Slashdot Mirror
Greenland Ice Sheet Melts At Record Rate In 2010
RedEaredSlider writes "A study using satellite and ground-based data is showing the Greenland ice sheets are setting a record for the areas exposed to melting and the rate at which they are doing so. NASA says 2010 was a record warm year, and temperatures in the Arctic were a good 3 degrees C over normal."
From TFA: Tedesco said if the variability were random, then over a 30-year period one would expect the record years to be evenly distributed
What absolute rubbish from yet another climate scientist who fails to understand random numbers. Random numbers does not mean "evenly distributed" numbers - especially over such a small sample size. It could be the same number every year for 5 years in a row and still be random, just like you can throw "6" several times in a row with dice and it does not mean that the dice are loaded. That's what random MEANS. Look at the stock market with it's bull runs and bear markets - yet many claim that it's a totally random phenomenon despite this, and tests for randomness support this idea. When he has 500,000 points of data I will start trusting tests for "randomness". But under 30 years' worth of average temperatures and a guy's opinion?
While I don't have a clue on whether his data is true or not, it certainly concerns me that someone who makes such unfounded statements is doing this research in the same way I would be concerned about a paramedic performing a neurosurgical procedure. Apparently he's another pseudoscientist already set on his idea and is collecting information to support his bias.
It's all very good to observe this process but since there is little we can do to stop it, at least we should make an effort to observe and document it properly to see if someone can come up with a plausible, reproducible explanation for it. Putting alarmist, or worse, rabid green "spin" on it is only going to discredit the research in the long run.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Way to go, Greenland !!
I will buy the entire population a round of drinks at the only pub in Greenland, called, you guess it, The Icicle Melts.
The climate situation has been is a constant change since the very beginning of the Earth. You can't pick an ideal year and say "Thing must never change". So Greenland is melting... New York find itself underwater? No loss. But we'll be able to populate Greenland... Folks, things change.
Greenlands shelf is shrinking and the Ross ice shelf in Antarctica is expanding.
its a cyclic system, does it all the time.
This is a great page to follow information on sea ice trends at both poles.
Just say "no" to the religion of AGW... there are much more pressing problems to solve here.
For those who don't remember the Abortion debate in the 80s , it was a lot like Gw. Both sides really intense. Finally you just learned not to bring it up. Both sides too strongly belief in their own POV, no possibility of rational debate. Sex, religion, politics - not possible to discuss in public
What absolute rubbish from yet another climate scientist who fails to understand random numbers. Random numbers does not mean "evenly distributed" numbers - especially over such a small sample size. It could be the same number every year for 5 years in a row and still be random, just like you can throw "6" several times in a row with dice and it does not mean that the dice are loaded.
Of course it's possible -- that's called "the null hypothesis." The rather more interesting question is, "how likely is it?"
If I roll "6" ten times straight, the dice might not be loaded. After all, the odds of doing so (allowing the first time free, since it had to be something) are one in a mere 6^9 -- one in ten million. One in ten million events happen all the time (especially on Star Trek) and if you're a betting man by all means put your money on them and I'll match you on the other side.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I feel dumber having read that article. Thank goodness it's 2.3 kilometers thick, so at a 1.8 millimeters per year over the past century that sucker will be melted in ONE MILLION, two hundred and seventy seven thousand, seven hundred and seventy seven years! And that's IF the melting continues at all, and even more unlikely keeps melting for the next 1,277,777.77 years. "But that is unlikely to happen for several centuries at least." That's the understatement of the millennium
carbon gases, humans adding up to it, will make everything worse. its one thing to have to build huge dams and sets in order to save london, netherlands etc from sinking, and its another to have the sea levels rise higher than we can prevent with building dams or sets, due to exacerbating the situation through our pollution.
i assure you, those who are opposing the measures will not be there, to spend money to save anything, when the time comes. its better to ignore them entirely now, rather than having to blame them and not being able to find them anywhere when the clock hits the hour.
Read radical news here
All those Greenlanders will be chilling out at the beach in 50 years.
Plus we won't have to worry about Florida land scams - it will ALL be swampland. And every homeowner will be underwater, so no need for a bail-out. Just attach huge inner tubes and let the hurricanes float your abode to a new state.
Look, a pithy, stupid, and somewhat psychopathic argument!
XML causes global warming.
I wanted to come here and make some fake troll posts just for laughs. Sadly, the real trolls have beat me to the punch.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I will buy the entire population a round of drinks at the only pub in Greenland, called, you guess it, The Icicle Melts.
I thought it was called Eskimoes.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Kudos on being the only person to point out that during this whole volcano disrupting aircraft flight over europe thing possibly having an effect. Does anyone have any data on how volcanic activity effects local weather patterns and ground temperature? Volcanic events and solar eclipses seem to be the only things cavemen ever kept records of, so there should be some pretty good data to start with.
moox. for a new generation.
Have you noticed that climate change conferences are always populated with research funded by billionaires
Have you ever been to a scientific conference, know anything about science funding, or even met a scientist?
The big two conferences in climate science (and geosciences in general) are the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting and the European Geosciences Union General Assembly. The research is mostly government funded: in the U.S., the big funding agencies are the National Science Foundation, NASA, Department of Energy, U.S. Geological Survey, etc.
How the heck does [a carbon tax] solve the problem of climate change?
It makes the price of fossil fuels account for their environmental costs, correcting the market distortion due to this negative externality. The higher price of fossil energy makes alternative energy and energy efficiency more economically attractive, reducing consumption of fossil fuels.
I would like to see a conference populated with all of the names on that black list
There isn't any blacklist of scientists. But climate deniers did make up their own "scientific" conference. It's the Heartland Institute International Conference of Climate Change. You can find plenty of nonsense there if that's what you're looking for.
Why is that, billionaires attend these conferences
Billionaires don't attend scientific conferences. A few attend political conferences, such as Copenhagen, but the vast majority of attendees are not billionaires.
Why would I trust the findings of anyone associated with these people?
Scientific research has nothing to do with billionaires or their behavior.
fox news was bashed. react strongly.
Read radical news here
Such silly people. Greenland used to be ____GREEN____ within recorded history. Things got colder. Now they are correcting and it's getting warmer again. Before long much of the northern lands that are locked up in ice and cold will be habitable again by plants, animals, yes, people. Bravo!
We'll get access to more viking camps that are buried by ice and snow. The same thing is happening in Alaska, where native American artifacts are being found as glaciers recede. Which mean that it wasn't too long ago that those areas were ice-free... which means ice was added in the time between now and then. Which means that it happens extremely quickly in geologic time.
So the only real concern is... will it come back? That's the subject of debate. Will the CO2 forgings outweigh the natural glaciation cycle. I don't even think the "experts" know, our models only go out a few hundred years, not 10k years.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
The volcano that affected European air travel is in Iceland, not Greenland.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-01/uoc-cct010611.php
Yuppie! They've got the models to prove it:
Climate change to continue to year 3000 in best case scenarios
The study, to be published in the Jan. 9 Advanced Online Publication of the journal Nature Geoscience, is the first full climate model simulation to make predictions out to 1000 years from now. It is based on best-case, 'zero-emissions' scenarios constructed by a team of researchers from the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis (an Environment Canada research lab at the University of Victoria) and the University of Calgary.
The Northern Hemisphere fares better than the south in the computer simulations, with patterns of climate change reversing within the 1000-year time frame in places like Canada.
That's a pretty good model.
Who cares about 30 years of data when they can forecast out 1000 years!
Looks to me that after we drown because of rising sea levels then the sea level will go back down. Darn - and I want some ocean front property. Maybe this will drive the price down. Maybe it will drive the price up. Maybe can we use the model on the stock market? I hate to admit that probably some of my tax money funded this.
Whatever the plan is, we need to do it while Bruce Willis is still young and vigorous.
Their they're doing there hair.
http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/SeaIce.HTM
Why Doesn't Anyone Mention the Record Growth of Sea Ice Around Antarctica?
Typical of the commentaries on sea ice is this by Harold Ambler, published, of all places, in the Huffington Post, on January 3, 2009:
P.S. One of the last, desperate canards proposed by climate alarmists is that of the polar ice caps. Look at the "terrible," "unprecedented" melting in the Arctic in the summer of 2007...
So, to answer Ambler's final question:
Why, I ask, has Mr. Gore not chosen to mention the record growth of sea ice around Antarctica? If the record melting in the Arctic is significant, then the record sea ice growth around Antarctica is, too, I say. If one is insignificant, then the other one is, too.
The answer is simple. The Arctic decrease is statistically significant, and the Antarctic increase is not. This is Stats 101. Ambler is flat out wrong. Not all trends are equally statistically significant.
What the last two (2) maps don't indicate is if warmer ocean temperatures increase precipitation inland.
http://www.sciencebits.com/CO2orSolar
I suggest if anyone wants to dig into this check Sciencebits. More specifically look here:
http://www.sciencebits.com/CosmicRaysClimate
http://www.sciencebits.com/CosmicRaysClimate#ShavivVeizer
Since we are still waiting for a very anemic solar cycle#24 to build up sunspots, I think perhaps we should wait till past 2015 because it seems the great solar science experiment in the sky is already underway.
http://solarcycle24.com/sunspots.htm
http://sc25.com/
Yeah, but when about half the record years in the last 30 years are in the 15 most recent years, to conclude to the presence of an underlying trend is hardly an extraordinary claim.
It is an extraordinary claim when even Michael Mann, the inventor of Mann-Made Global Warming admits that the variations in temperature since 1998 are not "significant". There's not enough difference to overcome the errors in measurement and processing. There is no warming since 1998 that is provable to a scientific degree, even to a scientist who has tied his entire reputation and career hopelessly to the AGW train.
Considering the Mann Hockey Stick graph had people projecting relentless huge and growing increases every year, the fact that statistically significant warming stopped in 1998, but CO2 increases didn't is odd. Either we somehow dodged the apocalypse without halting CO2 production, or perhaps something else. Perhaps the alarming shape of that graph had more to do with the way the data was processed than the significant underlying data. We shall see in a decade or five. In the meantime unless some statistically significant warming recurs it wouldn't do take some rash action to stop a process that wasn't happening.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I just checked the local forecast and the temperature is predicted to rise 25 celcius (45 F) over the next week. It won't melt all the ice though as it will still be below freezing...
Nuke China back to the Pre-Cambrian era.
That'll cut anthropogenic methane emissions by roughly 25-30%.
That should buy us at least a century.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
how long before greenland is green again?
Hey, maybe Greenland will be green and lush, again, soon.
Someone like me can reasonably propose that the previous 50 years of warming mean nothing since the next 50 will be cooling.
Since you mentioned that you reasonably propose this prediction, I must ask you to explain your reasoning. What makes you believe the next 50 years will be cooling? What are the mechanisms? Please explain your model - I am genuinely interested in hearing about it.
When people move, often they vacate a house that someone else moves into. They aren't just fleeing disaster. The exchange of housing doesn't destroy value, disaster does. How bad could it be? Hansen and Sato have a draft paper out talking about exponentially growing mass loss from ice sheets. They are talking about several meters of sea level rise this century. http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110118_MilankovicPaper.pdf
I suppose if you don't agree with the experts on a subject you can always try to distract people with the bait and switch of putting up an expert in a completely unrelated field.
It is quite a childish and disgusting tactic which should have been beaten out of you while you were still playing in a sandpit. Why is there this crazy "end justifies the means" attitude that brings out the worst in people around climate change?
"Melting in 2010 started exceptionally early at the end of April and ended quite late in mid- September," Tedesco said in a statement. "This past melt season was exceptional, with melting in some areas stretching up to 50 days longer than average."
It so happens that this correlates with the volcano eruptions in Iceland which were particularly intense in mid to late April. Looking at the map of the ashfall, it appears that the southern tip of Greenland got a heavy dose of ash and it's likely (IMHO, of course) that the rest of Greenland got at least a dusting. My take is that ash, despite its typically light color, absorbs more sunlight than ice and snow does. So is it a coincidence that the albedo of Greenland collectively changed in a way that absorbed more sunlight at the same time that increased melting was observed?
There are nice long data series on ppm of CO2 in the air as measured in HI for example. We've tripled it.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/#mlo_full
1960: 315 ppm
Today: 390 ppm
I don't think you know what "tripled" means, do you?
So far the data for this year has shown that the sea level has receded a significant amount. I wonder what is happening to all of this melted glacier ice.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
If you want a better comparison, use for example white noise , or similar anlogue randomness. It is then quite clear that the cocneption of random of the op only apply to discrete distribution, and with real world data one can very quickly see that something is not "random". It could be a local trend, but not random.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Random numbers does not mean "evenly distributed" numbers
He didn't say that random numbers had to be evenly distributed. He was talking about the matematical expectation, which is a completely different thing from "true randomness" that you are talking about.
Car analogy: there is some probability that a random driver will be in a crash each year. If this probability remains constant throughout the lifetime of an individual, then the mathematical expectation would be that crash incidents would be evenly distributed throughout the lifetime of a person. There is variability, but in the absence of that variation, the incidence of crashes would be equal every year. But, say the crash record of an individual begins to increase rapidly after 80 years of age, then we can say with some statistical probability that this is an anomaly that is due to a non-constant probability caused by some other relevant factors. And that is what may be going on with the recent years of record global termperature.
If you roll a 6 sided die 6 times, you don't "expect" to see each side exactly once
You do if you are using the word "expect" in the sense of mathematical expectation Of course, the outcome of your experiment may (and probably will) be completely different to the statistical expectation.
but over 600 rolls, you'd expect approximately 100 of each side.
The original post was arguing that over 600 rolls we couldn't "expect" anything - because it's completely random. If you "expect" something, then it isn't random. That argument is clearly not using the mathematical sense of "expect", and neither was yours - the expectation for an equal probability event doesn't change because you carry out more samples.
I like how they only ever compare to how much has melted each summer. However these types of articles fail to mention how much melted and how much of those melted areas froze again the following winter. Without an accurate comparison of how much re-froze the information is completely worthless. Of course it almost needs to be calculated on a volume of everything based in the artic circle as it may not freeze again in the same area's Also not to mention has anyone published anything about how much is melting on top compared to how much is freezing on the bottom in the opposite season? it may have been the warmest summer in the artic. It may also have been the coldest winter in the antartic!
There are a couple of satellites which travel regular orbits enabling perfect pictures of Greenland and its glaciers.
They are the Terra satellite and the Aqua satellite.
Terra has been in orbit since 1999 and Aqua since 2002. They have taken some excellent, high-resolution images of Greenland and her ice sheets.
They are both in a perfect situation to take comparative images of the extent of glaciers and ice pack over the approximately 10 year period of their service. It would be quite easy to see just how much ice is and is not there in that given time frame. However, there is a problem. I can't find any images which show these comparisons. Why? It ought to be an obvious course of research. "How much ice is there today verses ten years ago?"
But that question isn't answered with direct photographic evidence.
Instead, we are offered fudge FUDD articles like this one, (widely quoted), based on squishy, confusing math.
Why can't we see some simple photos? I am told over and over that the glaciers are retreating. The ice packs are melting. Polar bears are drowning because the ice is vanishing so quickly. (One wonders why the bears did not just walk away from the water's edge. Greenland didn't sink. So maybe something else was going on. Like creative hysterical journalism perhaps?) But okay, the claims are that the ice is vanishing. Fair enough. I'm open to that. I've been open to that for the whole enthusiastic several-year ride I took on the Al Gore bandwagon. But enough is enough. Show me the pictures. We have the satellites in place, they take excellent images on a regular basis. So show them to me. We could all benefit from this very simple demonstration.
But we don't have those photos. (We do have some curious items like which seem to stand in stark contrast to the AGW narrative.)
But really, I'd like to see those satellite images from then and now. Why has nobody provided them?
Here's one theory:
Global Warming is a giant scam. A one-world-government tax scheme and distraction from what is REALLY going on.
Yes, before you argue, climate change is certainly happening. There is no question about that. But the problem is a LOT more complicated than just CO2 emissions. Consider. . .
1. It's happening not just on earth. (Notice the brand new giant spot on Jupiter? What convenient timing.)
2. Animals are freezing to death in places where this doesn't normally happen. Vietnamese cows. Fish in many parts of the world are dying because they find the water too cold. Even people in India are being hit with weird cold snaps. It is suggested that we are entering another ice-age.
3. Magnetic north is rapidly sliding out of the norm. The airport in Tampa FL just repainted its runway markers to catch up with the change.
4. Greenland experienced its first sunrise after the longest night two days too early. [..]on january 13th (13 minutes before 13:00) of each year, the people of Ilulissat go to welcome back the sun after months of darkness." It's clocked to the exact same minute every year. This year it was off by two days. That's odd. --And of course, the AGW people have quickly leaped to blame the melting ice sheets, saying that with the ice sheets melted down, the sun would of course be seen earlier. But there is a problem with that theory. The Sun's appearance isn't measured over something as changeable as ice. It is measured over rock and ocean. So what might be the real reason? Well, here's an idea which doesn't requ
No, a typical tactic of you warmongerers is to shoot the messenger. You're all very fond of arguments from authority, as long as you get to define what "authority" actually is.
So proud of not giving a shit about "the environment and all those species". You sound fucking Palinesque.
quit being rational! you're messing up our fun!
Sorry kid (and if you are an adult please stop acting like a child), but that is precisely what you are being accused of. You don't get to throw it back in peoples faces unless you can show that they have actually done it, and even then it is hypocritical. Besides, it is far better to get advice on climate from somebody that actually knows about the subject instead of a misquote from an astronomer (stars and stuff not climate) that appears to have taken it back later.
I'll say it again in another way: there's something about the refusal to accept climate change that makes people forget civilised behaviour and try to trick others by any means they can find. The above poster is reverting back to a childish fight in a sandpit complete with the "you did it/no you did it" bullshit.
Actually, the world would be better off nuking the Americans back to the stone age, since they are per capita the greatest producers of carbon dioxide.
"Tedesco said if the variability were random, then over a 30-year period one would expect the record years to be evenly distributed."
"What absolute rubbish from yet another climate scientist who fails to understand random numbers."
What absolute rubbish from yet another blogger who fails to understand actual climate scientists and the level of work that goes into actual professional level research.
The actual scientific content is something like "under the null hypothesis that the yearly temperature anomalies had no trend and were distributed iid, the observed data shows a test statistic of trend which violates the null at the p0.001 level"
Or, perhaps "Using the Wally-Dilbert Bayesian estimator of trend, the lower confidence interval at 99.9% is above zero"
Or, perhaps "using a bootstrap randomization test with heteroskedastic correction according to blah blah blah the hypothesis of no trend is rejected by ...."
And these are what get published in the actual professional papers.
Furthermore, the description that "then over a 30-year period one would expect the record years to be evenly distributed" is actually a good intuitive explanation of the null hypothesis implicit or explicit in the various statistical test procedures.
"Look at the stock market with it's bull runs and bear markets - yet many claim that it's a totally random phenomenon despite this, and tests for randomness support this idea." Actually there is serial autocorrelation in stock markets shown by statistical tests.
It's curious that most of the comments here immediately attribute the "abnormal" warmth in Greenland to either AGW or simply climate change. What the article states is actually blindingly obvious, because of the blocking high over Greenland and eastern Canada in addition to the rather strong El Niño in the beginning of 2010.
The exact same blocking high phenomenon caused the heat wave in northern Europe this summer as well as the unusually cold period in Nov/Dec. Melting glaciers are not in themselves abnormal and very few local phenomena like this one can scientifically be attributed to AGW (or climate change for that matter).
Oh and for the "zomg sea levels are going to rise we need to evacuate all coastal regions!!1111" crowd, I recommend taking a look at the graphs at wikipedia. I know wikipedia is about as scientific a source as voodoo, but the climate change articles seem to be mostly controlled by pro-AGW people so you can usually pick up the plausible-sounding worst-case scenarios there. 18-31 cm of sea level rise in a century doesn't sound like a problem to me. Anything more than that would require an exponential increase in warming, which is not happening at least for now, since the global temperatures have plateaued for the last 10 or so years. If global warming happens to speed up for whatever reason, then feel free to worry, but worrying about it now is just silly.
Would this be a good point to trot out that local weather != climate?
*ducks*
http://www.hongkongvacationsholidays.com/ says...Thanks for giving such a nice info.
I'm telling you now, any carbon I capture I won't be returning...
"The arguments on climate involve fundamental disagreements about what's actually happening, not just whether certain things should happen or not."
Probably a good assessment, but I add that without the ever-present agenda of politicizing AGW, an elementary school child with nominal physics could figure this one out. The sun pounds the earth 24-7 with radiation and only a portion is reflected. Heat can't transfer through a vacuum except by radiation, so whatever isn't reflected remains in the Earth's environ. It's obviously going to heat up over time.
All that crap about greenhouse gases is just that, crap. Nothing to do with it, won't speed up the demise of the Earth nor slow it down. Carry on folks.