Slashdot Mirror
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.
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*
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Being as it is the continent that encompasses the south pole, how do you define what is southern?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Build a trench from the ocean to the desert. Let the excess water pool there. Problem solved.
The post accepted by Slashdot cites European Space Agency's satellite as evidence of ice-loss.
And earlier submission citing NASA's satellites leading to the opposite conclusion was not accepted. Kind a strange for a normally unabashedly US-centric Slashdot to so openly favour European satellite-data over American — makes one suspect a certain pre-existing bias...
I don't see any substantial changes here, do you?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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...
Your post in response to a request for pairs of links contained only a single link and was thus automatically rejected. FAIL.
Your request is unreasonable. Just because you would like real-world data to take a certain format: does not mean that you get to choose the format.
It is still sufficient to invalidate the claim that: none of the actual predictions made over these years by the "alarmists" have ever materialized.
when a result is known, it is too easy to find somebody having "predicted" it.
That is complete and utter nonsense, when the subject is modeling the value of a variable over a period of time.
It is implausible that someone randomly predicted all or most every possible set of results. That would only be possible with a simple 'binary' prediction such as "A positive trend", or at least a prediction of a small number of datapoints, or datapoints that can take on a limited number of discrete values.
Models make specific predictions over a period of time, when most of the predictions made by the model are accurate to a reasonable degree (no model is perfect), then the prediction was made and came true, And it cannot be attributed to the claim that "'once a result is known, it is too easy to find somebody having "predicted" it.'".
In my college Earth Science classes, our professor taught us that there is no doubt the Earth is slowly warming. The only argument is over whether it's natural or due to mankind's effects on the environment.
I should have told him that mi, Slashdot's resident political scientist/economist/earth scientist has it all figured out, and that's not true.
predictions made over these years by the "alarmists"
Wow, score 1 for intellectual dishonesty. How about you look at the predictions made by the scientists rather than random pundits in the media. You don't expect the media to accurately report tech news, so the fact that you refer to predictions from "alarmists" rather than scientists implies that you are intentionally going for bad reporting rather than trying to find out what is actually going to happen.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The site you link to has no peer reviewed papers, charts with out proper methodology cited, and links to essentially nowhere. Not acceptable.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
People don't have to jump through your ridiculous hoops to prove the Earth is generally warming.
I've had the same problem with mi. Apparently his mind is too simple to parse out the comparison in a single link and he rigidly requires responses be presented only in the format he wants.
In response to your post temperatures are still within the uncertainty range on the model projections so it's impossible to say they are wrong.
I'm in the Philippines at the monent and its 40 degrees celsius plus and all the malls and everything else seems to be airconditioned down to 22 degrees celsius or so. Could someone crunch the numbers of the global heating caused by air conditioning starting with their power consumption and efficiency for example? I'm thinking that insulation might be a better investment to prevent climate change because otherwise, what we are doing is expending huge amounts of energy to cool small sections (and thereby heating everything else) on a massive and unprecedented scale...
The numbers have been crunched here. They show that the heat emitted by all human activities are about 1% of the heat from enhanced greenhouse warming so it's pretty much just at the rounding error level.
I'm not going to try again because I've already presented you with this peer reviewed paper that compares IPCC projections to observations for temperature and sea level rise. The fact that you won't accept the format I present it in just shows how you lack intellectual flexibility.
Ok, here's the IPCC third report published in 2001. You can compare the projections in it to current observations.
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.
Newsflash: Nobody cares about your "rules".
Try discussing things like an adult.
Dismissing valid information over technicalities (that YOU have decided are meaningful) makes you look like a small minded child.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
I've repeatedly told you this is consistent with Manabe et al. 1991 page 811: "... sea surface temperature hardly changes and sea ice slightly increases near the Antarctic Continent in response to the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide."
I've explained that Manabe et al. attributed the slight Antarctic sea ice increase to increased precipitation in the area. This freshens the frigid surface water and reduces mixing with the warmer water below. Other possibilities include stronger winds which spread out the ice and expose more surface water to be frozen.
I've told Jane and economart that Fig. 2(a) from Polyak et al. 2010 shows that the reconstructed Arctic sea ice extent in the 1930s was comparable to that in 1979, and the modern decline is quite clear.
I've also repeatedly explained that Jane's accusations of deliberately misleading cherry-picking are completely backwards. As usual.
No, Jane. Manabe et al. 1991 was 24 years ago. The fact that Manabe was 24 years ago is exactly why I've repeatedly showed it to you. They predicted that Antarctic sea ice would increase in a warming world, but you keep insisting that "The science is faulty at its roots. The models haven’t predicted one thing, in 30+ years. ... You don’t really need to know anything about the science except that IT HASN’T PREDICTED ANYTHING. That makes it bad theory. ... CO2 warming theory has predicted NOTHING."
In addition to the other 17 reasons I gave you, don't you think this is another reason you should reconsider making these baseless accusations?
Huh? Jane, I just gave you links to peer-reviewed long-term reconstructions of Arctic sea ice extent in response to your insinuations that scientists are deliberately misleading. In response, Jane tries to guess at my feelings about what I "told people".
Instead, you might find it more productive to click on those links and learn about peer-reviewed long-term reconstructions of Arctic sea ice extent. Then maybe you'll be in a better position to judge whether you should dare to accuse scientists of deliberately misleading.
Good grief, Jane. Once again, I'd rather use all the available data. In the context of using a single dataset, that means using all the data in that dataset. That's why it's so ironic that Jane baselessly accused Layzej of cherry-picking when he loaded the entire UAH dataset, then Jane suggested only using data since 1998. But Jane obviously won't ever be able to grasp this irony, because he just did the
There are reasons to doubt the land ice melting connection to Antarctic sea ice, but I don't think that's one of them. I mentioned real reasons by citing Swart and Fyfe 2013, Polvani and Smith 2013 and referencing fig. 2 and fig. 4(e) from Parkinson and Cavalieri 2012 (PDF).
But ocean warming is sufficient to thin West Antarctic ice sheets, as I've explained:
"West Antarctica is among the most rapidly warming regions on Earth, with an ice sheet that's vulnerable to the warming oceans because it's mainly grounded below sealevel."
"Because West Antarctica juts out into the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC), those warming waters are thinning its ice sheet at an accelerating rate. ... Its ice sheet is also mainly grounded below sealevel, making it more vulnerable to the warming oceans than the East's which is mainly grounded above sealevel."
The fact that West Antarctica is mainly grounded below sealevel means that ocean warming causes rapid land ice thinning there. Also, the fact that the bedrock is deeper farther inland from the grounding line has "interesting" consequences. See Rignot et al. 2014 and Joughin et al. 2014.
Here are several posts at RealClimate on the subject of whether warming has paused or not:
http://www.realclimate.org/ind...
http://www.realclimate.org/ind...
http://www.realclimate.org/ind...
http://www.realclimate.org/ind...
There are indications that the PDO is switching to a warm phase that generally favors El Ninos. If that happens temperatures may well move above climate model projections in a few years. It's all a part of the noise of natural variability. As I said before less than about 30 years is too short a time period to make judgements about the temperature trends.