Larry Kummer writes in by email:
Today’s responsible climate reporting, terrifying liberals: “A glacier the size of Florida is on track to change the course of human civilization” by “Pakalolo” at the Daily Kos.
Reposted at Alternet. Number 5 in today’s daily links at NakedCapitalism, one of the major nodes in Liberal America. It will be seen by pretty much the entire Left in America by sunset. The headline photo is about a crying person after a hurricane. Here is the opening:
Thwaites glacier in West Antarctica is enormous and is often referred to as the most dangerous glacier on Earth. It has also been dubbed the Doomsday glacier. The glacier holds two feet of sea level but, more importantly, it is the “backstop” for four other glaciers which holds an additional 10-13 feet of sea level rise. When Thwaites collapses it will take most of West Antarctica with it. This is not new information for those of us that follow the science. For example, Eric Rignot in 2014, stated that the loss of West Antarctica is unstoppable. (You can listen to an excellent interview from 2019 between Rignot and Radio Eco-shock on Antarctica).
According to researchers at the University of Washington back in 2014, Thwaites is already collapsing. “The simulations indicate that early-stage collapse has begun,” notes their news presser. What’s more, the Thwaites Glacier is a “linchpin” for the rest of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet; its rapid collapse would “probably spill over to adjacent catchments, undermining much of West Antarctica.”
About that statement by Eric Rignot in 2014. It is from a NASA press release “West Antarctic Glacier Loss Appears Unstoppable” that announces “Widespread, rapid grounding line retreat of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith, and Kohler glaciers, West Antarctica, from 1992 to 2011” in GRL, 12 May 2014. The paper’s conclusion (with the only mention in it of timing):
“We conclude that this sector of West Antarctica is undergoing a marine ice sheet instability that will significantly contribute to sea level rise in decades to centuries to come.”
Rignot provides additional detail in the press release. No mention of timing in the story, or of uncertainty.
“This sector will be a major contributor to sea level rise in the decades and centuries to come. A conservative estimate is it could take several centuries for all of the ice to flow into the sea.”
This is just the first two paragraphs. Long quotes from reporters for Wired and Rolling Stone. The article runs on for 2300 words.
Added: NASA says in January 2019:
A gigantic cavity — two-thirds the area of Manhattan and almost 1,000 feet (300 meters) tall — growing at the bottom of Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is one of several disturbing discoveries reported in a new NASA-led study of the disintegrating glacier. The findings highlight the need for detailed observations of Antarctic glaciers’ undersides in calculating how fast global sea levels will rise in response to climate change.
Researchers expected to find some gaps between ice and bedrock at Thwaites’ bottom where ocean water could flow in and melt the glacier from below. The size and explosive growth rate of the newfound hole, however, surprised them. It’s big enough to have contained 14 billion tons of ice, and most of that ice melted over the last three years.
“We have suspected for years that Thwaites was not tightly attached to the bedrock beneath it,” said Eric Rignot of the University of California, Irvine, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Rignot is a co-author of the new study, which was published today in Science Advances. “Thanks to a new generation of satellites, we can finally see the detail,” he said.
Note the last quote from NASA, about being able to see the detail for the first time. Here’s the thing: before there were advanced satellites, this sort of activity went on for millennia, blissfully unnoticed. It’s business as usual for glaciers; they melt, breakup, and calve into the sea. The Earth and humanity survived then and will now. -Anthony
Larry Kummer is the editor of the Fabius Maximus website and a frequent contributor to WUWT.
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I implore all the climate’s saviors to go there as soon as possible and try to stop this terrifying glacier:
– Do not forget to take (eco-produced) picks, saws, hammers, nails and some beams !
Interesting. So there are strawman arguments used for attack purposes and hobgoblin arguments use to keep sufficient terror levels in a defensive move. Is this like advanced climate psychology weapons class?
Last decade was about Arctic melting, because Antarctica wasn´t melting.
Next decade will be about Antarctic melting, because the Arctic stopped melting.
(Ok, maybe the dates are a bit off, but you get the point)
About right. Arctic sea-ice stopped shrinking in 2007, and the Greenland ice-sheet did the same in 2012.
This means that it is getting hard to hide any longer.
There’s only one way to snap a liberal out of this condition: Giant multicolored squirrels.
https://www.foxnews.com/science/amazing-giant-multi-colored-squirrels-caught-on-camera-become-internet-sensation
No mention of the 90+ volcanoes on a rift line under West Antarctica…
Do note that this entire scare is based on the phrase, “Simulations indicate…” Nothing about observations (which, it would appear, directly contradict the “simulations” but – hey! – what have FACTS got to do withis, eh?).
I just love that I don’t even have to pay for climate porn!
Just like any other kind of porn, though, it’s unrealistic and never happens in the real world…
Oops I just realized they ARE making me pay, whether I want the climate porn or not!
Now I’m really mad!
Imagine if other types of porn were funded by taxpayers?
I cannot honestly imagine how bad it would be if created by any government. Just considering the concept would be enough to put anyone off, so I guess it would probably help anyone with an addiction.
Actually Thwaites glacier and the rest of the WAIS is not floating, it is resting on rock as other glaciers, but those rocks are often below sea level. It is this that makes the WAIS potentially unstable (if a number of other conditions are also right).
However this means that if the WAIS collapses much of the meltwater will be needed to fill out the space where the ice was, particularly as seawater is about 12 % denser than glacier ice.
The end result is that the maximum possible collapse of the entire WAIS can only raise the sea-level about 11 feet. Of course this will take millennia, ice flows pretty slowly.
The further conditions needed to make a glacier unstable is:
1. The depth of the sea at the glacier front must be >90% of the thickness of the ice
2. The depth to bedrock must increase up-glacier (=the ground must slope downwards going away from the coast)
3. This slope must be steeper than the increase in thickness of the glacier
4. There must be no thresholds or pinning-points up-glacier
As you might imagine it is not easy finding a glacier that satisfies all these conditions, Thwaites Glacier is the current favorite, but even that is doubtful. Recent measurement shows that the bedrock under it is rising extremely fast as the ice-load decreases, so it might well be self-pinning. This fast isostatic adjustment is due to Thwaites lying on top of a volcanic hot-spot with an unusually low-viscosity mantle. The phenomenon has been noted before on Iceland where the complete isostatic adjustment at the end of the ice-age only took about a thousand years, while it is still going on after 12,000 years in Canada and Scandinavia which are Precambrian shield areas with high-viscosity mantle.
“Actually Thwaites glacier and the rest of the WAIS is not floating, it is resting on rock as other glaciers, but those rocks are often below sea level.”
I think they are talking about a cavern at the bottom of the glacier. I wish I knew where on Thwaites that is. There is another glacier south of Thwaites (can’t remember the name at the moment) that has a 200 m (I think) tall cavern beneath it, and there is currently, or was just recently, an expedition exploring that cavern with submersible drones.
So is the Ice Age that we are supposedly still in, officially over? Did we just end the regular and enormous ice sheet expansions? This appears to have been determined by comparing 30 years or 100 years of temperature data with glacial patterns that last over 100,000 years?
Only according to Revisionist History
We’ve been in an ice age for several millions years. We are presently in an interstadial.
One reason I enjoy coming to this site is to be directed by the erudite and astute who post here toward interesting science. The various articles concerning the WAIS are a prime example of this. The 1968 contribution by Mercer regarding “Antarctic ice and Sangamon sea level” is a solid piece of earth science in the old form where an argument was carefully framed based on observational evidence. His 1978 article in Nature was marred by the prediction that atmospheric CO2 levels would double in 50 years (double the 1978 level of 350ppm to something like 700ppm in 2028) which would lead to the collapse of WAIS. Thence to the sorry Nature editorial from 2018 giving him credit for raising the alarm about WAIS catastrophic collapse–thus conflating a true crisis with a mere caution about something that could happen over several centuries at some unknown point in the future, and never mentioning the varied misleading evidence and misdirection.
I wonder where the climastrologists and glaciologists think glacial melt water from the volcanic heat flux beneath Thwaites and the other glaciers is going. Or don’t they think about such things?
Heh. He said ‘think’.
Didn’t you mean ‘Glaciaholics’?
Did you read the part where the Penn State guy is going to take a ton of explosives, drill holes in the “cork” (their formulation, not mine) leading edge of the glacier, then let off explosions, just like mining a quarry of marble? These aren’t scientists. They don’t deserve public funding. They’re terrorists.
That’s the plot from “State of Fear”. This Indian scut is using the plot from State Of Fear to try and induce a glacier collapse.
I’ll bet you money they did the same procedure to Larsen B.
It wouldn’t matter. They can blast all they like and there will be no catastrophic collapse. It’s purely theoretical.
If it’s cold enough to be ice now, blowing it up won’t turn it into water, just ice cubes.
WOW. They need more grants and satellites.
Gawd these people are pathetic. Their incessant, melodramatic virtue signaling makes me want to spew.
https://twitter.com/ElizabethaRush/status/1100470310363717632
I invite you to come to my little town in Maine, where we deal with 10 feet of sea level rise on a daily basis. Mitigation technology exists, particularly if you have 100 years to solve the daily increase we experience.
Any observed change is presented as somehow proof of AGW.
It is interesting that the actual observed changes in Southern high latitudes are not in agreement with the climate simulations and are not unusual compared to the paleoclimatic record.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3103
IF, and that is a big IF, this glacier system is unstable, then do these people propose that they can assign a cause and effect relationship for that instability to anthropogenic CO2?
I mean, can they say CO2 is responsible rather than the end of the last glaciation (that’s rhetorical, I know they can’t)?
Even if CO2 were responsible can they do anything about it (rhetorical again, no they can’t)?
Chicken Little must either run or adapt.
It is already displacing its own mass in magma, nothing is going to happen.
PHYSICS, BAYBAY!
I remember as a child the same West Antarctic ice sheet collapse scenario touted at primary school 45 years ago. Boy that called wolf stuff.
Interviewer:
Can you please develop how your bartender experience of serving whiskey on the rocks qualifies as “degree in iceberg climatology” ?
If you post stuff like this, you are declaring climate skepticism a political opinion, not a scientific one.
There is no reason why the science should be more obvious to one side of the political spectrum than the other.
Ah, the paycheck dilemma.
Liberals and co. plan to get worldwide momentum on what tenured scientists establish.
No warming, no tenure. That’s precisely how politics steps into the trade.
There is no reason why the science should be more obvious to one side of the political spectrum than the other.
There is when one side isn’t doing science to reach their conclusions.
Grift – your ‘declaring’ anything does not make it so.
That’s another trick used by your type – false definitions and equivalency.
See, what’s REALLY the case is that WARMISM is the political position – and they prove it every single day. This article is just one example.
14 billion tons of ice adds 1 cm of water to 1.4 million sq km of ocean.
Larry Kummer [ sic! ]
are you “bekummert” maybe the world doesn’t hold space for a floating “glacier the size of Florida“.
No Angst, no Kummer – who needs such a small world. Anyway.
“Pakalolo” is Hawaiian slang for marijuana