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Newly Discovered Meltwater Streams Flow Beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet
The Telegraph reports that previously undetected streams of meltwater have been observed beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. "The streams of water, some of which are 250m in height and stretch for hundreds of kilometres, could be destabilising parts of the Antarctic ice shelf immediately around them and speeding up melting, researchers said.
However, they added that it remains unclear how the localised effects of the channels will impact on the future of the floating ice sheet as a whole. The British researchers used satellite images and radar data to measure variations in the height of the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in West Antarctica, which reveal how thick the ice is." The paper itself is paywalled, but the abstract is available online.
"newly discovered" != "new". Those streams may have been there for millions of years. They certainly were there when the continent was free of ice.
Scientists have discovered that Antarctica's ice shelf is made of water!
News at 11.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Jeepers. If this is how the correct side presents a counter argument, it's no wonder the retards are taking over our great country.
I know, the correlation/causation comment will come up, but you would never know the water temperature unless you got in the water and feel it for yourself over 2-3 decades of actually being in the water and knowing when to get in. I wouldn't call 250metres a stream, but other noticable thing is the way the weather has changed from a smooth transition to summer where it gradually got hotter to bursts of weather change where you will suddenly get days of really warm weather in winter and then back to cold and visa versa in summer.
I regularly goes for a swim or a surf on the east coast of Australia and for the last decade years the water has been really cold during seasons where I used to notice it was pretty warm. It has altered my whole habit of surfing. I used to go into the water around September and now it's late October. I love the waves but the goolie shock is just to severe. My mates would say the same thing and often the comment 'at least we know where the ice caps are melting to' would come up.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Well, if it's increasing in surface area, but decreasing in mass, that would be a problem.
I think the concern they're trying to address is the same as one of the arctic ice concerns.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outburst_flood
I'm not saying that it's possible, or even probable. It's just an example of what destabilized polar ice can do. There's a whole lot of mass there.
Remember, the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami was caused by a 1,000 mile long rift shifting by 50 feet over a few minutes. If a sufficiently sized chunk (or chunks) of ice moved enough, there could be catastrophic effects for boating and coastal areas.
The long-term sea-level rise will be slow, and civilization will change around it. The short term effects of such events can be fast and catastrophic.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Altmetrics is a new-ish bibliometic service for scholarly journal articles, including Nature, which is where this was published. Altmetrics includes mainstream media coverage as as well as social media appearance counts e.g. SciBlogs, Twitter as valid data. Physorg is mentioned but I do not see Slashdot. We, the Slashdot collective, demand recognition!
* Unless we are deemed insufficiently social? Anti-social? Of course not.
** Altmetrics is beta-ish, possibly open source, so my indignation is mostly insincere.
tempus fugit
It's common knowledge that, unlike the arctic, Antarctic ice has been increasing.
As is often the case this common knowledge is actually a common misconception. While the sea ice is increasing, the land ice is shedding mass at an accelerating rate. Since the sea ice is already in the sea, it does not affect sea levels at all. Thawing land ice does increase sea levels, since it introduces water to the sea that used to sit on land.
The mean annual surface air temperature of the Antarctic interior is -57C. Surface melt refreezes rather promptly. But ice is great insulation, and geothermal energy comes up from the Earth to melt the bottom of the ice sheet. This meltwater flows in streams and rivers across the world's largest continent until it becomes the world's largest rivers, inevitably finding the sea. This should be obvious.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Yes, yes. Because the last time the entire earth has all the water as ice (snowball earth) and the last time the earth had NO ice on it at all it was those pesky humans and AGW. Wait. they didnt even exist then.
(although, apart from pollution, human emissions are fairly negligible compared to the other effects going on - such as the emissions from volcanic sea vents etc).
Interesting, how about this? Apart from claws and teeth, tiger related injuries are fairly negligible compared with other effects going on.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warming.htm
Do volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans?
What the science says...
Humans emit 100 times more CO2 than volcanoes.
Volcanoes emit around 0.3 billion tonnes of CO2 per year. This is about 1% of human CO2 emissions which is around 29 billion tonnes per year.
SplashMyBandit is obviously an AGW troll, even if he does recycle those old gems.
Fat cat scientists? Are you a fucking idiot? Check out the fat cats around the world - multilmillionaires, billionaires.
Bill Gates - computer scientist or businessman?
Businessman.
John Key, prime minister of New Zealand - scientist, or businessman?
Businessman.
Obama - scientist?
In fact, if you could list the scientists who are "fat cat" millioniares, I'd quite appreciate it. I'm waiting....
Antarctica is one of the major feedbacks:
[...]
Considering we're already experiencing major extinctions I'm not sure I want to stack ecological disasters.
I stole this Sig
And the area of the ice shelf at the Arctis is indeed larger (my numbers say 50%, 5.1 million square kilometers in 2013 instead of 3.4 square kilometers in 2012) than the year before, but it's still less than the long term average. This is at 13.9 million square kilometers for the years 1979-2000. So while 2012 might have been an extreme minimum, we are in 2013 still far away of any normalization.
the world's largest continent
Antarctica is the fifth-largest continent.
The extent of sea ice during the winter seems to be growing, but the total MASS of ice, sea and land, continues to shrink. You're the propagandist.
Total mass of ice in the Antarctic continues to decline: http://www.skepticalscience.com/antarctica-gaining-ice.htm Temperature trends since the 90s indicate more gradual warming, not cooling. http://www.sciencealert.com.au/news/20121705-23396.html In the past, ice at the poles has never coexisted with atmospheric CO2 above 400ppm, a threshold that we just crossed. Time will prove you drastically wrong, but some of us are running low on patience for the trolling.
Not a chance. The nature of self-delusion is such that it becomes harder to admit the truth the more evidence you've ignored, especially when you've been vocal about it. People who have made fools of themselves by publicly speaking of international climate science conspiracies have a lot of incentive to keep believing in them. And of course there's still whatever reason - usually economic - that led them to start such games in the first place.
The more evidence is found, the more ridiculous assumptions are required to explain it away, and the more desperate the defence will be. It's the same with all communities of true believers. Unfortunately, this issue happens to have some actual impact on the world, so they can't be simply left alone in their fantasies.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
uhm - Antarctic *sea ice* is growing (and that only in winter, it mostly melts away in summer), in part because Antarctic land ice is shrinking - some of it is melting, some of it is floating to sea faster than before...
So, no imminent collapse of AGW...
Yes, yes. Because forest fires ravaged the earth when the dinosaurs ruled and there were no humans then, so forest fires can't be caused by humans.
Wait, humans totally can cause fires.
What Steve Goddard "forgets" to mention is that it's actually only the Antarctic sea ice that is growing, while the land-ice there is melting away ever faster...
And the 67% more ice in 2013 compared to 2012 still puts 2013 in 6th lowest position for arctic ice-extent in the observational record, curiously together with 2007-2008-2009-2010-2011-2012) - so it is lower than *any* observed ice-extent prior to 2007... Doing better than the single worst year on record is not proof that nothing's wrong, it's just proof of the fact that there are significant annual fluctuations in ice-extent, primarily due to short-term weather.
Average thickness and ice-volume in the Arctic are actually far more relevant measurements (as unlike "extent", they measure the *amount* of ice, not how thinly it's spread out) and those have been dropping almost without fail year after year after year...
Did you really just compare arctic ice falling into the ocean with 1000 miles of the ocean floor permanently shifting?
Only two people in this entire comment section have successfully dodged the global warming spin hucksters to note the following:
The mean annual surface air temperature of the Antarctic interior is -57C. Surface melt refreezes rather promptly. But ice is great insulation, and geothermal energy comes up from the Earth to melt the bottom of the ice sheet. This meltwater flows in streams and rivers across the world's largest continent until it becomes the world's largest rivers, inevitably finding the sea. This should be obvious.
This has nothing to do with industrial exhaust.
So chill out. (In fact, you don't have any other choice. We're entering another ice age. Wise up. Be prepared for a really shitty snow-heavy winter.)
Give me a big drill and I can fix that. We'll just let the hydraulic forces bring the water up to the top of the glaciers, freeze there, and poof, glaciers stop moving *and* more ice mass. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
Before AGW, we'de been in a slow cooling phase for 5,000 years- yeah, we emerged from an ice age 12,000 years ago, but we haven't been "emerging from it since".
But let's not let *facts* get in the way of our preconceptions..
The distinction is between ice caps on land vs. on the ocean. The arctic ice is already in the ocean, so melting it won't raise sea levels. But the majority of antarctic is is on land (same as Greenland), so melting that ice would raise global sea levels.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Once again, a denialist conflates seasonal *sea* ice with permanent *land* ice.
Be free people.
Freedom of conscience doesn't mean freedom from consequences, as much as we'd wish it so.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
15 years of no warming despite CO2 emissions continuing, greatly increased Arctic Ice coverage, increasing Antarctic ice thickness. increasing Antarctic sea ice coverage, and no observed retreat in Himalayan glaciers.
Sounds kind of collapsey to me. But what do I know? I'm just the guy who has been making physical chemistry arguments that show that CO2 has no net effect on the heat capacity of the atmosphere for the last few years, arguing instead that what warming we saw was from increased water vapor emissions, which maintain a tight equilibria with their rate of emissions (thus the lost decade global growth lead to a lost decade of warming), and bringing AGW idiots to take because they are ignoring the real threat from CO2--ocean acidification and the collapse of already overstressed fisheries.
But hey, let's all ignore physics and pretend like Al Gore is is a priest of the AGW god, who we must appease by throwing money at him.
lol, that's the first time I heard that one. How about a source there, Chicken Little?
It's not warming, that much is clear. Ice doesn't always melt due to warming. Penguin urine could be adding salt to the ice and causing it to melt. Scientists are so BS.
Since the sea ice is already in the sea, it does not affect sea levels at all.
How does that follow?
If you put some ice in water and let it melt, the water level will remain the same. Even if you see ice sticking up out of the water when it floats along, the weight of it still displaces the same amount of water that the ice is made from.
This means that melting sea ice will not make the oceans rise.
This is an old thought experiment of mine. They say that the mass of ice is decreasing and that surface water freezes immediately, (what with it being -50 degrees and all that) .
Would it be possible therefore to do some engineering and pump relatively warm water onto the surface ice sheets and therefore act as a heat radiator. Surely you could radiate colossal amounts of extra heat this way?
The only problem I can see with this is the quantity of water you'd have to pump. The question is for me would it help radiate more heat than it would cost to do?
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
"The streams of water, some of which are 250m in height and stretch for hundreds of kilometres"
WTF?
Since when did we start measuring rivers' height?
It's common knowledge that, unlike the arctic, Antarctic ice has been increasing.
As is often the case this common knowledge is actually a common misconception. While the sea ice is increasing, the land ice is shedding mass at an accelerating rate. Since the sea ice is already in the sea, it does not affect sea levels at all. Thawing land ice does increase sea levels, since it introduces water to the sea that used to sit on land.
Sea ice clearly affects sea level. Take a glass of water, put in two cubes, Mark the line. Add two more ice cubes. The water will rise.
If all the ice slid off Antarctica, the sea level would rise. Calving a greater total volume of ice bergs over a given time period will cause a rise in sea levels. But the easiest way to determine the overall effect of global warming on sea levels is to measure the mass of ice that isn't floating in the ocean. It's also worth noting that the total volume of water on earth doesn't vary greatly over time (yes, we lose some water vapor to space, and gain some from comets).
Of course, total ice volumes are a determining factor in the salinity of the ocean, which is also significant.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
15 years of no warming despite CO2 emissions continuing
Convenient use of a record high as your starting point. Care to redo your calculations with any other window? Maybe, say, a 20 year window? Or even a 10 year window? What about a 12 year window?
greatly increased Arctic Ice coverage,
[Citation needed] and [Confusing a rebound from a historic low to slightly less historic lows with an increase over average].
increasing Antarctic ice thickness
[Confusing weather with climate] and [Lack of understanding of ice formation]
increasing Antarctic sea ice coverage
[Cherry-picking specific regional ice data points] and [Mistaking surface for volume].
no observed retreat in Himalayan glaciers
[More reading needed]. See also http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v4/n3/abs/ngeo1068.html
I'm just the guy who has been making physical chemistry arguments that show that CO2 has no net effect on the heat capacity of the atmosphere for the last few years
... which has nothing to do with the problem of CO2 trapping IR, or with why the atmosphere is heating up.
arguing instead that what warming we saw was from increased water vapor emissions, which maintain a tight equilibria with their rate of emissions
Water vapor cannot drive long-term heating. A single cold-spell will remove water vapor from the air, which will reduce temperatures, which will remove more water from the air.... Water vapor is the result of warming, not a forcing.
thus the lost decade global growth lead to a lost decade of warming
The global economy was working in overdrive until 2000-2001, and again from 2005 to 2008. Your own data calls you a liar.
bringing AGW idiots to take because they are ignoring the real threat from CO2--ocean acidification and the collapse of already overstressed fisheries.
I'm glad you'll find that all kinds of scientists, but especially marine biologists and oceanographers would love your help in spreading message. Care to sign up maybe with an organization like NOAA or the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute?
But hey, let's all ignore physics
Says the guy who mistakes anecdotes for data, cherry-picks his time frames, misunderstands the overall and problem and thinks that he has a better understanding of physics than Physicists.
Tell you what, write a paper about your insights, and if you're right, the Nobel prize in a few areas is yours. How is that for an incentive to go show up all the AGW believers? You'll be right up there with Galileo, Kopernicus, Pasteur, and a few other up-enders of the consensus.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
you do realize the IPCC is backpedalling furiously on their dire predictions; their latest report essentially admits the billions of euros, yen and dollars spent on climate modeling have been wasted and the prediction are rubbish.
"I think that the latest IPCC report has truly sunk to level of hilarious incoherence," said Dr. Richard Lindzen a top climate scientist at MIT. "They are proclaiming increased confidence in their models as the discrepancies between their models and observations increase."
Markott et al 2013 - temperature reconstruction of the Holocene. ...
http://www.realclimate.org/images//Marcott.png
Keep drinking the cool-aid, their latest report doesn't "admit" what you claim here, not by a long shot - it actually states that they're even more certain now that most of the recent warming is caused by Anthropogenic CO2. What has happened is that the right wing climate denialosphere are spinning like they've never spun before, trying to deform and cherry-pick statements from the report into what they want it to say... And you're clearly lapping it up uncritically, probably because it reinforces what you *want* to hear...
And Dr. Richard Lindzen may be a "climate scientist" (I would certainly dispute the "top" prefix....), but he doesn't walk the walk like he talks the talk - he's always up for yapping away in the media about not trusting models & stuff, but when he actually goes about publishing articles, those recognise the reality of AGW... At this point, he's little more than a paid shill for the Oil industry...
Er, Australia is a continent. It's the smallest continent and the largest island.
no, having read the report it is clear they is huge increasing discrepancy between the dire predictions of models and reality, ,they are indeed retreating from the fantastic and sensationist agenda-driven predictions they were paid to make
What land is there in the Arctic?
This bit, for instance.
Science definitely is performed by consensus. If there's a consensus on something, that's good reason to believe it, and scientists will build on that in further work. Naturally the consensus is always subject to revision, but it's very likely to be correct. If it's incorrect, it's likely to be in interpretation rather than measurement.
What do you think the scientific consensus that opposed Galileo was? He didn't get into trouble for heliocentrism, which Copernicus had already given good arguments for. Any educated astronomer would know of Copernicus and his theories. Moreover, the disagreements were about interpretations, not data.
Scientists have been wrong on theories (phlogiston, anybody?), but I'm not aware of any case where a consensus has been thoroughly wrong on the data. Nobody knew how black-body radiation worked before Planck, but the observations were detailed enough for him to propose his famous constant.
I find the idea of scientists deliberately using unscientific data incredible. Scientists, as a rule, are aiming at the truth. They dislike being proven wrong. They don't, in general, knowingly risk their reputations by deliberately using bad data. (Scientists are not particularly well-paid, and value their reputations.) If the data were as you represent it, there would be large numbers of scientists pointing that out. Since I have not observed that, the odds that my personal examination of the data would show something climate scientists as a whole miss seem sufficiently low that I'm not going to bother.
If you can come up with a credible reason why all those scientists would be blindly using bad data, that would alter my opinion on whether to do my own examination. (The claim that they're faking things to keep the grants coming is not credible.)
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I thought Australia was the world's largest island, and the largest country in the continent of Australasia, which includes New Zealand and Tasmania as well as sundry smaller islands.
A fair number of individual scientists could be running a scam. I find it incredible that virtually all the scientists in the field would run a scam, and that there wouldn't be numerous peer-reviewed articles pointing that out. Yet, we find that 98% of climate scientist agree on it. If this were to be fraudulent, I think it would be unprecedented in the history of science. If 98% of scientists in a field were seriously wrong about the data, I think that would be unprecedented in the history of science.
Science is about observations and coming up with neat theories to explain it. However, to move on to new topics, we need to have some way of establishing what set of observations we can rely on and which theories are accepted (so scientists can either build on it or come up with more precise ways to break the theories). That would be consensus.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I still don't get it. You say that (a) a few fraudulent scientists are acting as a gateway to bad data, and (b) I can look at the data and see for myself. It seems to me that, if I can look at data, numerous other scientists can too. Most of these are going to be honest (since most scientists are honest), and many are going to see the opportunity to write a paper that gets them some attention.
Grants aren't really a concern here; many scientists have their salaries (many are tenured professors, for example), and if I can find discrepancies in my spare time they can too, and write about it better than I can. Their papers will get out, somehow or other, regardless of any orthodoxy in established journals. Established journals, after all, like publishing exciting papers, and there's no way to stop papers from being published.
I'm doing sort of a meta-scientific analysis here to see if it's worth my time to look at your data. I'm making observations of the scientific community, which has some known properties, and figuring what my observations of the scientific community would be under certain hypotheses.
It's easy to find cases where the scientific consensus was wrong on interpretation (Chandrasekhar as you mention, Wegener and continental drift, etc.), but I'm not aware of any consensus being that wrong on the observations. (They have been wrong on details; Milliken's oil-drop experiment is the obvious example, but that wasn't that wrong.)
So, unless you can explain my observations of the scientific community, I'm going to continue to accept its consensus.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I've never heard a serious scientist proposing that the "Snowball Earth" events froze all the water on the planet. Typical scenarios under discussion propose a kilometre or so of ice floating on top of the liquid ocean. That would leave about 2.6km of water in the average part of the ocean (assuming the same volume of water as today, and the same volume of continental crust floating on mantle of the same density ; the latter assumptions are a little bit unsure, as temperature regimes have probably changed slightly , and continental crust is probably accumulative)
What makes the climate qualitatively different in a Snowball Earth situation is that the ice covers essentially the entire surface of the ocean, from pole to equator. If such a situation persists for any significant period of time (a few hundreds of thousands of years), then the severely reduced evaporation from the (ice-covered) ocean would reduce the amount of water transport onto land, so land ice would decline substantially.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I just looked at the sinusoidal graph you cited. It shows that ice coverage varies rather predictably by time of year. That's its main message. That doesn't disprove global warming.
It has lines in various pastel shades for the years 2005-2012. It's hard to pick anything out, since there hasn't been that much variance since 2005.
The 2013 line is near the top of the grouping, but not at the top. We've had more ice in this period.
In short, it tells us nothing about global warming. The effects are not expected to be monotonic, and none of the observations are. The graph covers nine years when the increase in world temperature has slowed. We've seen anomalous years, like 1998, when the global temperature spiked high, and for all I can tell we're looking at another anomaly.
The graph would have been much more indicative if it had extended back more than nine years. Global temperatures now are significantly higher than they were in the 1990s, for example. Showing polar ice for 2000, 1990, and 1980 would have at least added a little context.
Looking at this, it looks like the numbers of hurricanes have been on the rise in recent years. The number hitting the US is of no importance, since climate scientists haven't (as far as I've heard) been saying that hurricanes will necessarily hit the US. Most hurricanes never hit the US, and so it's better to look at total hurricanes.
The problem with your political accusations, aside from the fact that it's potential libel, is that they constitute a rather far-fetched theory to account for climate science publications and statements. Another hypothesis would be that the planet is warming up. This would account for the fact that publications say so, and if the deniers are simply bad or biased scientists that would account for their treatment.
You're saying that there is a cabal of politically motivated climate scientists that controls pretty much all funding and publication. That, as far as I've been able to tell, would be a unique phenomenon in the scientific community. I think it's much simpler to conclude that the planet is, indeed, warming up. Since your sixty-second study has proved to be basically meaningless, I'm going with that.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes