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.
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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.