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The Himalayas and Nearby Peaks Have Lost No Ice In Past 10 Years, Study Shows

DesScorp writes "A story from UK's Guardian reports on a study of ice levels from the Himalayas area, and finds that no significant melting has occurred, despite earlier predictions of losses of up to 50 billion tons of ice. 'The very unexpected result was the negligible mass loss from high mountain Asia, which is not significantly different from zero,' said Professor Jonathan Bamber, who also warns that 8 years simply isn't enough time to draw conclusions. 'It is awfully dangerous to take an eight-year record and predict even the next eight years, let alone the next century,' he said." Readers have sent in a few other stories today relating to melting (or persisting) ice around the globe; read on for more. bonch writes "New research from the University of Colorado concludes that the polar ice caps are melting less than previously thought. Almost 230 billion tons of ice annually melt into the ocean, 30% less than past predictions. The new data comes from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellite, which provides more accurate estimates than previous methods."

The earth being a complex thing, though, note that these observations don't mean an end to predictions of elevated sea level.

Finally, an anonymous reader writes with another ice story: "NASA's Terra satellite saw a huge crack in the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica and it is all set to give rise to an iceberg the size of Manhattan! The huge gash in the snow is 30 kilometers (or 19 miles) long and nearly 100 meters wide, and is widening every passing minute. This is expected to create an iceberg more than 900 square kilometer in area, as compared to the 785 square kilometer area of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island and Bronx combined, said NASA."

4 of 409 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Isostacy by Fned · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    No, dumbass, he's claiming that something being pushed upward with a weight on it tends to rise faster if you take the weight off.

  2. Fear Mongering by Taco+Cowboy · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Those who are yelling "Global Meltdown", like their "Millennium Bug" counterparts a decade or so ago, are nothing more than fear mongers

    They engage in fear mongering for one very specific purpose, and that is, they benefit from public panics

    The "Millennium Bug" fear mongers spreaded fears so wide that even ridiculous fear such as "Planes dropping from the sky" were uttered by many

    The "Global Meldown" fear mongers? Island nation wiped out, mass extinction of plants and animals, and so on

    On another message I got modded down to "-1 Troll" because the fear mongers do not like people like me who can see through their facade of lies and they will do anything to sweep the truth under the rug

    --
    Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
    1. Re:Fear Mongering by budgenator · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      Planes can get into serious trouble when the date handling routines are FUBARed.

      Maj. Gen. Don Sheppard (ret.): ”...At the international date line, whoops, all systems dumped and when I say all systems, I mean all systems, their navigation, part of their communications, their fuel systems. They were—they could have been in real trouble. They were with their tankers. The tankers – they tried to reset their systems, couldn’t get them reset. The tankers brought them back to Hawaii. This could have been real serious. It certainly could have been real serious if the weather had been bad. It turned out OK. It was fixed in 48 hours. It was a computer glitch in the millions of lines of code, somebody made an error in a couple lines of the code and everything goes. F-22 Squadron Shot Down by the International Date Line

      Y2K might have been exaggerated some, but at least that problem was real; Apocalyptic Global Warming, not so much.

      --
      Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
  3. Re:The 100% claim is essentially correct by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    I have a saying that belies the problem you suggested. "We must do something, this is something, therefore it must be done!"

    EVEN if there is Global Warming, and EVEN if mankind is responsible for part of it, the ONLY option would be to mass kill humans so that the rest of us could live in Pre-Industrial Sustainable localized economies. The problem is, nobody is willing to suggest that ... directly.

    Modern society is predicated upon petrochemical products, and boundless energy we can't sustain.

    --
    Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.