NASA Study Shows Net Gains For Antarctic Ice (google.com)

A widely circulated NASA study published in the Journal of Glaciology, and reported by UPI, says that Antarctic ice has measurably thickened in recent decades, a conclusion at odds with earlier findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "which in 2013 suggested gains were not keeping up with losses." The new study ... doesn't totally undermine the handful of studies showing significant glacier, ice sheet and sea ice shrinkage. Instead, if offers evidence of previously unaccounted gains. ... The new tallies reveal an annual net gain of 112 billion tons between 1992 and 2001. Annual gains of 82 billion tons were observed between 2003 and 2008.

Comments

Science is Settled

[Nuisance]

Yesterday Antarctica was contributing 0.27mm p/y to sea level rise
Today Antarctica is removing 0.23mm p/y to sea level rise
A 0.5mm p/y change in a day.
We are told sea level is rising 2.6 to 2.9mm p/y so that 0.5mm p/y change is 16 - 20% of the total figure, that is a massive discrepancy.

Keep being told that the science is settled, this hardly looks like settled science to me.

But queue the alarmists, I am sure they will explain this is 'worse news than eva' and matches what they predicted.

Or wait a year or two and NASA will adjust the data based on models 'cause the real data doesn't match the models, and everyone knows models trump real data in climate science.

Re:Science is Settled

[drinkypoo]

But queue the alarmists, I am sure they will explain this is 'worse news than eva' and matches what they predicted.

Did you even RTFA?

"The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away," Zwally said. "But this is also bad news. If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for."

In short, this is not good news or bad news. This is just news. It's not telling us that ice isn't melting. It's telling us that ice isn't melting (the net effect anyway) in one specific region. It doesn't change the fact of AGW, only how we understand the workings of climate.

Re:Science is Settled

[Chas]

That science is SETTLED my friend.

In science, the only things that are "settled" are things that have been unequivocally disproven. Things like Phlogiston, humors, etc.

Simply because a significant number (or even a majority (or even ALL)) of current scientists in the field agree that *this* is the One True Way, doesn't mean that they're correct.

Note: This is NOT the same thing as saying that they're wrong. Nor that the ideas they're espousing are worthless.

The basic message is "we should leave the planet better off than we found it". Which is a good and admirable thing.

The big problem is that nobody has a clear, and widely agreed-upon idea about what to do about it. And some of the options being put forth are fairly shady, dangerous, or just flat-out unacceptable. Sometimes two or three of those at once.

Sending everyone to live in caves, killing off a significant chunk of the world population, or destroying the world energy economy fall under the "all three" category.

The whole "carbon credit" trading scheme has already proven totally shady, since it's a carte blanche license to pollute.

Basically, I foresee nothing real being done about it for a long, LONG time while vast sums of money are spent uselessly and people wrangle over "The Right Way".

Re:Science is Settled

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, thickening of the ice doesn't slow global warming. Only growing ice extent can do that, by reducing albedo.

So, your statement destroyed by facts, you pivot to yet another argument. Suddenly the Arctic and Antarctic aren't important anymore because they refuse to play along.

Re:Science is Settled

[fyngyrz]

Smoking tobacco increases your risk of lung cancer.

You only get a partial for that: It increases some people's risk of having lung cancer. Appears to depends on the individual's genes.

The Earth is round

Nope: The earth is an irregular oblate spheroid.

Most plants produce sugars via photosynthesis

Another partial: Photosynthesis in plants produces glucose (C6H12O6), O2 and H2O. Glucose is a monosaccharide carbohydrate. This is a simple sugar in the chemical sense, but it is not "sugar" in the way most people understand the term, which is as the disaccharide sucrose, C12H22O11. Storage within a plant is generally as polysaccharide amylose or amylopectin -- or in other words, starch.

And while these facts are perhaps somewhat settled, perhaps it would be prudent for you to consider that your description of the facts, and perhaps the understanding of the facts you built those descriptions from, leaves something to be desired. It is possible this has follow-on implications for your descriptions of, and understanding of, climate change.

You should consider that science is essentially a method. The method is, generally speaking, to formulate a hypothesis (e.g. the earth will warm, the seas will flood, etc.) and then devise ways to attempt to show this experimentally so that you can see if your hypothesis has some truth to it. At that point, again generally speaking, you, or others, test further by looking for things that will falsify the hypothesis. Both of these require actual experiments that demonstrate the results, or collection of data where the process has already been shown to be ongoing.

In the case of CO2-driven climate change, which is to say what will actually happen with all the forcings and feedback mechanisms, there is no supporting data in the form of increasing CO2 having caused warming. In the historical record, in every case, rises in CO2 herald climate cooling. This has happened over and over again. So the whole "already ongoing process" thing is out as far as supporting evidence goes. As to the actual experiment, we have not seen actual results, so we are still in the "here is a hypothesis" stage.

In the process of trying to produce models that predict results ahead of time, we have repeatedly failed to hit the mark. This is at the very least, cautionary with regard to the validity of the hypothesis.

That's not to say it is wrong; but it definitely says that the science is not settled, no matter how you meant the term.

I would say it is prudent not to spew things into the atmosphere which do not naturally end up there in like amounts, assuming we want to keep climate change moving along the path it would have done without the presence of a large number of gas- and particulate-producing human endeavors.

But do we? That's actually subject to varied opinion... in the case of climate change in the warming direction along with sea level rise, some places would be less habitable, but others would be more so; some regions would be less well suited for some crops, but others would be more well suited for those same crops. Some land would submerge and lose habitability and real-estate value, but other land would become the bays and inlets and shorelines of the future, and it would increase in habitability, value and utility. People would very, very slowly (over generations) have to move around a little. Which they tend to do anyway. That's the least of all the challenges -- the majority of those displaced by this will be the wealthy who have an interest in the current shoreline -- who are, conveniently enough, also the people who can most afford disruption. The sea would likely warm, and life there would have to adapt, either by following the preferred temperature gradient or by evolving to meet the metabolic challenge.

On the other side of the coin, some low-lying areas that have been populated may have to

Re:Science is Settled

[evilviper]

The big problem is that nobody has a clear, and widely agreed-upon idea about what to do about it.

A few clear, viable, and widely agreed-upon solutions:

- Stop burning coal

- Increase energy efficiency (buildings, appliances, vehicles, etc.) as much as possible

- Stop Deforestation

- Slow population growth

- Eat more plants and reduce production of meat

- Switch to non-fossil energy sources as quickly as possible

With a simple search, you can find plenty of lists like this all over the web:

http://www.scientificamerican....

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_w...

The whole "carbon credit" trading scheme has already proven totally shady, since it's a carte blanche license to pollute.

It would probably work great if there was one global program. But without universal participation, a more aggressive standard will only penalize participants, while rewarding outsiders. Faking it and putting in-place a system that does nothing is the only option.

Not reliable

[Anonymous Coward]

After giving it a read (what a difficult paper to read!) I would take that study with a fair amount of healthy scepticisms.

The data they are using is fraught with issues (almost entirely satellite based, which has trouble with terrain slopes).

There has been a significant amount of work done to remove bias inherent to the data (because the data was modified from Oct 2003 onwards), and there is no provided analysis on effectiveness of the methods used (they don't mention the number of data points used as reference, so hard to calculate manually).

Part of the data is made up, all areas south of 86 S is generated based on algorithms rather than data.

And the very large elephant is the missing data between April 2001 and October 2003. Over two and a half years when the Antarctic was going through particularly bad times.

There is a lot of other stuff that I couldn't fully comprehend on my reading, and I might be missing some stuff that clarify's some of the above, but it is super clear that there are multiple points of failure in the reams of calculations and estimations.

It's probably more right than wrong, but not nearly enough to use this paper to build other assumption off.

Re:Not reliable

[Zocalo]

No matter where you stand on the debate, at this point people should be taking ALL climate change studies with a healthy degree of scepticism; there are too many people with an agenda on all sides to assume that any of it is completely free of bias. Even so, I think NASA handled the discrepency rather clearly in the article; they disagree with the IPCC's figures on ice loss/gain, but not with the overall sealevel rises - ergo, they conclude that the difference is either coming from additional water entering the oceans from somewhere else or there is something else going on in Antarctica. Well, duh! What they don't do is speculate what that might be, so in otherwords it's also serving as a "give us more money to do further research" piece. What was that about having everyone having an agenda again...?

Re:Famous Bill Gates Quote

[Ol Olsoc]

My question is what temperature is the Earth supposed to be?

There is no temperature that it is supposed to be.

It is probably in our best interests that the climates we live in are compatible with us.

Re:Why is diversity a goal?

[estitabarnak]

Well, the temperature that maximizes biodiversity across the planet.

Could you expand on why "biodiversity" ought to be the goal? If I had to pick something, I'd have picked "comfort of humans" or, perhaps, the humans' longevity or something like that.

Why do you pick "biodiversity"?

Maximizing biodiversity is a decent goal to have high on your list. The more organisms there are, the more resistant a given system is likely to be. If you've got one species of tree in a forest and beetles come and wipe out that species, you're in trouble. If you've got high biodiversity, you're more likely to have less trees that will be affected, plus a better chance that there's somebody that calls the beetle dinner.

Why should humans care about resilience? We derive a lot of services from natural systems. Protection from extreme events (flood, fire, insects, etc); diverse food stocks; tourism; unique chemicals for pharmaceuticals; groundwater purification; local weather stabilization; and so on. Even if you don't "like" nature, you derive a tremendous number of services from it. The best way to maintain longterm comfort/longevity of humans is to make sure those systems continue to be able to perform those services.

Re:Government are the other

[mi]

If that is your opinion about 'government' and hence 'society', why don't you emmigrate to true third world country, like Somalia, Sudan or Nigeria?

Weren't you among those, "threatening" to emigrate to Canada, when Bush got elected? Or was it North Korea — the platonic ideal of government "taking care" of the citizenry's every need? WTF are you still doing here?

The 'governments' there certainly don't feed the poor, house the homeless and treat the sick.

Nice of you to have included Somalia — this whole meme about how Libertarians are supposed to move there is as stupid as it is infamous — the country's current troubles are due to its previous government being Socialist. Venezuela is unravelling into the same direction in front of our eyes — just ask Bernie Sanders, when you next meet him, what he would differently from Hugo Chavez...

Oh, but what about Sudan? Well, they have an ambitious social protection program called the Social Initiative Program. Nigeria does too. Time to update your talking-points card.

And you likely proclaim yourself a Christian even...

Tell me, where in the Christian (or Jewish) dogma is there anything about it being the government's (Cæsar's) responsibility to help the "less fortunate"? It is not — good people are supposed to do it themselves, government spending tax-monies on it is not benevolence.

Re:Climate change hogging the spotlight

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish other (arguably more pressing) environmental concerns could get half as much attention as climate change.

Be careful what you wish for, friend. Next thing you know, there would be plastic pollution deniers asserting that floating six pack rings are actually an undiscovered form of kelp and, even if there were such a thing as plastic pollution, it would a good thing, because it gives wildlife something to eat in lean years. These would shortly be followed by an almost equally obnoxious cohort of armchair plastic experts, eager to demonstrate the reality of plastic in our oceans. And then we'll all be too busy demonstrating our dogmatic loyalty to our chosen side rather than integrating new information to form a more accurate picture of reality.