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Stronger Winds Explain Puzzling Growth of Sea Ice In Antarctica
vinces99 writes "As NOAA announces a new record for the extent of sea ice in Antarctica, a new modeling study to be published in the Journal of Climate shows that stronger polar winds lead to an increase in Antarctic sea ice, even when Earth's overall climate is getting warmer. The study (abstract) by Jinlun Zhang, a University of Washington oceanographer, shows that stronger westerly winds swirling around the South Pole can explain 80 percent of the increase in Antarctic sea ice volume during the past three decades. The polar vortex that swirls around the South Pole is not just stronger than it was when satellite records began in the 1970s, it also shoves the sea ice together to cause ridging. Stronger winds also drive ice faster, which leads to still more deformation and ridging. This creates thicker, longer-lasting ice, while exposing surrounding water and thin ice to the blistering cold winds that cause more ice growth. A computer simulation that includes detailed interactions between wind and sea shows that thick ice — more than 6 feet deep — increased by about 1 percent per year from 1979 to 2010, while the amount of thin ice stayed fairly constant. The end result is a thicker, slightly larger ice pack that lasts longer into the summer."
All that damage control.
I don't understand why all the libs are butthurt, though. If you want an excuse to shut down industry, then you are looking in the wrong place. Ocean acidification is definitely real, and isn't disproved by a simple analysis of the IR and Raman spectra of CO2.
Seriously. Ocean acidification is far more dangerous than AGW could ever have been. Fisheries are already in a state close to collapse. Additional pressure from acidification could push them over the line and into extinction. That would be monumentally bad, on par with, say, the extinction of rice.
In exactly the same way that the lack of "divine manifestation" disproves the existence of god. Unless, of course, you "believe". Then you'll see divine manifestations everywhere, even in your breakfast cereal.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I work in a government remote-sensing role, where we generate a lot of derived data (backed up by ground truth data we collect in the real world to compare against).
We've got a bit of an unspoken law about models: they're shit.
No matter how hard you try, when you attempt to model/simulate large-scale natural phenomena - where you have so many different systems affecting one another, and so much to keep track of - you end up with a realistic workload of dozens of man years of scientific development just to come up with the mathematical model (ignoring the software side to actually simulate it on a computer).
The end result of this is: People simplify, and then simplify again - to take what should take the better part of a couple years, and do it in 6 months to get reviewed and presented at their next conference of choice; ultimately coming up with useless results - which on the surface if they're lucky may look valid, but just end up proving to be horribly incorrect in a different spatial or temporal domain (eg: on another continent, or in your case - a year later...)
There's are of course a few exceptions to this rule (typically around radiative transfer models, and flood plain modeling - and a few other places where you're either working at such a low level and scale or an incredibly well studied field (eg: radiation/light physics has centuries of scientific backing)).
Needless to say though, 'climate change' is a worst case scenario here - large scale, many complicated systems, and in aggregate everything needed to model this accurately doesn't have the solid scientific understanding.
Any time "experts" flawlessly explain occurances after the fact, even when it contradicts their predictions, it makes me believe they have no idea what they are talking about
Correcting your theories after they've been proven incomplete or incorrect is part of the scientific process. The alternative, declaring reality wrong if it disagrees with you, would be religion.
I guess this is why people seem to listen to religious experts more often than scientific experts.
Despite the obvious fallacy of comparing the two, he does make a valid point. Every time you see something that discounts global warming impacts EG: Growth of ice in Antarctica increasing. It rapidly gets dismissed as "oh that is just natural variation" but you get the opposite EG: Loss of ice in the Arctic and it is end of the world global warming doom all the way down.
This kind of reporting is really very troublesome for both sides of the argument. Pro-AGW folks get painted as biased alarmists and Anti-AGW folks have any evidence they might use immediately dismissed.
I know enough to know I don't have the truth one way or the other about the whole AGW issue, but I sure as hell can tell when people are putting spin on things and everyone on both sides is doing that.
Flamebait??!!
When did slashdot become a stronghold of science-denialist crackpots?
There are about ZERO scientific organizations: (as of 2007, when the American Association of Petroleum Geologists released a revised statement, no scientific body of national or international standing rejected the findings of human-induced effects on climate change), and about ZERO scholarly papers (Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position ) that support your denialist bullshit.
The OP is a perfectly scientific discussion of a finding about the changes in Antarctic Sea Ice. How the hell did the average IQ in here drop so far that this became a George-C-Marshall deniomatic thread.