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Scientists Cut Greenland Ice Loss Estimate By Half
bonch writes "A new study on Greenland's and West Antarctica's rate of ice loss halves the estimate of ice loss. Published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the study takes into account a rebounding of the Earth's crust called glacial isostatic adjustment, a continuing rise of the crust after being smashed under the weight of the Ice Age. 'We have concluded that the Greenland and West Antarctica ice caps are melting at approximately half the speed originally predicted,' said researcher Bert Vermeeersen."
Quick! Change the name!
CLIMATE CHANGE!
Yeaaah! Then we'll be able to claim we're right, even when we're wrong! woo!
This estimate change means climate change has once again been proven wrong! Right? Right?
(Hint: No.)
I think it just means that in reality, science hasn't got all the right answers, all of the time, and science should be treated, as it was always intended, with a grain of salt.
Scientists are wrong again, just like they were about magnets.
Just as wrong as they were about every single thing except those they've not yet been proven wrong about.
The method's kind of based on being provable wrong so, everything's going as planned. Nothing to see here unless you know how to interpret the new data.
i.e.: The news are, on themselves, useless but as a heads up for the result that will come shortly.
Some bright researchers managed to refine a previous model and come up with better and more accurate predictions. You may want to note how, contrary to some "skeptics" beliefs this wasn't suppressed or refused publication or any other such shenanigans. In the word of a famous person "When I'm proven wrong I change my opinion, what do you do ?".
So this must be fake, but if they'd instead said it's accelerating faster, it would be true - right? Because that's what you want to hear.
which is totally what she said
No. They are just decreasing less fast than previously thought.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It's not even so black and white as you seem to think. Some are increasing, some are decreasing. On the net? Good question, and one I don't know. It seems from recent advances (eg this article) there is still disagreement amongst scientists.
"The ice caps are increasing."
That particular hypothisis has been falsified to death, it now requires a blind faith in the hypothisis afterlife to believe it.
What "republicans and oil executives" need to falsify is this - Snowfall above 3000 meters in greenland is increasing as predicted by climate models. This has nothing to do with the gulf stream (which is not significantly slowing down), it's due to increased water vapour which in turn is due to a positive feedback from global warming. Overall the extra snowfall at high altitudes does not make up for the extra loss at low altitudes, the extra snowfall may even speed up the loss of glaciers by making them top heavy.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Nothing would please me more than to find out that, in fact, we aren't screwing up the planet after all and that future generations will be able to enjoy a stable climate and SUVs. Really, I hope that everything turns out just great. However, it still doesn't look like it, I think we will face some very tough times. I don't know whether this new data is correct or not, just like I don't know whether the old data was correct or not. But 164 gigatonnes of glacial ice melt per year still sounds like a lot to me, even if it is less than 362 gigatonnes, so I'm not going to become complacent just because it isn't quite as bad as we thought - note that the word "bad" is still in the situation.
Also, all this means is that Greenland and West Antarctica are contributing less than 1/4 of the annual rise in sea levels rather than accounting for more than half. I guess we have to keep looking to find where the rest of the rise is coming from. None of this evidence contradicts the rise in sea levels, which is going to displace millions of people.
Less fresh water in the North Atlantic means the thermohaline convection effect will be keeping Europe warm and wet for a while longer. In the short term, that's good. In another sense, though, I suspect it's not so good: it's going to take something dramatic to move climate change out of the "we'll worry about that when we don't have anything more important" category.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I no longer believe you, when you say that you would be "pleased" to hear that global warming isn't that big of a deal. If that were true, why are such stories buried and alarmist stories repeated even if based on incorrect data?
About 10 years ago, I also believed in global warming, however I stopped doing so. How is such a thing possible?
1. Climate Change
I had my first doubts about global warming, when they introduced the term climate change“ which the added claim that climate change“ may not just cause warming in some regions, but may actually cause cooling in others. So all of the sudden climate change“ may cause everything: Hot, cold, stormy, dry, wet, etc.
2. The first decade of the 21st century
If the “hockeystick” were correct, we should have experienced a record-breaking hot climate in every year or at least most years between 2000 and 2010, but that just didn't happen. Some people say that 2009 was the hottest year on the record and hotter than 1998, but even if that's true it does not really support the supposed runaway warming-scenario - at all. Now when from the 10 years following 1998 9 have been cooler and one has been warmer, that may show that the climate may be a little warmer than usual (after all 1998 has been the warmest on the record and 2009 may have broken that record), but it points more to a relatively steady climate that may be little bit too hot, but not at all to some runaway climate shift.
3. Alarmism
What also disturbs me a lot is the alarmism. The warm periods, no matter when we talk about humans (medieval warm period, little ice age, etc.) or life in general were always the better periods (where “better” means of course that more life can be sustained by the earth)
So the horror-scenarios don't make that much sense and are blown way out of proportion.
4. The “experts” opinion
It is always said that the “scientific consensus” is clear about global warming. Well, science is not a popularity contest and is also not democratic. The “scientific consensus” also said that therapy and short prison sentences would reduce crime, but crime rates in the US quadrupled in the 1960s. The “scientific consensus” said that big government will reduce poverty, yet the higher the taxes are and the more incentives is given to the poor to have large families, the more poverty there is. And of course the “experts” also worried about “global cooling” in the 1970s.
The experts have a pretty bad track record, especially when it comes to politically sensitive things.
5. Socialism
Socialism has always been marketed as rule by the scientists and experts. Everybody shall lose their “bourgeous” human rights like right to property and freedom of association (freedom of association is racist anyway, right?) and submit to “expert rule” because the experts know it all and know it better than us rednecks. Well, not only have the “experts” been very often wrong, the centralized rule from above by the experts has proven to be a bigger disaster than any global warming scenario. (Yes, you read that correctly.)
Russia has always been a traditional food exporter and was turned into country where millions starve by the “experts”. And famine and widespread starvation has been the hallmark of socialism almost everywhere it has been tried: China, Cambodia, many african countries, etc.
The “experts” seem to be able to turn a fertile country into a desert not only much faster than global warming, but also repeatedly and in the real word (not just in a computer simulation). Warming may force a change of crops and maybe even a reduction in yield (that's a big “may” - far more likely is that it increases yields because warmer was usually better in the past) but there is no land on earth that cannot be utterly ruined by the advice of an “expert”.
When the “experts” want to create
1.1mm per year being the best available globally measured data? Outliers being 2mm? Worst case scenario being 4mm? That WILL displace people,eventually. 4mm per year means that in just under a century, sea levels will have risen a foot. This is the worst case scenario - it's more likely to be 150-200 years based on existing data (it's actually hard to measure exactly - between isostatic rebound, tidal variation, building, etc)
That's not going to chase anyone out of their homes. Flooding is more likely from heavy rainfall or really stupid building decisions such as building below the water level (New Orleans) or building on flood plains (everywhere else) than from sea level increases. Even the melting of ice causing sea level rises isn't a problem (work out 500Gt versus the amount of ice on Greenland alone), reduced salinity affecting currents is more likely to be a problem.
Rational thought is the only true freedom
Scientists are always wrong.
That is, until one of them gets it right.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Except for certain low-lying island nations in the pacific, but fsck'em why should we care?
You ask a salient point why should we care? No really, why should the other 6+ billion people living on the earth all freeze to death in the winter and bake in the summer, so a bunch of islander can continue to live somewhere a strong hurricane(or cyclone) could wipe out their entire community. But hey, you drive a Prius right?
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
Science corrects itself after finding new facts, no news at 11.
Besides, wether or not global warming is caused by humans isn't the important bit, the important bit is that we learn to understand the dynamics of our only place to live, Earth, and how to prepare for the future.
If global warming is real, it's important that we know what this will bring in the future, what the effects will be on the weather, the oceans, the wild life,...
And even if it's not actually warming, the science that goes into studying this will serve us in the future.
The fact is, we don't have a full understanding of the dynamics involved, all studies i've seen seem to indicate there is in fact global warming, and frankly, i don't care whom or what caused it, i want to know how we're preparing for the next day.
They don't have superpowers like Captain Obvious does.
on sea level rise alone - a lot of Tuvalu is 1m above sea level. To cover it in water would require 250 years of 4mm per year, so it's not going to disappear overnight.
Bear in mind that 250 years ago there were an estimated 1.5m colonists in North America divided between British, Dutch and French colonies, the Prussians, the Holy Roman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire and others were fighting the Seven Years war, the British had just gained control of Canada by capturing Montreal from the French and beginning the end of the French and Indian war, the Marathas kingdom in India was fighting (and losing to) the Afghans to their North, and George III was raised to the British throne. :)
A quarter of a millenium is a long time
Rational thought is the only true freedom
"We have not answered every question you have. Each answer led to more questions. But perhaps now we are confused at a more sophisticated level, and about more important things."
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
In science, when your hypothesis is falsified by the data being different from its predictions, you abandon it and look for a different model.
In religion, when the predictions of your dogma turn out to be wrong, you tell your critics that they just don't understand how your religion works, and really with a deeper understanding you were right all along.
Supporters of the notion that "AGW is a serious threat" keep sounding like the latter case to me. When the data is unexpected, the models are adjusted to explain that too, and the modelers keep believing. Creationists have really entertaining explanations for the fossil record - but it doesn't help your case if the explanations come after the data, as that's sort of the opposite of a prediction.
If your belief in AGW (or anything else!) is scientific and not religious, then you can both explain the belief at a qualitative level (quick: how does a greenhouse work?) and you can explain what new data would cause you to abandon your belief. In my experience, most people who consider themselves intellectuals have a religious faith in scientists (the intellectually lazy approach) instead of having scientific beliefs.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Scientists certainly do "believe" in evolution (well, a few of them don't, I suppose) and that belief is justified by a great many successful predictions made by that theory (and not by others).
It's simply not the case that science is about adjusting the theory to fit the data (well, it happens, but it's not seen as good science). Newtons theories weren't "adjusted" by relativity, they were proven wrong. They were still useful, in fact very predictive in most cases, but nevertheless wrong.
Anyway, that whole discussion misses the point: as you say, it's not about black-or-white "right" or "wrong", its about how predictive is a hypothesis over the domain of interest. Thus far, to the extent that the climate modelers have deigned to make any predictions, the predictive value of those models has been crap. Call it "right" or "wrong", I don't care, but I call it "not sufficiently predictive to justify telling me what to do in my daily life"!
And what about you - sarhjinian - are your beliefs about AGW scientific or religious? Do you actually understand what you're arguing for, or are you just saying "I'm part of the 'in' crowd that believes in X, not one of those lossers with unfashionable beliefs".
Quick: how does a greenhouse work? Are we in an ice age right now? What's the only 10ky period of relatively stable climate in the past 400K years, per the accurate ice core data - is a stable climate norma? What's the obvious ~100ky cycle in that data? What's the highest historical level of CO2 (as a multiple of today's) since the oxygen catastrophe? How well did life on land do during that time?
Well, have you actually taght yourself about this stuff, or are you just fashionable?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
This is something anyone on Slashdot should be able to do. First, go get the GISP2 ice core data at
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/greenland/summit/gisp2/isotopes/gisp2_temp_accum_alley2000.txt
Pull the data into Excel or R or your favourite tool and plot the most recent 10,000 years (period since the end of the last ice age). You'll find it easier to interpret if you convert the age to years AD and BC and normalize the temperatures to make them relative to current.
You'll see that the Mann Hockey Stick is right where it's supposed to be. What's surprising is how tiny it is (said the actress to the bishop).
What I find most interesting is that, since 8000BC, it's only been as cold as it is now three times, and for each time only 200 or so years. So is it going to get warmer? Yeah, that's a safe bet if we don't get an ice age first. It's going to get a lot warmer before it gets to what's been normal and comfortable for most of modern human history.
Does Mann demand an explanation? No--there's nothing exceptional about the current trend--it doesn't require an exceptional explanation. It's just the climate being the climate.
The next thing I did was superimpose the rise and fall of the great human cultures in both the Old World and the Americas, with a focus on equatorial civilizations. With a couple of exceptions, they all get their start during warming periods. A few, the Hittites, both Romes, Islam, see their fortunes literally rise and fall with temperature.
But don't take my word for it. It's an hour's work to see for yourself.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.