Canadian Ice Shelves Halve In Six Years

eldavojohn writes "The CBC reports on new research that shows thousand-year-old ice shelves (much different than sea ice) are breaking up and have been reduced by half in a region of Canada over the last six years. 'This summer alone saw the Serson ice shelf almost completely disappear and the Ward Hunt shelf split in half. The ice loss equals about three billion tonnes, or about 500 times the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza.' More detailed pictures can be seen at The Conversation, with a quote from Professor Steven Sherwood, Co-Director of the University of NSW's Climate Change Research Centre: 'The real significance of this, in my view, is that this ice has reportedly been there for thousands of years. The same is true of glaciers that have recently disappeared in the Andes. These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming could be natural.'"

Comments

"These observations should dispel..."

[AdamJS]

It has never and will never be that easy, Steve. Your optimism is appreciated though.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[khallow]

You moved the goalposts. Before you said scientists, now you say climatologists. There are several problems with this assertion. First, people in fields that overlap with climatology projects have noted problems in the parts of climatology research (more accurately, global warming research since that is a particularly problematic aspect) that reflect their area of expertise such as statistics, economics, or computer/math modeling.

To outline an example in each of the three, statisticians have been concerned for a while about how climatologists measure mean surface temperature from weather station data and temperature proxy data (the notorious tree ring data and ice core data) that has a great deal of irregularity and adjustments to it. Economists have been concerned by the primitive economic models of carbon usage. For example, no study of the effects of "peak oil". And there's weak research on the economic effects of global warming. If one is going to decide whether or not to implement mitigating action, they should have some idea of the costs and benefits of global warming as well as the mitigating action. Computer modelers have noted the bizarre spaghetti code that builds crucial datasets (such as the Climate Research Unit's paleoclimate temperature estimate built on a huge number of datasets. Finally, mathematical modelers have noted the absence of large scale weather phenonema such as hurricanes and equatorial waves.

Second, climatology has a problem common to geology, economics, and astronomy, namely, that it is extremely hard to conduct reproducible experiments. This is a crucial flaw of climate modeling and prediction that routinely gets ignored.

Third, the field has unusual difficulty in communicating its research to the outside world due to the complexity of the field and the difficulty of generating data and models.

Fourth, there's an enduring bias due to who funds climatology research in the field of climate change. Most of the organizations want global warming to be demonstrated. It seems to me that there is a serious danger that research which doesn't support a claim of global warming (particularly, urgent global warming which would require substantial change in society in order to mitigate), is at increased risk of becoming defunded. For example, the Goddard Institution of Space Science (a NASA-run organization) and the before-mentioned Climate Research Institute have both been headed by people who have made extreme claims about the effects of global warming for decades. How would research from someone lower down in the hierarchy that doesn't fit the message coming from the top of the organization fare?

As I see it, an argument from authority (such as "over 97% of climatologists who are actively publishing on climate change and over 85% of climatologists in general agree that human influences are responsible for most of the global warming we are seeing") isn't good enough in the present circumstances.

Amazing

[avandesande]

These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming could be natural.

So you are saying that if there was natural global warming these ice shelves wouldn't melt? That's pretty amazing!

We need more pirates!

[Oswald McWeany]

We all know by now that global warming is caused by the lack of pirates:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster#Pirates_and_global_warming

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[asylumx]

Those didn't disappear in six years.

The Happening vs Natural Argument

[ChrisKnight]

Summaries like this irk me. It ends with "These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming could be natural." This is a complete invalid conclusion.

"These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming is not happening." is a more reasonable statement based on the facts presented.

As to proving that it is not natural, that is a different argument that needs to be made by demonstrating the causes not reciting the symptoms.

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but we have documented proof that both Europe and North America were experiencing a "mini ice age" as late at the mid-1800's, and that before the early 1700's (when the mini ice-age started) it was warmer than it is now.

It doesn't matter...

[dpilot]

There are 2 basic threads to anti-anthropogenic global warming arguments...

The first is, "It's not really happening, you've cherry-picked your data and/or misinterpreted it." and the refutation usually seems to consist of cherry-picked data with very specific interpretations.

The second is, "It's not anthropogenic, it's natural, because of..." with some reason or other.

For the moment I won't take sides on either thread, but I'm going to take very serious issue with the second. However I get the very distinct feeling with both threads that the real message is, "Since global warming is not real / not anthropogenic, we don't need to modify our actions. We can keep our fossil-fuel-based energy and transportation, unmodified." (and business models, might I add...)

But assuming you're on the second thread, and assuming you're saying that global warming is real, just not man-caused, it must be apparent that we simply cannot keep going the way we are. We must come to grips with a changing environment. Global warming means more energy into the atmosphere, and that means more water evaporates and moves from place to place. Some places get even more water, some places get even less, storms get stronger, and it's not even a smoking-gun kind of thing, it's statistical. No new killer drought or killer flood or killer tornado, just a slow ramp on the severity and frequency of the ones we have.

All the while people living in marginal areas get stressed, our agricultural systems get stressed, our emergency response systems get stressed. It's not "a disaster", it's more of the disasters we've had all along.

Not planning for it, not studying it very carefully to understand the extent, not taking some action to mitigate it, is hiding our head in the sand, and waiting to get smacked in the butt.

When you get flattened by a giant rock, you're just as dead if the rock rolled off a cliff as if it was dropped by a crane. One is "natural", the other "anthropogenic", but you're still dead.

Re:what do Canada's growing glaciers prove?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Other glaciers in Canada are *growing* (an inconvenient truth), like Helm, Pace and on Mount Logan. In one swoop, this proves......

I like it when people post references for their claims.
I tried to verify yours on my own and was not successful.

The claim that Helm Glacier is growing seems to be out right false.

The claim about Mount Logan seem to be based on an increase in height - the assumption being that it's due to ice accumulation, but that does not translate one way or the other to the total mass of the glacier, just the thickness at one point.

I couldn't easily find what "Pace" refers to since the word "pace," as in speed, is commonly used with the word "glacier" so I couldn't verify your claim either way.

Re:Why would that dispel anything?

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

In 2008 fossil fuel burning adding 8.7 gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere, land use changes another 1.2 gigatons. Where did it go? Unless all anthropogenic CO2 is disappearing in a way that natural CO2 isn't, then we're contributing to the increase.

Re:Bad phrasing

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>If we lived back then I'm sure we'd be hearing about Anthropogenic Tectonic Drift.

The difference is that there's a physical mechanism for human effect on climate and that observations are matching calculations based on that physics.

A quick touchstone for any alternative hypothesis for explaining global temperature rises is to ask, "Does it predict stratospheric cooling?" If CO2 is trapping heat in the lower atmosphere, then we'd predict that it won't reach the stratosphere, which will then cool down. Warming due to orbital changes, solar activity, or whatnot, would warm up the stratosphere.

It's easy to find out which is happening.

Re:what do Canada's growing glaciers prove?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some glaciers should grow due to AGW while others should shrink. We can, to a degree, model which ones should grow and which ones should shrink (but that's a bit harder than recognizing the generality).

AGW raises that atmosphere's temperature, and its temperature affects glaciers by at least two general proximal mechanisms: more or less directly, by melting them, melting the snow that would accumulate to form them, lubricating their flow, etc.; and by changing the amount and type of precipitation that might fall on them. The mass of a glacier is dictated by the balance between melting and accumulation. If the extra moisture in the atmosphere falls as significantly more snow than would have fallen without AGW, as might occur at certain latitudes and elevations, or due to peculiarities of geography, it can swamp the loss of mass caused by warming. Those glaciers will accumulate mass even in spite of somewhat higher temperatures.

The most endangered glaciers are those at modest latitudes and elevations, especially in places that don't get dramatic amounts of snowfall, or areas that will see adverse changes in precipitation levels and patterns as a result of climate change.

That said, I have no idea how Mt. Logan might be affected by this dynamic, but no single mountain or glacier's behavior will prove or disprove anything about climate change. Overall, however, the world's long-lived temperate glaciers are losing mass and receding, the cause of which can only be climate related. The most reasonable explanation for the abrupt change is AGW.