsense” as you say and you know what you are talking about, you should be able to show me some math that disproves mine. And cite a specific case in which a glacier “cracked and split and fell into the ocean.” If you cannot do that, I laugh at you.
There are several problems with Kristi Silber’s worry “that a large chunk that is now above sea level will break off”. A chunk with a volume of 1.32 million cubic kilometers will not break off all at once–what tremendous forces would be needed to push it into the ocean?
But even if we imagine many smaller chunks breaking off over a period of years, and floating in the southern sea as icebergs, melting them would pull the same amount of heat out of the surrounding ocean water as was calculated in Julius Sanks’ article. This would mean that the surrounding ocean would become colder, and would freeze earlier in autumn than it would if the ice remained over land. The resulting sea ice would tend to block further “chunks” from breaking off.
Steve Zell,
“A chunk with a volume of 1.32 million cubic kilometers will not break off all at once–what tremendous forces would be needed to push it into the ocean?”
Gravity.
The matter of large bodies of cold, fresh water melting at the poles was one focus of a recent paper arguing that climate models have been biased. It’s quite an interesting argument they lay out. Even so, many people here would dismiss it, I suspect.