Guest lampooning by David Middleton
99.989% rounds up to 100%. This is fantastic news… Unless you’re a Warmunist. Fortunately for Warmunists, Science News tailors their headlines to your preferences…
NEWS
CLIMATE, EARTH, OCEANSAntarctica has lost about 3 trillion metric tons of ice since 1992
Ice loss is accelerating and that’s helped raise the global sea level by about 8 millimeters
BY LAUREL HAMERS 1:23PM, JUNE 13, 2018
Antarctica is losing ice at an increasingly rapid pace. In just the last five years, the frozen continent has shed ice nearly three times faster on average than it did over the previous 20 years.
An international team of scientists has combined data from two dozen satellite surveys in the most comprehensive assessment of Antarctica’s ice sheet mass yet. The conclusion: The frozen continent lost an estimated 2,720 billion metric tons of ice from 1992 to 2017, and most of that loss occurred in recent years, particularly in West Antarctica. Before 2012, the continent shed ice at a rate of 76 billion tons each year on average, but from 2012 to 2017, the rate increased to 219 billion tons annually.
Combined, all that water raised the global sea level by an average of 7.6 millimeters, the researchers report in the June 14 Nature. About two-fifths of that rise occurred in the last five years, an increase in severity that is helping scientists understand how the ice sheet is responding to climate change.
“When we place that against the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s] sea level projections, prior to this Antarctica was tracking the low end of sea-level-rise projections,” says study coauthor Andrew Shepherd, an earth scientist at the University of Leeds in England. “Now it’s tracking the upper end.”
[…]
Is context a violation of the Warmunist Manifesto?
| Area (km2) | Volume (km3) | Mass (Gt) | Significance of 3 trillion metric tons | |||
| East Antarctica | 10,153,170 | 75% | 26,039,200 | 86% | 23,870,135 | 0.013% |
| West Antarctica | 1,918,170 | 14% | 3,262,000 | 11% | 2,990,275 | 0.100% |
| Antarctic Peninsula | 446,690 | 3% | 227,100 | 1% | 208,183 | 1.441% |
| Ross Ice Shelf | 536,070 | 4% | 229,600 | 1% | 210,474 | 1.425% |
| Ronne-Filchner ice shelves | 532,200 | 4% | 351,900 | 1% | 322,587 | 0.930% |
| Antarctic ice sheet | 13,586,400 | 100% | 30,109,800 | 100% | 27,601,654 | 0.011% |
Ice sheet areas and volumes are from USGS Professional Paper 1386–A–2: State of the Earth’s Cryosphere at the Beginning of the 21st Century: Glaciers, Global Snow Cover, Floating Ice, and Permafrost and Periglacial Environments.
I obtained the mass by multiplying the volume by 0.9167.
The total mass of the Antarctic Ice Sheet is about 27,601,654 BILLION metric tons… 27,602 TRILLION metric tons… 3 is 0.011% of 27,602. Zero-point-zero-one-one percent is indistinguishable from Mr. Blutarski’s grade point average…
Even if all of the melting was from the only place in Antarctica that’s actually losing ice (only slightly sarcastic), the Antarctic Peninsula, it would only be 1.441%… Leaving 98.559% of the ice on the Antarctic Peninsula un-melted, along with 100% of the ice on the other 99% of the Antarctic Ice Sheet.
I thought about putting together some sort of clever graphics for this like I did with Greenland, but I couldn’t figure out how to put something so small (the ice loss) and something so big (the Antarctic Ice Sheet) in the same image at the same scale and still be able to see the ice loss. I think Dean Wormer suffices.
But, but, but… What about the 8 millimeters of sea level rise?
Sorry.
Note: Wherever I use variations of the word “melt,” please read “ice mass loss”… Or I’ll smash another guitar.
Micro math error – applied to the Antarctic Peninsula, 1.441% loss would leave 98.559% unaffected.
Sorry.
🙂
Math was right, typing was wrong, will fix.
Not that it means much to the discussion or the overall point of your post, but I think there is a typo/transposition error in the volume of the EAIS given in the USGS paper. it gives an area of 10,153,170 km2 for the EAIS in Table 2, page A77, but gives an area of 10,135,170 km2 for the EAIS in the discussion on page A103.
Just a comment in case the warmunists accuse us of not reading the literature. :>)
Area may be easier to calculate,
but ice volume is what really counts
for sea level rise.
Volume may be what matters… It’s also the most commonly available number… But idiotic articles like the Science Snooze bit, almost always refer to billions or trillions of tons.
3 Trillion Metric Tons of mass equates to 7.6mm Sea Level Rise. (2.54mm per inch is 7.62 for 3″)
3T Tons sounds like a lot but reality is, 1 trillion tons equates to 1″ of sea level rise.
For Antarctica, literally a Drop in the Bucket.
25.4, not 2.54
That’s what I get for not being metric…
2.54 cm not mm
7.6mm is around 1/3″ so 9-10 Trillion Metric Tons would equate to 1″
It’s worse than we thought
25.4mm per inch… 2.54cm per inch.
not 2.54 mm/inch. 2.54cm or 25.4mm per inch
If it took 25 years to lose this ice then the amount of sea level rise per year caused by Antarctica melting is 0.3mm per year. Even if 40% of the melt occurred in last 5 years that rate is only double or 0.6mm per year and we are supposed to be scared about this? Wake me up when it gets to 25 mm per year which is still only 1 inch. Dont forget CAGW has been destroyed with the revelation that H2O and CO2 emission of back radiation decreases with temperature increase. So we would have plenty of time to shut off the CO2 control knob assuming the knob works which according to all evidence is impossible anyway.
1″ per year is 100″ per century or just over 8′ per century. This would require some immediate action. How long would it take to build a 10′ high sea wall to surround an entire country and still allow river access?
The USA has a coastline that is 12,400 miles long and could be more than a centuries long project to raise a wall 10′ tall. Then to raise it another 10′ over the next century.
(glad it is only MM and not CM)
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-big-is-the-us-coastline-2015-10
It did not take New Orleans or the Netherlands a hundred years to build their dike systems.
Assuming that 25 years of Antarctic melt will suddenly start occurring every year.
But they weren’t building them for thousands of miles. The only thing that comes close is the Great Wall in China. It is several thousand miles long and took many centuries and many thousands of workers to build, refurbish, rebuild, extend and take into its current form.
And it only averages a height of around 25′
But if the Mexicans and Canadians don’t build walls the water will leak around the ends.
One world
Kind of like Germans and the Maginot line.
just have to extend the ends inland to an elevation higher than the wall height. The southern end could be managed by Trumps Wall (if it ever gets built)
But how many Hiroshima atom bombs is that?
The “Hiroshima bombs” scientific measurement method is my preferred…..
It just seems so scientific.
I quite like ‘football fields’ and ‘olympic swimming pools’ ….!
My problem with the “football fields” measurement is that, as scientific as it clearly is, it doesn’t measure volume.
Whereas my exploding Hiroshima bombs do, albeit an expanding one so one should specify how many seconds one is referring to.
Something like HB4s/HB7s etc. Although one has to be careful as the expansion isn’t constant. It’s a scientific conundrum and no mistake.
The problem I have with “Olympic swimming pools” is that it’s a rather small unit of quantity when one is measuring Antarctic ice volume/mass.
Although I do see your point Mr Norwegian.
Before anyone asks, yes, I’m a bit bored at the mo……..
How about measuring it as “Antarctic Ice Volumes” That would really put it in proper perspective. .003 Ice Volumes of loss
manhattans make me laugh
This is a serious subject.
Yes, almost wrote a story for WUWT myself when I saw it yesterday. Sea level rise! Upper end of the predictions! 8 mm in 26 years! Which is 3/10ths of a mm a year! which is the thickness of 6 whole sheets of paper. My god we’re all gonna die, because 3 Trillion Metric Tons is an HUGE HEADLINE!
Sorry for the sarcasm. Utterly unbelievable what these people will try.
If my math is correct, the average ocean depth is 3, 688 meters, at .3mm per year the oceans are decreasing their depth by .00000813% per year. My confidence in our ability to even measure such an amount is even less than in my math. And while it is estimated that 10% of the earth’s land is “occupied” and 70% is oceans that means that only 3% of the earth’s surface is occupied.
One would need to have one’s head firmly wedged in one’s fundament to think we are having any truly measurable effect upon this planet. Temperature, weather, climate, ocean levels, all are not truly measurable to any meaningful, statistically scientific degree.
Increasing not decreasing.
How does ice “melt” at -40F?
Well… ice loss also includes ablation and calving of icebergs.
Technically, I should use “negative mass balance” or “ice mass loss” rather than “melting.”
Is it possible there is sublimation going on?
Absolutely…
https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/glossary/term/ablation
Sublimation is a big part of ablation in cold, dry places like Antarctica.
Technically, I should use “ablation,” “negative mass balance,” or “ice mass loss” rather than “melting.” But… This was intended as a lampoon of the Science Snooze article… so my language (and typing) wasn’t as precise as it should have been.
“Good News! 99.989% of the Antarctic Ice Sheet Didn’t Melt!” is a lot catchier than “Good News! 99.989% of the Antarctic Ice Sheet Didn’t Ablate!”
😉
There are so many, many jokes in your question, Sharpshooter…. so many jokes.
i believe & have read the sea ice melts from below due to’ warmer’ (not frozen)water,&sea floor volcanic vents mainly .If we are referring only to land ice, -40F would seem to make this impossible,unless heat is transferred from below ,maybe geothermal, wind erosion,sublimation,or migration of glaciers to the coast to meet&calve into the ‘warmer’ sea water.this would logically vary somewhat from year to year ?
Nothing is going to melt the 75% of the ice that is over the land mass of the East Antarctic. The 8 weather stations in that region have shown no warming in the ~60 years of measurements. Even if the world’s average temperature went up 10 C the temperature of almost all of that ice mass wouldnt even come close to 0C except on the coasts. An engineer calculated on this site that it would take 105000 years to melt all of that ice even if you were blowtorching it with all of the energy produced in the world with blowtorches aimed at every inch of it. People have no idea of just how large Antarctica is almost the size of Russia.
They went looking for evidence of melting below the Ross Ice Shelf this year. After drilling through the ice they didn’t find what they expected however:
“The undersides of ice shelves are usually smooth due to gradual melting. But as the camera passed through the bottom of the hole, it showed the underside of the ice adorned with a glittering layer of flat ice crystals—like a jumble of snowflakes—evidence that in this particular place, sea water is actually freezing onto the base of the ice instead of melting it.”
Source: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/ross-ice-shelf-bore-antarctica-freezing/
Flying saucers land on it and go ‘ssssssssssssssss.’
Maybe they meant -40C? Oh, wait.
How is it even possible to measure this accurately? As an engineer, I’d look at any such result extremely skeptically and would draw no conclusions. More bad/fake science.
Models.
Buckeye Bob
This is “modern climate science”,
with SUPERcomputers,
not old fashioned engineering
practiced by old timers with slide rules.
In “modern climate science”
if you have a science degree,
and state any conclusion with great confidence,
and three or four decimal places, then it is
automatically true.
You comment: “More bad/fake science”
I say: What science?
Just computer games.
No “experiment” can be replicated.
No conclusion can be falsified.
This is left-wing politics,
not real science
Correction State-of-the-Art Supercomputers “Art” being the key word.
It is not possible, Buckeyebob. You probably know it better than I do.
As I commented above, there are always significant assumptions that go into calculating a metric such as this. Not only do they not know the relevant (large) numbers they are estimating with such precision, but there is no reason to suppose these unknown large numbers don’t change in unknown amounts.
It is entirely based on the precision of their imagination.
We’re all gunna die! Seriously, despite multiple studies that the southern pole ice is increasing, what are the error bars on such silliness? Was it reported in the study? I’m guessing not.
Read carefully…..they found a new way to measure the ice…the new way found less ice….when compared to the old way….shows a faster rate of decline
..if the old way had been measured the same…it might not show any decline at all
I am reminded of: “Law Number XXXV: The weaker the data available upon which to base one’s conclusion, the greater the precision which should be quoted in order to give the data authenticity.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine%27s_laws
My sentiments as well: “On Making a Precise Guess”.
It’s a frequent go-to resource to debunking BS.
You mean with satellite altimeter accuracy somewhere between 4.2cm and 3.4 cm? Crystal ball.
Naturally, some harpy at the NYT is claiming otherwise…
But…Dr. Mann said once the ice sheet starts to melt there’s no stopping it… [insert rolleyes here]
Seriously, what attribution do they give for this? Are we seriously expected to believe that this melting is somehow due to CO2?
rip
Are you to believe? Not sure what to expect from people. When CO2 is the only rational explanation, I guess you can believe what you want.
Blaming CO2 is the exact opposite of rational. But you Warmunists live in an upside-down Alice-In-Wonderland world.
Wrong as usual. The best rational explanation is increasing ocean temperatures due to natural ocean current changes (MOC speed changes).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0007-4
I suspect when faced with evidence that supports this claim your only response will be denial. I’ve already seen it dozens of times from climate cultists.
What would the null hypothesis for agw conclude is the most rational explanation?
Anything other than AGW…
Read more: Null Hypothesis Definition | Investopedia https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/null_hypothesis.asp#ixzz5IQ0rglAv
Follow us: Investopedia on Facebook
There is no requirement for an alternative hypothesis, to presume that the null hypothesis still holds.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/04/17/the-good-the-bad-and-the-null-hypothesis/
Just because you are paid not to think, don’t presume that everyone else suffers from the same limitations.
Off the top of my head I can think of a number of things.
The sun
Ocean cycles
Magma stirring beneath the crust.
Mark,
You forgot measurement/modeling error.
When I’m measuring models, I try to be very precise.
Hands on even.
Alley,
And you too are welcome to believe what you want. But if you expect us skeptics to believe similarly, you will have to provide more than your statement of belief that swans only come in the color white.
ripshin,
It is a corollary of ‘Cold Fusion.’ Once the reaction starts, there is no stopping. Something like thermite.
This alarmist nonsense, disguised as science, is really getting my goat. The arrogance of these people comes from the fact that they can predict anything to promote their agenda without fear of being proven wrong until long after they are gone. Science has been turned on its head. I’d love to see what kids are being taught in college now. It sure isn’t the scientific method.
Hey, more science here at WUWT! Just like the “Gosh, CO2 is only .04% of the atmosphere, so can’t have an impact!” statements that made here.
Since most of the CO2-related greenhouse effect is in the first 0.01%, there is no analogy.
CO2 is 0.04% of the atmosphere. The atmosphere holds 1% of the enthalpy of the climate system. The oceans hold the remaining 99% of the enthalpy of the climate system. CO2 is therefore less than 0.0004% of the enthalpy of the climate system. It is an utterly negligible factor.
True… However, to the extent that atmospheric CO2 does affect the temperature of the bulk atmosphere, 80% of the current effect is due to the first 100 ppm (0.01%).
So… It starts out insignificant and gets more insignificant with each additional ppm of CO2.
Irrelevant comments, David. It is often pointed out here on WUWT that since CO2 is just a trace gas, it can’t have much impact. Period. Just like your Antarctica comment. Whether more of the CO2 impact is due to the first .01% than the last .04% is not relevant to my point.
First… I’m not one of the people who says that 0.04% CO2 has no effect on the atmosphere.
Second…
It’s not a red herring to point out the incorrectness of saying “it’s a small percentage so therefore is not a big deal.” That’s exactly what you did with your post about Antarctica.
Here’s the anatomy of your red herring:
A loss of 3 trillion tons out of 27 quadrillion tons is mathematically insignificant. This is only a 0.011% reduction… despite Antarctica comprising something like 90% of the ice on Earth.
And increase of 120 ppm over 280 ppm is not mathematically insignificant. This is a 43% increase… despite just comprising 0.04% of the atmosphere.
You are comparing the total atmospheric concentration of CO2 to a change in the Antarctic ice sheet. This isn’t even apples and oranges.
The climatic significance (or lack thereof) of the Antarctic ice sheet and atmospheric CO2 is irrelevant.
David, for the 3rd time, my point is the fallacy of saying “it’s a small percentage, so can’t be a big deal.” That applies both to your Antarctica post here and comments made about CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Your point about an increase of 120ppm above a baseline of 280 is exactly what is used to refute the “.04% is small so it can’t be a big deal” statement.
A small percentage increase in a large number is not analogous to a large percentage increase in a minuscule number.
Saying that CO2 is a small portion of the atmosphere therefore it can’t have any affect is categorically different from pointing out that only a tiny, tiny, fraction of Antarctic ice has melted therefore there is nothing to fear.
How would you like it if I took the most ludicrous claims by an alarmist, such as the claim that CO2 is going to cause the end of all life on earth, and proclaim that this is what all alarmists believe.
Then again, I never expected integrity from you in the first place.
MarkW, I didn’t say all skeptics believe that, stop lying. I said that statement often appears on WUWT. Saying often appearing does not = saying all believe it.
Chris,
No, what we are saying is that both are so small that the effect is negligible.
Paul, correct, and that’s ludicrous to say.
It’s not ludicrous to say that the GHE of adding a fourth molecule of CO2 per 10,000 dry air molecules is negligible. That’s what skeptics more commonly say than CO2 doesn’t matter because it’s only .04% of the whole atmosphere.
Prove it. You say ‘often’, so it should be no problem for you to link to ten instances of that statement previously posted here. Put up and/or shut up.
Tough guy Jorge, here are a few:
1) dbstealey
David A,
Good post. The “acidification” scare is having a hard time getting traction, for the reasons you cite. The only reason it is mentioned is because the label sounds scary to ignorant people who know nothing about the oceans’ immense buffering capacity.
When CO2 rises from 3 parts in 10,000 to 4 parts in 10,000, over a century and a half, that is hardly going to change the oceans’ pH. CO2 is only a tiny trace gas. The ocean doesn’t even know it’s there.
September 10, 2014 2:26 am
2)gymnosperm
At less than 1% of the resonating molecules, CO2, CH4, and stragglers are insignificant in the greenhouse effect. Hello? Don’t trust the satellites. Trust the spatially biased, corrupt, and much adjusted surface temperature record.
0 September 9, 2014 9:35 pm
3) iknowthetruth
“without carbon dioxide, which is currently only about 0.04 percent (400ppm) by volume, both the oxygen itself, and most living organisms on earth could not exist at all.”
Nonsense. It’s just a trace gas and can’t have any significant effects on anything.
0 June 4, 2013 2:00 pm
4) It has to be questioned whether it is plausible that CO2, a minor trace gas in the atmosphere, currently at the level of ~400ppmv, 0.04% up to 0.10% achieves such radical control of Global temperature, when compared to the substantial and powerful Greenhouse Effect of water vapour and clouds in the atmosphere?
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/10/the-diminishing-influence-of-increasing-carbon-dioxide-on-temperature/
1) Not relevant to your claims. He didn’t say that since CO2 is a small part of the atmosphere it can’t matter. He said that such a small change in CO2 percentage is not enough to significantly impact ocean acidity.
2) Not relevant to your claims. He’s stating that the GHG impact of CO2 is small, a true and well known fact.
3) Relevant. Finally
4) Not relevant, pointing out that compared to water vapor, CO2 is a bit player. A true and well known fact.
1 out of 4. By your standards, that’s pretty good.
1) yes he did. “When CO2 rises from 3 parts in 10,000 to 4 parts in 10,000, over a century and a half, that is hardly going to change the oceans’ pH. CO2 is only a tiny trace gas. The ocean doesn’t even know it’s there.” What part of “CO2 is only a tiny trace gas. The oceans don’t even know it’s there” don’t you understand?
2) the GHG impact of CO2 is not small. Fail.
4) absolutely relevant. The commenter says that CO2 can’t have much impact because it’s a small trace gas. That’s patently false.
0 for 4, Mark, that won’t even get you a spot in Single A ball.
It really is sad the way climate alarmism rots the brain.
This isn’t Skeptical Scientist, people are allowed to post things that not everyone agrees with.
Okay, it’s now 11:11 a.m. Let’s see you cite (full link) someone actually making that statement here previously. You have fifteen minutes.
I’ve seen a couple of people make that point, and I usually correct them when they do.
Chris’s big fallacy is taking the most ridiculous statements made on a site and declaring that everyone on that site believes it.
As David has pointed out, it’s a red herring designed solely to change the topic of discussion because you are losing the current topic.
Haha, Jorge thinks he’s in charge. You’re not. I don’t march to your deadlines.
Translation: I can’t do it, but I’ll pretend that I’m a superior being and don’t have to.
Mark – you do nothing except post all day long. You don’t do any research, you don’t post links.
You are 100% correct Chris. Mark is computer illiterate and does not know how to post a link.
What matters is that CO2 is minor even just looking at the GHGs in our atmosphere.
In the moist tropics, the more potent GHG H2O is 100 times more plentiful than CO2. In the dry, cold polar deserts, the ratio of CO2 goes up, yet it still appears to have no detectable effect on temperature. At the South Pole, where the GHE of CO2 should be the most pronounced, the temperature hasn’t changed for as long as records have been kept.
Felix,
The effect of CO2 at the South Pole is negligible.
The 15 um absorbtion band of CO2 emits at ~220 K in the tropopause.
As the average surface temperature at the South Pole is ~-50 deg C, the emission in that band from the surface is about the same as to space, so there is no net CO2 effect.
I saw that story, thought the weight of xtra ice lowered the top, giving fake satellite loss. … NOW …Sorry, my off topic obsession, heh. Micro IceAge- Has the annual number of Mesoscale Convective Systems (MCS) storms been increasing in any region since 2000?
.
.
Sandy,
Minister of Future
Important subject.
Short article.
To the point.
Some humor too.
Grade = A
For an A+,
the article should have mentioned that most of the
areas that have had some melting are near underseas
volcanoes (that are most likely the cause of the melting).
The greenhouse effect would not cause melting only
at a few locations, most of which happen to be near
KNOWN underseas volcanoes … and the few other areas
with melting may be near UNKNOWN underseas volcanoes.
I posted a similar article on June 5
on my climate change blog,
with slightly different numbers,
but I also included a few charts
that would be a useful supplement
for your article. I don’t know how
to post charts here now, so I’ll
provide a URL for the article:
https://elonionbloggle.blogspot.com/2018/06/antarctica-lost-0005-of-ice-volume-in.html
When I’m going for the A+, I wind up with long articles that read more like geology textbooks… 😉
The language of the Propagandists: Out of Context.
According to a research study conducted by a NASA team and published in Journal of Glaciology in October 2015 (see sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2016/why-is-antarcticas-ice-sheet-growing-in-a-warming-world/ ), the Antarctic ice sheets gained an average of 112 billion tons of ice each year over the period 1992-2001, and continued gaining an average of 82 billion tons each year over the period 2003-2008.
Further on in the above-referenced Harvard blog article, titled “Why is Antarctica’s Ice Sheet Growing in a Warming World?”, one finds this blanket statement “The Antarctic has gained about 7,300 square miles of ice each year since the late 1970s.” and these statements “There is ice loss still occurring at the periphery of West Antarctica; it’s simply that the ice gains in the other regions are greater in magnitude.
“Moreover, annual average of the Antarctic ice coverage extent has INCREASED by about 15% since 1990, and the peak coverage in 2014-2015 was about 50% MORE than the mean for 1980.”
I put more faith in this study conducted by NASA than in the unnamed “international team of scientists”, led by an “earth scientist” at the University of Leeds in England, that have massaged data from “two dozen satellite surveys”.
Nevertheless, these two parties should at least talk to each other and reach a, ahem, consensus about what the data really says.
In glancing through this new report, I don’t see that they even referenced Zwally (and friends) NASA’s report. It did reference a one page published letter which found fault with the report.
The studies that have found an overall increase in mass balance forgot to pretend that the entire continent is isostatically rebounding from a post stadial melt that didn’t happen.
When warmunists blather on about “ice loss”, what are the odds that they are including the ice gained on the other side of the ledger. Warmunists are only interested including those facts (exaggerated and over-dramatized as they are) which support their ideology.
So I don’t have to feel some kind of weird guilt about taking a shower this morning, after all?
Well, that is a load off my mind!!!
Just a question, trying to not make it an obvious question, also: do the people who make these pseudo-terrifying pronouncements have any idea how big this planet really is and how deep the oceans really are? Also, are they living on the same planet as the rest of us?
(Okay, I know, I know – dangling participles are a bad thing, but high school was a while back, and I mowed the lawn at 7AM this morning, trying to avoid the coming heat wave of 77F in my kingdom. And the grocery store has sweet corn tomatoes, and radishes now in stock, so I’m going grocery shopping.)
Sara: “So I don’t have to feel some kind of weird guilt about taking a shower this morning, after all?
Well, that is a load off my mind!!!”
Unless you live in California Sara !! LOL
Tammy Bruce: California’s new water rationing law is a tax in disguise, complete with fines
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/06/14/tammy-bruce-californias-new-water-rationing-law-is-tax-in-disguise-complete-with-fines.html
I’m going to start drinking more water (even here in CA) to do my share to keep SLR to a minimum.
It’s actually reassuring to me that Antarctica is loosing a bit of ice. Too much ice might make the continent tip over.
As big as it is, too much ice might make the planet tip over!
actually it is that mass imbalance that provides the rotation of the planet!!!
Well, that and the molten metals sloshing about in the outer core.
I find it reassuring that Antarctica is on the bottom of the earth because if it were on the top, the whole planet would be in danger of tipping over!
Don’t scare the Aussies and Kiwis ! 🙂
The Nobel Authors in kind with Al Gore forgot that June is Winter in Antarctica!
Ha ha
Let us not forget the 120+ geothermal vents (volcanoes ?) that have been discovered under the west Antarctica ice sheet in the last few years. The AGW folks seem to ignore that. Good article, good perspective.
Geothermal vents also mean an active magma chamber.
These guys assume that any change in mass must be due to changes in ice. It could also me caused by movements in the magma chamber.
I’ve asked about that in a number of forums and never got an answer. Specifically, how does GRACE know that the change in mass is due to ice and snow and not magma movement.
Magma movements generally don’t have much of an effect on GRACE measurements. Although the rebound of the Earth’s crust from the last Pleistocene glacial maximum does. The correction for this is called Glacial Isostatic Adjustment. GIA is often the difference between an ice sheet gaining or losing mass.
Like most Gorebal Warming “observations,” the adjustments are often larger than the anomalies.
In places like Yellowstone, movements in the magma chamber can lift or drop the ground above by several inches.
Thanks for the lol’s….zero-point-zero….the lefty’s don’t believe in math unless it’s the agenda suiting kind.
O.T. but interesting ?
“Elon Musk’s The Boring Company wins contract to build 150 mph underground transit system in Chicago”
http://www.foxnews.com/auto/2018/06/14/elon-musks-boring-company-wins-contract-to-build-150-mph-underground-transit-system-in-chicago.html
Hmmm, a company that makes baseball caps and toy Flame Throwers !!
I’m not sure that win is the right word. They promised to build it without any government support, charge cheaper than what is already out there, and pay if it doesn’t work out. How could any government say no?
Especially since it will be powered by underground solar panels!
Haven’t you heard, those are all the qualifications that Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel required for the successful bid.
Each day I get the morning propaganda report from NPR.
Then, I dial up WUWT to get the actual facts and perspective.
(Thank you, David Middleton)
The Lost Angeles Times boldly presented the story in today’s newspaper, withe the headline of, Ice shrinks at unprecedented rate – Antarctic changes could mean an even higher sea level rise by 2100, scientists say.
Looks like the year 2099 is still safe.
Thanks!!
Thanks David, I saw the article yesterday, and was wrestling with how to depict the ice loss compared to total mass too. I looked at bar graphs, pixels in context to a map of the continent, and other ideas, none really worked to convey the data. Dean Wormer is about as good as anything I could come up with.
A bar graph with a logarithmic axis would work… But, it really wouldn’t convey the scale (or lack thereof) as well as Dean Wormer.
If a 13,000 pound elephant went on a diet till he lost 0.011% of his weight he would then be a sveldt 12,998.57 pounds.
If they claimed to be able to measure the dynamic mass of the Antarctic Ice Sheet to +/-1.0%, I would say they are lying. Anything better than that is, well,… climate science.
There are many necessary assumptions that go into calculating such a number. They can only appear to be so precise in their measurements because they make the necessary assumptions be so precise. It is total make-believe science.
Precision pretending to be accuracy, aka the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy.
(Named for the old tall tale of a Texan who fires blindly into the side of a barn, paints targets around the largest concentrations of holes, then claims to be an excellent marksman.)
Isn’t it by definition that there is ice loss during interglacial periods? Asking for a friend.
It really wouldn’t work very well otherwise… LOL!
How many different satellites were used to compile this 26 year record?
How good are the inter-satellite correlations?
Beyond that, what’s the error bars on these gravity measurements? Wouldn’t surprise me if it’s an order of magnitude or two greater than the signal they are so excited about.
If I understand correctly, most of the “enormous” ice loss in West Antarctica is ice over water. How does losing ice mass over water contribute to sea level rise? Whether it’s in the form of ice or water, it has the same mass, and melted water has a slightly smaller volume. Archimedes tells us that this should have little or no effect on sea level. NPR et al. wouldn’t try and deceive us, would they?
LOL. The global worriers have been trying to find ice loss in Antarctica for decades. It’s a bit like the “missing heat”. They know it’s there. They just have to keep twisting, turning, pulling apart and putting back the data until they find it. It wasn’t so long ago that convenient data from the GRACE satellites was used to support the global warming conclusion. (Whatever happened to that data anyway?) Antarctic sea ice was hitting record levels in 2014/15. The Ship of Fools got stuck. NASA finally had to admit that Antarctic ice was increasing.
Now we have a period of low levels of ice in the Antarctic, I guess it’s somehow convenient to draw a linear trend line from Point A to Point B to support a predetermined conclusion. The fact that ice in the Arctic refuses to melt and shows indications that it might be about to increase in coverage exerts a certain pressure on the snake oil sales reps to find another “canary in the coalmine” or to take yet another shot at crying “Wolf!”.
Ho hum!
This is how propaganda works. Continue bombarding people with misinformation from every perspective and suppress the truth that contradicts the chosen narrative. There are many people alive today that have been through the catastrophic climate change scare before and know the drill already. Those that haven’t are realizing none of the predictions are materializing. It’s time for the alarmist cabal to move on to a new bogeyman. Even Soros admits he’s been living in a bubble.
In the interglacial periods temperatures were occasionally higher than they are at present , resulting in the melting of the ice sheets (mostly Antacrtica/Greenland), and a sea level higher than today. Around the Cape here (South Africa) you can see the places when the water was in fact 30 meters higher than today and the Cape peninsula was transformed into a string of islands.
Of course we cannot blame man for this …….., can we? For the past 10000 years (Holocene) sea levels have remained more or less constant and this is the period when man showed up on earth…..
Funny, that you should mention it: we are carbon made and everything we eat depends on getting CO2.
More carbon is OK!
Yeah, I’m not even buying that Antarctica is losing ice as a whole. I wager they come to this conclusion after adjusting altimeter data, pretending that there is isostatic rebound after the continent lost mass when the current interstadial began, but that is nonsense. If anything, the continent has gained mass during the interstadial because of greatly increased precipitation. So not only are they adjusting the data, they are adjusting it the wrong direction, and isostatic depression could actually be decreasing the gravity anomaly as well.
Afterall, it’s not like this new research spawned from nothing, it is the latest in a line of junk sophist science that was determined to claim Antarctica is melting. There are many papers that used models and compared them to other models, and then based models on those models, and found that those models support their other models. Besides, everyone knows that when you heat ice from -80 F to -50 F, it’s going to melt.
https://academic.oup.com/gji/article/190/3/1464/570434
The isostatic rebound is so great that it is swallowing old camps and surface equipment.
“But, but, but… What about the 8 millimeters of sea level rise?”
For the unit-conversion challenged who are more familiar with American (formerly English) units of measure: 7.6 mm = 0.30 inches
Surely the ripples on the ocean, let alone the waves, are larger than that!
About the height of a drop of water due to its surface tension.
“Hit-em where they ain’t” was the strategy attributed to [US general of your preferance] during the WW2 Pacific campaign. Occupy the islands with no enemy forces present.
The ecofasc1st stormtroopers of our generation are adopting a similar strategy in keeping alive the great global warming narrative.
Curiously the places on earth with the most dramatic, screaming, we-must-act-now warming are always coincidentally places with no humans present to confirm or deny the disaster-portending trend.
Arctic and Antarctic – warming is “spiralling” – just ask the penguins, and polar bears (if any of these beleaguered creatures still cling to life). No humans present to confirm or deny.
In the oceans a mile below the surface – water is warming at politically useful rates. Take our word for it – or ask the amphipods or giant squid. Again no humans.
Or Siberia – yet another fastest warming place on earth – just ask some erstwhile enemies of Vladimir Putin. No-one there free to confirm or deny.
Oddly though, where you have humans living with those inconvenient eye-brain systems who can actually see and feel what climate is doing, you get a diametrically opposite picture. Late frosts, lost fruit harvests, long ski seasons, record cold in many places.
What is actually happening in the earth’s climate? With all the instrumental datasets in the hands of ecofasc1st fanatics – no-one actually knows.
The thing is they aren’t even certain that there was any net ice loss. From the abstract:
So on a more normal reckoning, we would use 2 standard deviation (1.96 if you really believe it is normally distributed), to get 2,720+/- 2,780 billion tonnes and 7.6+/-7.8mm. In other words, they are not reasonably certain that there has been any net ice loss at all, since we can’t reject that at the 5% significance level.
More fake science, misreported as the authors knew it would be when they opted for 1 s.d. error data. Indeed, the figures look to be suspiciously concocted already – they probably strained every sinew to try to justify a 2 s.d. conclusion, but in the end couldn’t quite manage it without completely destroying their credibility.
Totaling up the world’s ice we get a total volume of approximately 3.3*10^16 m^3.
It takes around 3.33 * 10^5 Joules to melt one kilogram of ice.
The density of ice is around 916.7 kg/m^3.
The heat of fusion for ice is L(f)=3.33 * 10^5 Joules/kg, so the total amount of energy to melt one kg of ice is Q=3.33*10^5 Joules.
Finally, we need to heat up the now-melted water so that it stays as a liquid. I’ll define that as T=5*C.
So, we need to do the specific heat formula Q=mcT, where “c” is the specific heat of LIQUID water. That’s around c=4,186 Joules/kg*C. That means that the amount of energy required is Q=20,930 Joules.
Add up all the energies required to find the total energy required to change the temperature of water from -50*C to 5*C. And we get Q=4.59*10^5 Joules. Multiply by total amount of ice
We get a total energy of around Q=1.38 * 10^25 Joules of energy needed to melt all of world’s ice.
There was energy consumption was 5.67 × 10 20 joules, … of World Energy June 2017;
That means it would take 410000 years to melt all of the world’s ice at present rate of energy use. That means we would have to apply all of the world’s energy use into blowtorches directly melting the ice and assuming if we had enough blow torches and the means to supply them with all of the world’s energy.
Addendum Are you scared when 10% of that ice melts? okay wait for 41000 years. Are you scared if 1% of that ice melts? okay wait for 4100 years. Are you scared if 1/10 of 1% of that ice melts ? okay wait for 410 years. Wake me up when 1/100 of 1% of that ice melts in 41 years. And dont forget that you have to transport all of the worlds blowtorches to all of the ice and use all of the worlds energy every year to do this.
Because of miscalculation correct figures are
Are you scared when 10% of that ice melts? okay wait for 2434 years. Are you scared if 1% of that ice melts? okay wait for 243 years. Are you scared if 1/10 of 1% of that ice melts ? okay wait for 24 years. And dont forget that you have to transport all of the worlds blowtorches to all of the ice and use all of the worlds energy every year to do this
Sorry miscalculation
The article should read
Totaling up the world’s ice we get a total volume of approximately 3.3*10^16 m^3.
It takes around 3.33 * 10^5 Joules to melt one kilogram of ice.
The density of ice is around 916.7 kg/m^3.
The heat of fusion for ice is L(f)=3.33 * 10^5 Joules/kg, so the total amount of energy to melt one kg of ice is Q=3.33*10^5 Joules.
Finally, we need to heat up the now-melted water so that it stays as a liquid. I’ll define that as T=5*C.
So, we need to do the specific heat formula Q=mcT, where “c” is the specific heat of LIQUID water. That’s around c=4,186 Joules/kg*C. That means that the amount of energy required is Q=20,930 Joules.
Add up all the energies required to find the total energy required to change the temperature of water from -50*C to 5*C. And we get Q=4.59*10^5 Joules. Multiply by total amount of ice
We get a total energy of around Q=1.38 * 10^25 Joules of energy needed to melt all of world’s ice.
There was energy consumption was 5.67 × 10 20 joules, … of World Energy June 2017;
That means it would take 24338 years to melt all of the world’s ice at present rate of energy use. That means we would have to apply all of the world’s energy use into blowtorches directly melting the ice and assuming if we had enough blow torches and the means to supply them with all of the world’s energy.Are you scared when 10% of that ice melts? okay wait for 2434 years. Are you scared if 1% of that ice melts? okay wait for 243 years. Are you scared if 1/10 of 1% of that ice melts ? okay wait for 24 years. And dont forget that you have to transport all of the worlds blowtorches to all of the ice and use all of the worlds energy every year to do this
Mods please delete the 4 previous posts Here is my final version
Totaling up the world’s ice we get a total volume of approximately 3.3*10^16 m^3.
It takes around 3.33 * 10^5 Joules to melt one kilogram of ice.
The density of ice is around 916.7 kg/m^3.
The heat of fusion for ice is L(f)=3.33 * 10^5 Joules/kg, so the total amount of energy to melt one kg of ice is Q=3.33*10^5 Joules.
Finally, we need to heat up the now-melted water so that it stays as a liquid. I’ll define that as T=5*C.
So, we need to do the specific heat formula Q=mcT, where “c” is the specific heat of LIQUID water. That’s around c=4,186 Joules/kg*C. That means that the amount of energy required is Q=20,930 Joules.
Add up all the energies required to find the total energy required to change the temperature of water from -50*C to 5*C. And we get Q=4.59*10^5 Joules. Multiply by total amount of ice
We get a total energy of around Q=1.38 * 10^25 Joules of energy needed to melt all of world’s ice.
There was energy consumption was 5.67 × 10 20 joules, … of World Energy June 2017;
That means it would take 24338 years to melt all of the world’s ice at present rate of energy use. If all the world’s ice melted the sea level would rise 66 meters. So 1% of that is 0.66 meters or 26 inches. That means we would have to apply all of the world’s energy use into blowtorches directly melting the ice and assuming if we had enough blow torches and the means to supply them with all of the world’s energy.Are you scared when 10% of that ice melts? okay wait for 2434 years. Are you scared if 1% of that ice melts? okay wait for 243 years.
But the alarmist argue that the energy use will increase every year. Okay
Per capita energy consumption is basically flat except for China but everyone expects that will level off long before 2100. The World Bank estimates that world population will peak at around 11.2 billion with 0 rate of growth in the year 2100 based on present rates of growth which is 1.15% and has been declining for the last 60 years. So if we assume that the world will maximize its energy use in 2100, that is only 82 years away and is only 1/3 of the way to the unrealistic and impossible scenario of trying to melt at least 1% of all the ice in the world with blowtorches. Then for the last 160 years of those total of 243 years needed to melt 1% of the ice, there would be no increase of energy use. So since the world needs some energy to operate other than to blowtorch all the ice we will give the extra energy use back to the world for that last 161 years in order to survive. They would need some of the energy in the 1st 82 years as well so we couldnt run as many blowtorches as we wanted to but for the alarmist sake we will give them the benefit of the doubt.
So if the sea level would rise 26 inches for the 1% scenario (See above) that means 0.1 inch per year. But the sea level already is rising about 0.1 inch per year and is showing no signs of accelerating. Don’t forget that you have to transport all of the worlds blowtorches to all of the ice and use all of the worlds energy for the 1st 82 years to do this for 243 years just to make the sea level rise to double its piddly amount of rise per year that has happened for each year of the last 14000 years. So what in the hell are we worried about?
This all seems to assume you have 100% efficiency combusting that fuel, and furthermore 100% of that heat actually enters the ice, none of that heat escapes into the atmosphere. When I’m figuring the efficiency of a gas water heater I typically use 80%, but the most modern condensing burners can get you close to 95%.
8 mm
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… the vertical distance between the two line segments above
Synthesis; i.e. construct, model, imagine, fantasy, etc.
Speculation; again.
No mention that temperatures tend to stay well below freezing most of the yearat both locations. Leaving sunlight and storms as melt causes. Not CO₂.
Which is an outlier or aberration, when compared to the rest, majority that is, of Antarctica.
“Antarctica has lost about 3 trillion metric tons of ice since 1992”
Making the meltwater coming from sea ice, not above seal level glaciers. Net increase to sea level, a lot less than meltwater from above sea level glaciers.
Then there is their SW Antarctica glacier ice loss:
Compared to Antarctica volcanoes:
http://s1.ibtimes.com/sites/www.ibtimes.com/files/styles/embed/public/2017/08/14/antarctic-volcanoes-map.JPG
To place that into a frame of reference, here is a better image of Antarctica:
https://img.purch.com/h/1400/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5saXZlc2NpZW5jZS5jb20vaW1hZ2VzL2kvMDAwLzA1OS8zNjAvb3JpZ2luYWwvYW50YXJjdGljYS1tYXAtMTExMDEwLmpwZz8xMzg0NTU2OTkw
Looks like CO₂ causes volcanoes that cause glaciers to melt from underneath, far from direct exposure to CO₂.
This research is just more pseudo science.
I could have sworn that I saw an article a year or two ago that stated something to the effect that Antarctica was receiving an increase in the annual snow pack on the in-land section, away from the floating ice. Does that ring a bell for anyone else?
Yes, there have been a few voices and papers claiming that deposition in Antarctica, and especially in West Antarctica, has been higher over the last several hundred years (since the general warming following the Little Ice Age). Recently a paper was published that claimed ice shelf thickness had grown in a couple of the so-called ‘problem’ glaciers near the northern tip of the West Antarctic Peninsula (Thwaits and Pine Island). This probably means that more snow is falling on the uphill portions of those glaciers. The big calving events on those two shelves are not unusual. But you know how alarmists are. They cannot let something that big go without trying to use them to exploit them. Never let a crisis go to waste. Never miss an opportunity to scare people with something big that few people have ever seen before.
In simple weather-speak, if MORE big chunks are breaking off the floating end of a land glacier, and if the floating portion of it’s outflow is thicker, the presumption should be that the glacier is receiving more snow on land. But in that paper, these authors bent over backwards trying to explain the increased thickness as some bizarre expression of some AGW effect, due to warming water underneath, and melting at the grounding line by warmer ocean waters. What about heavier ice scouring the grounding line more rapidly? Did they ever consider that? NO!
One of the propaganda elements of Antarctic ice melt comes in the way of another ‘trick.’ That trick is to utilize an UNREPRESENTATIVE SAMPLE as representative. This is a statistical no-no of the highest order. The behavior of the entire Antarctic ice sheet cannot be inferred from the most variable portions of that continent. The northern tip of West Antarctica extends far north, outside the Antarctic circle, and it’s long and narrow and has the most variable temperatures on the continent. It has the most flowing ocean water surrounding it. It has the warmest places on Antarctica. It’s where Shackelton’s men holed up to wait for their rescue. We should routinely expect it’s glaciers to change more than the more stable parts of West Antarctica, and the even colder East Antarctica. When alarmists (you know how they are) use the Pine Island and Thwaits glaciers, both near the northern end of the WAIS, to scare me, well, sorry dudes, I’m just not scared. I’m on to your tricks. If you want to impress me, stop using this trick and go find a new job in the private sector.
‘Context’ is not a word in the alarmist dictionary.. And they avoid it like the plague!
The West Antarctic Peninsula where a great deal of ice loss occurred has a large number of volanoes under it heating it up and melting the ice . East Antarctica was unaffected and lost almost nothing. Antarctica looks good to go for another 20 million years.
If the models were any good, President Hillary would have shut this site down by now!
Disclaimer – I am not a scientist but climate is not a cause.
Climate is defined as ‘weather averaged over a long period’, a result of weather, not a cause of weather.
The ice sheet melting, whatever the reason, results in climate change rather than climate causing the ice to melt.
I.e. measuring the average height of a population does not make people taller or shorter
On average, no ice melted, as the average temperature is way too low. Most of the ice which did leave the ice sheet would have been due to sublimation in dry winds. Are you telling me these guys surveyed the wind speed and absolute humidity over the Antarctic continent? A survey by people with biases might mean that the sign is wrong. It might be that the ice sheet grew by 1.44% due to slightly warmer air carrying slightly more water vapor on to East Antarctica, leading to slightly more deposition and less sublimation.
I think they just HAVE to keep this up. With all the funding for professorships, courses, seminars, studies, commissions, panels, institutes, projects, field trips, … all dependent on continued government funds, what is going to happen to ALL those kids who went into climate science? Since there is no such job as climate science, they need to keep conducting more studies, interviewing more subjects, and producing more reports that support the narrative.
And, of course whenever any of ice separates from an ice shelf it’s size is always compared to one of the smaller states or maybe Manhattan, which to New Yorkers may seem like over half the world, but they are small compared to the entire continent or even the ice shelves. Of course it’s a completely natural process that’s been occurring for centuries and even when separated those pieces still remain in the shelf ice and aren’t floating in the open ocean.
So at the current melting rate of 0.011% over 25 years, I get 2,272 years to melt one percent of the ice mass. Rapid? Catastrophic? And they wonder why we call them alarmists.