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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."
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."
I think the lesson to take away is to strive for a rational, "healthily skeptical" position when presented with climate data. It's just such an unpredictable thing--literally, a complicated system the size of the entire world with a scale spanning molecules, continents, and beyond. The media doesn't help, either--it's drive for alarmism tends to overly simplify or exaggerate situations, and perhaps even the scientists involved get caught up in it.
For example, do you remember how polar bears drowning in the Arctic sea due to global warming were cited as a reason to classify them as an endangered species, and how they were used as a symbol of climate change in Al Gore's movie? The lead scientist was actually placed on administrative leave, and several questions were raised about how the bears actually died and how the corpses were observed from 1,500 up in a helicopter rather than examined to actually determine their cause of death. Whether or not they were really drowning, there just wasn't enough data to come to the conclusion that was presented to the public with the level of certainty that was conveyed.
Unfortunately, if you're someone who agrees with doing the logical thing--reducing the negative environmental impact of humans as much as possible, within reasonable economic boundaries--the exaggerations and alarmism sweep you away into being on a "side", and you're shoved right in the middle of the mosh pit of tribal politics. If you question a conclusion or suggest a way of doing things, and you maintain a nuanced or balanced position, you get shit on by everybody, and nothing gets accomplished.
George Carlin did an insightful (and profanity-laden) bit on alarmism in modern society.
I'm not so sure. I'd like to see some scientific data to back that up. In the mean time, I will remain skeptical by default.
(Only half joking here)
Controversy over AGW aside, this means nothing. The world can warm while some regions gain, lose, or maintain ice. It's GLOBAL climate change so what matters is the GLOBAL ice pack.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
So basically what you're saying is that CLIMATE CHANGE may cause things to happen that have already happened to the planet before? Like when the Sahara was a lush forest? Somehow in our human ego-maniacal way we must be the cause of this change because it has NEVER happened before.
>who also warns that 8 years simply isn't enough time to draw conclusions
Right, 8 years isn't long enough to draw conclusions when the 8 years of evidence doesn't point to the conclusion you want it to.
But if it points to the conclusion you want, then it's all the proof you need.
(Sorry... I think there are MANY forces at work that shape our climate, and people are pretty arrogant to think they understand all of them.)
I am glad that seemingly hard facts are being presented.
While I still think the overwhelming evidence supports the hypothesis that 1) GW is occurring and 2) man is responsible, at least this is better than the ranting and raving that I've come to expect from skeptics.
Of course my thinking is sustained by much more complete data sets of a GLOBAL perspective provided by climatologists. There was a recent animation produced by NASA recently that showed a map of worldwide temperature readings for the past 150 years. (I submitted it to slashdot, for some reason it was rejected). If the skeptics can continue to produce data that shows the GW is not happening I'm open to changing my thinking. But again, from what I've been following in the literature, there hasn't been much supporting their point of view.
Look, I'm not ideologically opposed to fossil fuels per say; with the vastly increased amounts of natural gas in the U.S. I'm happy to use a fuel that doesn't directly fund people who hate us. However I'm also not one to overlook an inconvenient truth.
Number 2, I guess.
I was brainwashed into thinking that the scientific method leads to fallible results, which may be disproved by later tests.
I must be a rube for thinking that we should make decisions based on the best available theories of the time, with the acceptance that policies may need to change later.
How dumb of me to think that temperature changes might be a temporary thing, but it probably wouldn't hurt to cut pollution, anyway.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I agree. We're far enough into the global warming thing for 100% of scientists to agree that global warming is occurring, and 98% of them to agree that it's somehow caused or contributed to by human activity (those are real statistics in an article I read on the problems of the media trying too hard to present both sides of an argument regardless of the percentages involved; I'm too lazy to provide a link, but hey, so's the grandparent). The "healthy skepticism" sounds like someone trying to sound reasonable while still obviously not wanting to believe that anything bad is really happening.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
Most of the "climate reporting" is completely retarded. High and low pressures alternate, air is always flowing from high to low. Like now Eastern Europe has been very cold, well at Svalbard they've had record warmth because the high pressure has pushed low pressures with warm, moist air north. These lead to huge local year-to-year variations with mild and cold winters. And every mild season people go "ooh, must be global warming" and every cold season people go "ooh, global warming is a hoax" and the media isn't helping with their sensationalism. To say if it was really a global effect you need lots of data and would probably end up in a boring conclusion like "Average world temperature rose by 0.08C this year".
What's that, zero point zero something degrees you say? 8C in 100 years would actually be extremely much, but it sounds very little, very boring. So 99% of it is sensationalist hype from local extremes, because if you look at a huge mass of data and cherry pick results you'll always find some that are way outside the normal. That's at least what I consider healthy skepticism, in fact I'd apply it to most things found in mainstream media. Extrapolating from the fields where I know they butcher the truth, I don't expect the others to fare any better. I bet that for example doctors are tearing their hair out over the medical reporting, where almost any result is hyped like a major breakthrough or a cure being right around the corner to get readers.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You couldn't be more incorrect. Being skeptical means to be not easily convinced. To not take things at face value and to demand solid evidence for extraordinary claims.
It does NOT mean "disbelieving things by default."
I will remain skeptical by default.
Absolutely! It's a sad day when those of us who do accept the mainstream position on this topic feel we have to denounce skepticism (ie. the demand for proof as opposed to mere nay saying) itself, or cannot recognise reports such as these as good news.
Make no mistake, life will "flourish" even after 3 billion humans have starved. Nobody's arguing that life will stop -- or even human life; they just point out that the flooding of Bangladesh and the droughts in Subsaharan Africa might be avoidable...
Skepticism, always relies on stopping for a moment to think about a story you have read to find gaps in logic.
Hmm, melting ice, obviously if the location has temperatures in the range of -10 degrees and the temperature goes up to -8 degrees you are not going to see a great difference in melting at that location. You might see some interesting changes in glacier fracture due to stresses on 'weaker' ice.
Next up the 2 degree change in temperatures will not necessarily reduce precipitation, in this case snow falls. In fact at this location it will likely increase snow if at lower levels that rise in temperature is exacerbated due to local climatic conditions substantively increasing the moister in the air prior to it's rise to higher altitudes and the resultant increased precipitation occurs.
So all that ever will count are global averages, local areas only count where critical impacts might occur. Say like a storm surges might start flooding down town New York upon a regular basis or record snow falls over the whole of winter make even with a rise in temperature make Vancouver uninhabitable.
The real truth is, how much will it cost to take preventative measures and not need them and how much will it cost to not take preventative measures and need them. Aside from of course the mass execution of all Fossil fuel propagandists, political puppets and their funders. The world will really not be in a forgiving mood, with truly unpredictable changes in human society arising from that catastrophe but those short hair crested rock throwing monkeys have always been vengeful.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
There's also extremely solid evidence that the climate has been much warmer today with ten times the amount of CO2 in the air, and not only was life just grand then. Life flourished, and was even more diverse then, then it is today. . So, we're going to base all of our information on 150-200 years roughly. With 20-30 years of 'goodish' data, with 5-15 years of not bad data, with 5 years of okay data. That the earth is warming. Not forgetting that, it's been so much warmer when humans weren't even involved.
Beh.
But that was millions of years ago and every species alive at that time is now extinct. Sure, life will flourish if the Earth's temperature increases a few degrees and CO2 increases. But the Earth won't look the same and many of the species alive now will go extinct just like they always have when there have been big climate shifts.
And it will be damn inconvenient for humans who have built their cities by the oceans and in the lowlands to take advantage of trade and the best places for agriculture.
So evidence that the Earth is heating more slowly than we thought is good news. It means we have more time to get prepared for or possibly stave off the worst of the change.
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 "Millennium Bug" was little more than a hiccup precisely because the publicity spurred decision-makers to invest huge amounts of effort into reviewing/fixing old systems so that they didn't have problems. Had it not been for the publicity, many of the systems probably would not have been fixed and then there would have been hell to pay (as in "How could you eggheads let this happen?")
It was a no-win situation for IT professionals (at least in terms of the general public's view of them; I hear it was a major win for consulting companies who could scrounge up COBOL programmers)