Slashdot Mirror


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.

5 of 319 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Science is Settled by towermac · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Really? Because you said, 'Ice loss in the Antarctic is causing sea level rise.' That was a big one, as far as why and how everybody is going to die.

    Perhaps I exaggerate your position slightly, but is it really 'just news?' It changes nothing? I guess it wouldn't, if saving the planet from the deadly effects of AGW was never the goal in the first place.

  2. Re:Science is Settled by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    Nobody is asking that. moving to a low-carbon economy even has significant economic benefits, and I assume a lot less wars over oil would also be a very good thing.

  3. Re:ARCTIC vs ANTARCTIC - the map is startling by Normal_Deviate · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The map of antarctic ice-thickness changes shows virtually the entire continent in red to yellow (thickening ice) and two tiny areas in blue-to-green (thinning ice.) Thinning ice accounts for something like one percent of the continent, and 99% of the published discussion. For decades, most peer-reviewed articles on WAIS thinning have studiously avoided any mention of the rest of the continent. The same is true for Greenland, where for decades most of the published literature has focused on the margins and pretended the interior does not exist.

    Counterexamples exist, of course, but I noticed these omissions as early as the mid-eighties.

    Even if you attribute the publication bias to poor data, it would have been more honest to mention that the areas under study accounted for only a tiny percentage of the land area and ice volume.

  4. Watch documentary "Merchants of Doubt" by walterbyrd · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Or read the book.

    Corporations hire PR firms that hire professional deniers to "muddy the waters"

    The tobacco industry did this for decades, pushing the message that the negative effects of smoking were disputed, controversial, etc.

    As it turns out, the same scientists who denied smoking dangers also denied global warming. Look up "Frederick Seitz."

    Yes, it can be hard to know. That is because certain corporations spend millions making it hard to know.

     

  5. Re:Famous Bill Gates Quote by NostalgiaForInfinity · · Score: 2, Interesting

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

    Well, then global warming should be good news, since for the past several million years, we have been living in an ice age.

    And the only reason we are even doing as well as we are is because we are living during a temporary warm period during this ice age; without anthropogenic climate change, our climate would return to having much of the US and Europe covered in thick ice sheets.