ESA Satellite Shows Sudden Ice Loss In Southern Antarctic Peninsula

ddelmonte tips news that the ESA's CryoSat spacecraft has detected a sharp increase in the rate at which ice is being lost in a previously stable section of Antarctica. In 2009, glaciers at the Southern Antarctic Peninsula began rapidly shedding ice into the ocean, at a rate of roughly 60 cubic kilometers per year (abstract). From the ESA's press release: This makes the region one of the largest contributors to sea-level rise in Antarctica, having added about 300 cubic km of water into the ocean in the past six years. Some glaciers along the coastal expanse are currently lowering by as much as four m each year. Prior to 2009, the 750 km-long Southern Antarctic Peninsula showed no signs of change. ... The ice loss in the region is so large that it has even caused small changes in Earth’s gravity field, detected by NASA’s GRACE mission. Climate models show that the sudden change cannot be explained by changes in snowfall or air temperature. Instead, the team attributes the rapid ice loss to warming oceans.

Comments

Sudden?

[ArcadeMan]

People have been talking about global warming/climate change/politically-correct-term since the last two decades but some countries just keep their head in the sand. *COUGH*U.S.A.*COUGH*

Re:Sudden?

[itsenrique]

Why is this necessarily so? In many cases, e get the politicians who's team has the most money.

Re:Sudden?

[dywolf]

You were saying something about increasing over the past 5 years?
Yeah...no.

http://skepticalscience.com//p...

Re:Sudden?

[garyisabusyguy]

I agree with laziness as being a problem, but I would say that it appears as people being too lazy to get their buts to the polls.

There is a large group of people who do not even bother to vote, with the 2014 election being an example of the lowest voter turnout for America in the past 70 years.
There is a smaller group people who believe the fud they are served up and are motivated to vote because of it.

As a result we saw huge wins for the gop in 2014, which is the largest user of fear driven propaganda to get their base to he polls

If the larger group remains uninvolved the smaller, easily propagandized group (and the propagandists that motivate them) will determine public policy and this country will promote policies that will end up hurting the entire planet

Re:Any materialized predictions? (Re:Sudden?)

[BCGlorfindel]

People have been talking about global warming/climate change/politically-correct-term since the last two decades but some countries just keep their head in the sand.

They certainly have. But, to the best of my knowledge, none of the actual predictions made over these years by the "alarmists" have ever materialized.

Would you care to prove the above statement wrong? Try to post a list of link-pairs: first link in each pair shall point to a prediction and the second — to its materializing... Note, that entries containing only the latter will not be accepted — when a result is known, it is too easy to find somebody having "predicted" it.

The prediction and the materialization would have to be at least 3 years apart too — successfully predicting tomorrow's weather does not count, that is.

Game?

Easy.

Many posters have noted before that the IPCC has highlighted many good predictions from models over the last while. The CMIP5 temperature projections for last decade for example, you can find their assessment of the models here. They compare climate model runs against observed temperature and here's the summary:
an analysis of the full suite of CMIP5 historical simulations (augmented for the period 2006–2012 by RCP4.5 simulations, Section 9.3.2) reveals that 111 out of 114 realizations show a GMST trend over 1998–2012 that is higher than the entire HadCRUT4 trend ensemble.

The HadCRUT trend is the observed record and as you can see 111 of 114 model runs had a trend since 1998 that was way higher than the observed...

Oh, I guess I did that wrong and may have made your point for you...

Re:Strangely mixed signals here

[Anonymous Coward]

The earlier submission is not citing NASA's satellite. According to the submission itself, the "original source" is Forbes. The article on Forbes does not have any link to NASA website, he has a link to a graph which shows some data, but does not link to any explanation of this data. (you know, something like a scientific article, or at least the web page of the satellite/project which provide the data, just to know what it represents)

Re:Haters gonna hate (Any materialized predictions

[serviscope_minor]

Ah, ad-hominems, they prove everything!

No, it's ad-homenim if he says "Mi is an ignorant bigot and therefore his arguments are invalid". otherwise it's just an insult.

Re:Strangely mixed signals here

[Anonymous Coward]

Response from uiuc (the source of their chart) accuses the Forbes article of cherry-picking data and arriving at unwarranted conclusions. I don't think we should consider the Forbes article an unbiased source.

http://www.atmos.illinois.edu/~wlchapma/Forbes.article.response.pdf

Re:Any materialized predictions? (Re:Sudden?)

[dave420]

You lazy fucker. Seriously. You are just playing little childish games because you seem to be so set on being right the very thought of you being wrong has made you start to act like a petulant child. Seriously. You are an embarrassment.

Re:Any materialized predictions? (Re:Sudden?)

[Anonymous Coward]

Hnsen's 1988 model Spot on, if you put in the actual emissions (close to Scenario A, IIRC). Well, the sensitivity that model got was 3.4Cper doubling but what happened over the period was 3.2C per doubling.

Go to Realclimate and look for model data comparisons.

Go check the IPCC First Annual Report and the predictions to 2000+. If anything the situation is much worse than predicted. If you're going to take that as good news, then I have bad news for you.