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ESA's Cryosat Mission Sees Antarctic Ice Losses Double
An anonymous reader writes in with news that seems to confirm the alarming reports last week about Antarctic ice melting. "The new assessment comes from Europe's Cryosat spacecraft, which has a radar instrument specifically designed to measure the shape of the ice sheet. The melt loss from the White Continent is sufficient to push up global sea levels by around 0.43mm per year. Scientists report the data in the journal Geophysical Research Letters (abstract). The new study incorporates three years of measurements from 2010 to 2013, and updates a synthesis of observations made by other satellites over the period 2005 to 2010. Cryosat has been using its altimeter to trace changes in the height of the ice sheet — as it gains mass through snowfall, and loses mass through melting."
Hey, illiterate, that is simply from one source not the entire source of sea levels rising.
Of course, there's more than just Antarctic ice melting, but more importantly, it is likely that the melting rate will accelerate as the planet keeps warming.
The big secret(I don't know why it's a secret) is that melting ice has never been the biggest source of sea level change from climate change. Never. Contrary to what most people learn in middle school science classes, temperature does affect slightly the volume of liquids, and the increasing temperature of the deep ocean drive changes in volume. Tiny fraction decreases in the density of water might not seem like much, but it adds up to a lot more than a little melting sea ice when the average depth of the ocean is 2.4 kilometers.
The rich aren't actually doing that. Contrary to common belief, rich people are not actually more insightful and aware of things than your typical well-educated person. There isn't a conspiracy to exploit the results of climate change. Why bother when everything is based on next quarters' earnings anyways?
Actually, this recent study claims that in the years 2005-2011, contribution from melting ice was 3 times as high as thermal expansion of the oceans: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/jou...
Interesting. So... I have to admit I made a factual error in my post.
I shouldn't have used the word "never", it was apparently quite hyperbolic.
I don't think anyone was suggesting it was going to be total devastation since before "Waterworld" came out, but you should be asking "How much of my tax dollars are going to be spent on things like disaster relief after more levees and such break" or "How much more expensive is food going to get because all the good farmland is in floodplains that are now going to have higher insurance premiums for flooding?" Because the answer is going to be more than you want even if you're smug that your house is more than a few inches above sea level.
No, see, only government intervention can harm an economy. It's right there in their political philosophy, so it must be a true.
And if you had actually read the real research those garbage stories are referring to you would know that those volcano's have little to no effect on the ice sheet because the ice refreezes almost immediately after it's melted due to the fact that it's under several hundred (up to thousands) feet of ice. Hell, even the steam vents refreeze all the moisture in the air before the gases reach open air (creating some rather magnificent stalactites and ice formations).
Here: chew on some better data
...because everyone knows a blog that is heavily funded by the Heartland Institute must be better than direct satellite measurements.
And no, this is not an ad hominem; I'm not necessarily saying WUWT must necessarily be terrible purely because they have undeclared conflicts of interest, I'm just attacking your ridiculous qualifier better. How can you possibly argue that the quality of data on a blog with undeclared conflicts of interest is better data than direct satellite measurements? Your "better" just seems to mean "confirms my preconceptions".
Though let's not kid ourselves, WUWT is terrible. Every time I visit it, I find huge embarrassing mistakes any BA in science could spot.