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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.
Who funded it? Where did these people work before NASA? They need to be investigated.
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.
Antarctic ice has measurably thickened in recent decades, a conclusion at odds with earlier findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
That sounds like an...
*sunglasses*
inconvenient truth.
Yeaaaaahh!
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...?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
You forgot to mention the real threat.
MANBEARPIG!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Does this include denying global-warming studies so that chaos doesn't ensue when USA citizens are forced to live in greater relative harmony with the earth?
Requiem for the American Dream
so in otherwords it's also serving as a "give us more money to do further research" piece.
That's the natural outcome of every constrained body of research. In fact I don't think I've ever read a research paper which didn't lead logically to asking another question. Or do you think at some point we can just science as finished?
Global warming(and cooling) have been going on for millions if not billions of years. So what's all the hubub bub.
As even a cursory Wikipedia reading will note, ARCTIC ice is DECREASING in extent at a faster rate than ANTARCTIC is INCREASING.
In other words, Antarctic ice is growing X units per year, but Arctic ice is SHRINKING more than X units per year.
The net result is that the Earth's ice cover is shrinking.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_sea_ice#/media/File:Antarctic_Grows.jpg
Those who believe anthropogenic climate change is a myth thrive on the confusion caused by nuance like this. But the Earth's climate is not a simple system. It has nuance. Ice may be shrinking overall, and yet still growing in some places.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/...
You can connect at the bottom of the page as of right now the link in the article above is not working for me.
I am not a glaciologist but i read the article and am a bit puzzled by the findings related to snowfall and "thickness". It looks as if only satelite data was used, so why can't Antarctica actually be losing massive amounts of ice and the resulting removal of mass cause uplifting of the underlying rock? Removal of large amounts of mass over wide areas tend to have that effect and I was not able to find reference in the references. ICESat only uses laser range finding.
http://icesat.gsfc.nasa.gov/icesat/glas.php
No, I don't think science can ever be said to be finished. There's always going to be a further potential for refinement, follow up question, or piece of inexplicable data that needs exploring, and that's the nature of the beast. I was just driving home the point that there is always an agenda, even if it's the business as usual, and rather benign given how we approach funding science, "we need more money".
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Read the article quick before it gets taken down.
So WHY have they gone on for millions if not billions of years? These things don't just decide to start. They have a physical reason to occur.
So what is the physical reason to occur, and what do those physical reasons for the climate say about what we're doing with pumping out CO2 into the atmosphere?
I wish other (arguably more pressing) environmental concerns could get half as much attention as climate change. The shocking level of plastic pollution in our oceans for example. Why can't we have a big international panels on that? Could it be because fixing that would require actual work, rather than just dreaming up more ways to tax and control the population.
My question is what temperature is the Earth supposed to be? I mean is it supposed to be a hothouse with tropical foliage everywhere as it once was or is it supposed to be a ball of ice like it once was? I'd think somewhere in between would be good but really all I hear is that it's getting hot but no real idea of what temperature it should be.
Yup. So enjoy the ride, maybe move inland and hope for good TV coverage of the drowning masses at the beach.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I was told several years ago that, paraphrasing, any temperature is good and change in either direction is only bad when it is too rapid to adapt.
"The people with the money and power to change anything are selfish, lazy, SOBs, with no foresight, but believe they know everything."
They don't care how high the sea levels go, that's what they have the yacht for.
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.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Per TFA's conclusion: If dynamic thinning continues to increase at the same rate of 4 [gigatons/year] with no offset from further increases in snowfall, the positive balance of the [Antarctic ice sheet] will decrease from the recent 82 [gigatons] to zero in ~20 years. However, compensating increases in snowfall with climate warming may also be expected.
Apparently, warming has added mass via more snow, and the paper doesn't appear to address possible bedrock rebound from thinning ice. At some point, temperature will likely increase to the point where added snowfall can't keep up with the ice outflow. At the moment, the changing dynamic of the climate seems to be causing counterintuitive local changes, like added snowfall in the eastern US and eastern Antarctica, due to added water vapor in the air.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Ok, this is a meta post.
Can you mods modding down posts that disagree with your settled worldviews as "troll" fucking stop it? Both sides. kthxbie
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
drowning masses at the beach
Yes, well, let's hope they can get out of the way. The water isn't moving that fast..
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
NASA Study: Mass Gains of Antarctic Ice Sheet Greater than Losses
NASA seems to think it came from NASA. Maybe I should take their word over yours?
Not up onto my hill. It's cool if you think that climate change is a myth and you enjoy your beach resort. But put your money where your mouth is and if you should be wrong and the water starts climbing, don't be a sore loser and have the dignity to drown.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
We've been in an ice age for 3 million years were ice has covered much of the earth. There are glacial periods where ice extends furthur to the equator (what most people think is an ice age) and there are interglacial periods. We are currently in an interglacial period. During this ice age, the earth hos more often than not ben in glacial periods. The last interglacial period lasted only 12 thousand years. We are currently getting relatively close to that time frame.
Basically "what temperature the Earth is supposed to be" is many degrees colder than this over the past 3 million years.
I'll couch my dispute in the form of a net. Gravity tries to take me out; I win. Concrete is un-splattered.
Or in other words, what nature hath wrought, technology may provide an answer for.
In the case of climate change, such answers are all around us: solar power, nuclear power, electric vehicles, carbon sequestration technologies, etc.
Try not to panic. It is both unseemly and uncalled for. We solve problems as they come to face us; that's our nature. We'll solve whatever problems climate change may present us with as well.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I freely welcome my competitors to make the better mousetrap..."
Kind of hard to do when the factory I have my mousetrap made at has to pay Bill a fee equal to their profit on my trap for every mousetrap they make for me.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
According to this skepticalscience.com:
> Sea ice and land ice are two separate phenomena. Antarctica is losing land ice at an accelerating rate. Sea ice around Antarctica is increasing. The reasons for sea ice increasing in a warming Southern Ocean are complex
http://www.skepticalscience.com/antarctica-gaining-ice.htm
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.
[looks at your user ID] You're not new here... are you fantasizing? That's the only thing I can imagine that would account for your post. Moderation here is broken, has been broken, and likely will continue to be broken. It is incredibly poorly designed, if "designed" is even the appropriate word. There is zero accountability, zero recovery of incorrectly modded posts, and zero incentive to "do it right." Human nature at large being what it is (venal and small-minded), the results are always like this. "I disagree" and "I agree" account for almost all moderation on /. just as they always have.
I suggest a glass of warm milk and a cuddle with a nice soft pillow. Or breasts. Breasts do it for me every time. Slashwhat? Postwho? Eh? Work work work work...
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
Listen dick cheese. It's a simple question that even a simple mind like yours should be able to digest. The idea is that the earth has had climate change since there has been an earth. The temps go up and down and who is to say what is normal. We know what we like and that's about it. Yes, the climate is warming. No shit, sherlock, I can read a thermometer. Ice is melting and you know what, things change. One day one of those super volcanoes we read about is gonna blow and then things will get ugly. I'm all for some common sense ideas about how to keep from running the carbon footprint over the edge but this incessant carping about climate change is beyond that. Instead of common sense we get fucking shit-for-brains asswipes such as yourself foaming at the mouth.
He fucked all night and now his ass is sore and bleeding.
That's one theory. All the research I've done makes it seem like maybe the earth has no one stage, it's up and down. I kind of like it like it is now but I'm used to that.
What, you say transients matter more than first-order models in nonlinear dynamical systems? Impossible. That's not what they teach in undergraduate statistics, therefore it must be heresy.
Global warming(and cooling) have been going on for millions if not billions of years. So what's all the hubub bub.
People have died since there are people. Why should we try to solve this particular murder?
Stephan
My question is what temperature is the Earth supposed to be? I mean is it supposed to be a hothouse with tropical foliage everywhere as it once was or is it supposed to be a ball of ice like it once was? I'd think somewhere in between would be good but really all I hear is that it's getting hot but no real idea of what temperature it should be.
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"?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I notice the parent was moderated "flamebait". Whoosh!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The basic message is "we should leave the planet better off than we found it". Which is a good and admirable thing.
Hear hear!
The big problem is that nobody has a clear, and widely agreed-upon idea about what to do about it.
Even if the planet is warming, there are a number of steps between that and "We must stop it even if it takes us back to the stone age and kills off most of the population!" Most of the attention is on "Where's the temperature going?". That leaves out a number of others, starting with "Is it disastrous, bad, indifferent, good, or wonderful?"
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. [...] The whole "carbon credit" trading scheme has already proven totally shady, since it's a carte blanche license to pollute.
Provided you shovel a bunch of money into the carbon credit market, a substantial portion of which - to the tune of aggregate billions - went to the founders and operators of the market - notably, the same Al Gore who was pushing so hard to spread the idea that the science was "settled" and that ecogeddon was almost upon us unless the carbon content of the atmosphere was immediately reduced to pre-industrial levels, regardless of cost in money, freedom, and lives.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I, most certainly, did not vote for Obama, who got just barely more than 50% of the vote and quickly fell below that in approval ratings. Congress' ratings are even worse.
At any point in time about half the country disagrees with the sitting President and the Legislature. We accept them as a necessary evil — "evil" being the keyword — hence the "othering".
We hire the government to do the things, that nobody else can do or be allowed to do: protect us from violence within and without and enforce the contracts. They should not be allowed to do anything else: not issue loans, not treat the sick, not feed the hungry nor shelter the homeless, none of that — and certainly not sell electricity. All of that was a mission creep, which ought to stop.
I am from the government and I am here to help.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Also, thickening of the ice doesn't slow global warming. Only growing ice extent can do that, by reducing albedo.
Which brings up the question of whether urban heat islands could be mitigated somewhat by switching from black asphalt and tar surfaces to painting the streets and roofs white?
Or, better yet, paint it with something like the new nanotech pigment that reflects (rather than absorbing and/or down-shifting) 97% of the incident light and only strongly couples to the "infrared window" where the atmosphere is transparent, "seeing" only the sun and the near-absolite-zero sky, not the infrafred from the greenhouse gasses and clouds. This results in a surface that, in full sunlight, is about 9 degrees F cooler that the surrounding air (and produce still more cooling when the sun is down).
Nine degrees F is about how much heating they're touting as a disaster, isn't it? Maybe we should paint whole continents. B-)
(Meanwhile, reducing the amount of energy used for air conditioning by deploying trick paint could cut a lot of fossil fuel use without degrading quality of life.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Al Gore, of all people, undercut this particular aspect of his own scare-mongering, when he bought an ocean-front villa for himself. A real nice one too, I hear...
But then, the "recovering politician" was never much about practicing, what he preaches.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
When arctic ice melts, it doesn't lead to sea level rise, so as far as sea level rise is concerned.
Except for the drop-in-the-bucket part of it on land rather than in the Arcitc Ocean.
That's mostly Greenland and Iceland (which are really pretty small, though their position near the pole makes them look gigantic in Mercator projection maps.)
I hear there is joy in Iceland over their current warming trend. Though the recent retreat of their glaciers and improvement of their growing conditions is still far from that of the Medieval Optimum, they are once again able to grow some of the crops that were common there at the time.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
On the other hand, the sea rise from the current warming trend will leave much of the coastline (where many people live) uninhabitable.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
You're either an idiot, or lying; I would suggest agreeing to the later, because the former would be humiliating.
Icelands in in the middle of the gulf stream. ;)
In comparision with the "rest of" Europe it never was really cold there
they are once again able to grow some of the crops that were common there at the time. ;)
That is nonsense. They never stopped growing them. You are mixing up Icelands with the south of Greenland
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Well for a majority of the Cenozic era (the age of mammals) there have been no glaciers or polar ice caps.
The atmosphere traps some heat. Water vapor, C02, and CH4 are the most important traps in that order.
The Sun is about 15% brighter than when the Earth first formed. The the atmosphere was import for the evident liquid water the first couple billion years. It may have been at least half CO2 then.
The internet archive, archive.org, could not archive that page. Weird.
I don't actually expect a slow rise of the waters to be the problem. Before that we'll probably get a few floods, hurricanes and whatever else is necessary to clean our beaches.
Eventually, yes, the place will be going under, but I fully expect you to be washed off long before that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Look up in to the sky. See the big shiny thing. ~2 x 10^24 gigatons of slightly variable plasma fusion reactor. Incidental energy transport modulated by various astrophysical, terrestial and geologic factors.
By 2020, people will curse you when they are freeing their arses off. Partly colder weather with the solar/sunspot declines, and partly poverty.
Give it a break. This is what 'settled science' means. Karl Popper, called the same concept "The republic of Science", it's a key concept in the philosophy of Science, it is the difference between "A scientist says" and "Science says", why do so many people of one political colour have a problem with that?
As for TFA, there is nothing in it that says or implies "they've been measuring it all wrong", they are using all the measurements they have. NASA found something interesting in the data, something that doesn't fit previously extrapolated assumptions that were made because the data did not exist, they make it perfectly clear it does not change previous findings. The ocean is still rising, this observation means they cannot account for a very small portion of the observed rise.
By definition all scientific knowledge is imperfect but the mere existence of the modern world is very strong evidence that imperfect knowledge is preferable to ignorant speculation. So if being 'wrong' embarsses you, don't chose a STEM career.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
If your mousetrap is good enough then you'll be able to pay the applicable patent fees. If your mousetrap is good enough, and it's soon enough, another mousetrap builder that comes along behind you will have to pay you for your investment.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Everything I said is true, as a minute with Google shows you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The current ice age, the one we are in, is called the "Quarternary Glaciation" or "Pleistocene Glaciation":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The last "glacial period" (which is colloquially referred to as an "ice age", although that is not scientifically accurate), ended about 22000 years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
We are currently in an interglacial period:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It's unclear how much longer that would last without anthropogenic climate change; we might have started into the next glacial period already, or we may be skipping one this time. Either way, a glacial period is bad news, far worse than global warming.
At about 3mm / year, we're looking at a foot per century, or a meter per millennium. That's easy to adapt to. Even several times that rate of sea level rise is something we'd barely notice.
Furthermore, taking current topographical maps and combining them with sea level rise data is bullshit anyway; most coasts are sedimentary, not rocky.
Greenland holds fairly significant amounts of ice. The reason it's not a big concern is because, unlike sea ice, it would take a long time to melt, no matter what happens with climate change.
Well, then global warming should be good news,
And for some, after adjustment, it will be good news. For others? a catastrophe. This is the part that so many do not get. Canada so far has had an extension of the term between killing frosts, so the frost free season is lengthening. - also the Western US. Here is some interesting US data.
http://nca2014.globalchange.go....
Then again, some places might not be so fortunate. Some may even become colder. As the Greenland ice melts, the Weather in England might get a little frosty. This might happen if the gulf stream gets interrupted by the cold fresh water influx from Greenland.
At present in Ireland, they grow cabbage palm at the same latitude as Newfoundland - the warming effects of the gulf stream are so dominant, all may go away.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/... And some areas that are now verdant, may become arid. All sort of the luck of the draw.
I always like to put discussions in the manner in which others can relate. Strategically, is it wise to gamble that the US will always be blessed by climate? If large portions of the country turn into desert - is that a good formula for continued role as the world's superpower.
And that petrofuel. Is it patriotic and smart burning huge amounts of that portable energy dense fuel in gas guzzlers that we may some day need for our jet fighters?
Not the most glamorous web page, but interesting: http://vanrcook.tripod.com/Ger... Oddly enough, many people who consider themselves more patriotic, and love their country more than others, are happy to burn as much fossil fuel and use as much of the energy dense petrofuel, that they may have a leading role in our diminished power. All by foolishly believing people who are not at all patriotic, but have money as the central theme of their lives, but are smart enough to enlist them.
Me? I consider it my patriotic duty to enable the warfighters the best chance of fulfilling their missions.
So I'm going to drive, but I'm also going to conserve. I'm also going to attempt to have my country in good shape as long as possible.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
On the other hand, the sea rise from the current warming trend will leave much of the coastline (where many people live) uninhabitable.
Very expensive real estate owned by very wealthy people.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
For the past several million years, the earth has undergone regular glacial cycles, first every 40000 years, then every 100000 years. There have been dozens of these. That's not controversial or "a theory", it's something you can read off ice cores.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
At about 3mm / year, we're looking at a foot per century, or a meter per millennium. That's easy to adapt to..
Umm, no. Your simple version of sea level rise is really good, as long as you don't take into account just how low much of the coastline is. That and tides. That and storms. That and the fact that rise and sometimes fall are not always the same everywhere - in some areas, land is rising as it rebounds from the last ice age. So new land is being created at the shoreline.
Even so the rise is not consistent per year. Hell, in 2010, the ocean levels dropped due to a combination of conditions:
http://www.scientificamerican....
Furthermore, taking current topographical maps and combining them with sea level rise data is bullshit anyway; most coasts are sedimentary, not rocky.
While I don't have the data on most coasts, that would be much worse than a rocky coast. As inevitable storms especially when combined with king tides, low barometric pressure and wind, can take that small yearly difference, and amplify the bejabbers out of it.
What's the odds of that happening? Ask the peeps in New Jersey and New York City about Hurricane Sandy.
http://blogs.wsj.com/metropoli...
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Large portions of the US are already desert. So far, climate change has led to an overall increase in precipitation in the US. Overall, long term, climate change will probably not lead to significant net changes for the US; if it does, it will be towards less desert.
That's always the case with climate. It is naive to think that eliminating human carbon emissions will cause the climate to stabilize. Generally, pushing the climate in the direction of warmer temperatures is better overall.
Lrrr: We will raise your planet's temperature by one million degrees a day, for five days, unless we see McNeal at 9pm tomorrow - 8 central!
I was trying to point out that "we need more money" is not an agenda but the final outcome of every piece of science ever done.
Agendas bias towards a pre-determined conclusion. The desire to explore further is not created by having an agenda and is not related to the conclusion either.
Al Gore told us that the polar ice caps would be melted by 2014.
We all know that politician's don't lie....
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
"My question is what temperature is the Earth supposed to be? "
It varies. We don't live in a static world; we live in a dynamic one.
Dinosaurs once roamed the earth. Then they were killed off by an ice age. Then it warmed up again, leading us to the modern age.
Logic would dictate that the earth will get cooler and have another ice age, and then warm up again.
Cycles of nature.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
According to this skepticalscience.com:
> Sea ice and land ice are two separate phenomena. Antarctica is losing land ice at an accelerating rate. Sea ice around Antarctica is increasing. The reasons for sea ice increasing in a warming Southern Ocean are complex
http://www.skepticalscience.com/antarctica-gaining-ice.htm
You are right, SkepticalScience lists "Antarctica is gaining Ice" as number ten on their list of top Climate Myths. Either the crew at NASA are now foul mouthed deniers, or the blogger activists at SkepticalScience aren't as fair handed and open minded as they boast...
Guess you weren't paying any attention to the consequences of warming / cooling. Or that this natural process is sometimes due to the activities of one or more species causing the climate to change. Like when the cyano-bacteria caused the atmosphere to be unbreathable for a billion years. It's just natural. (And sometimes lethal).
Only boring people are ever bored.
The issue isn't what temperatures on the Earth are supposed to be. The issue is how fast the temperature is changing. Take the temperature increases that have happened over the last 100 years and are expected over the next 100 years (with BAU) and spread them out over several thousand years and they aren't that big a deal. The problem is that the temperature change is happening at a rate that outpaces the ability of natural systems to adapt.
"...Oops they caught us in another out and out lie, so we have to pretend that was never what we meant. We will return to our regularly scheduled lying as soon as practical."
And notice once again another political arm of the UN, the IPCC, once again treated as if they were really "scientists" and not just socialist activists with retreaded 'community organizing' degrees trying to use the global warming agenda to torpedo capitalism...
At this point, people should be ignoring people trying to drag politics into the science. The science is pretty well settled (particularly in its fundamentals), and pretending that most climate scientists are motivated by politics is ludicrous.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You do realize that science isn't a matter of making pronouncements and engraving them into stone, right? This is a new study with new information. It's unexpected, but that's what happens in science every now and then.
Up until now, the best guess was that Antarctic ice was diminishing, and this study challenges that.
The myth listing was to address the claims that Antarctic sea ice is extensive, so the Antarctic is icing up. That is bad reasoning, even if it turns out that the ice is increasing.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You do realize that science isn't a matter of making pronouncements and engraving them into stone, right? This is a new study with new information. It's unexpected, but that's what happens in science every now and then.
Up until now, the best guess was that Antarctic ice was diminishing, and this study challenges that.
The myth listing was to address the claims that Antarctic sea ice is extensive, so the Antarctic is icing up. That is bad reasoning, even if it turns out that the ice is increasing.
Don't tell me that, tell SkepticalScience that. They declare Antarctic ice is increasing as a 'myth'. Your discussion and reasoning that it isn't a disproof of overall warming nor sea level rise is dead on. That is to say that Antarctic ice increase is not a valid argument or reason to reject the overall conclusion from all other evidence, it even fits into existing theory. However a "Myth" is different and SkepticalScience was and is just flat wrong to have called it that. There was always conflicting evidence on what Antarctic sea ice mass was doing, but it was unequivocal that Antarctic sea-ice extent was breaking records repeatedly. This NASA finding isn't coming out of a clear blue sky or something, and to have declared such a notion a "Myth" was and is irresponsible.
Measurements by satellites show a sea level rise of over 3 mm/year since the early 1990's. Satellite measurements are largely independent of tides, regional gravity, subsiding land, etc.
Data is missing because there was a gap between when one satellite failed and the next one came online. As far as missing data from the inner part of Antarctic they rarely orbit satellites directly over the poles and if the laser altimeters they use can only look straight down then they miss the stuff near the South Pole. The microwave sounding unit satellites they use for measuring atmospheric temperatures have the same problem.
What's going to cause the problem (at least in the short term) isn't the sea level rise per se' but the storm surge the next time they get a big storm that reaches places that have never been reached before. Storm surge comes in fast.
Storm surge comes in fast.
Yes, that is true, but they should know now to expect them... However, if New Orleans is any indication, nothing will be done, and lots of people will be in a world of hurt.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
But haven't they heard???? Climate Change is PROVEN!
So says the simpleton who is unable to cope with the nuances of science.
You are right, SkepticalScience lists "Antarctica is gaining Ice" as number ten on their list of top Climate Myths. Either the crew at NASA are now foul mouthed deniers, or the blogger activists at SkepticalScience aren't as fair handed and open minded as they boast...
I think the "crew at NASA" were honestly reporting the results they found from some satellites with radar altimeters and laser altimeters. But evidence from the GRACE satellites conflicts with what they report and shows a loss of ice mass from Antarctica. The GRACE satellites measure changes in gravity so they have less issues than a satellite trying to measure the height of the ice surface. Time will undoubtedly resolve the discrepancy.
Second they (satellite temperature records) are the least adjusted.
What a laughable statement. It takes far more adjustments and manipulations to derive temperatures from satellites than it does for surface temperature measurements. Even Dr. Mears says he trusts the surface temperature measurements more than his satellite measurements.
Seems scary to consider that if, in fact, (we) may be wrong about global warming, i.e. polar ice is not doing what is forecast; then we ought to just plain stop messing with stuff. What's confusing are the conflicting data. How can we voting lay-persons make any decisions when the data are potentially invalid? Man-oh-man! Let's get it together, people. I bust my ass to be sure things are correct! How about ALL the other "qualified" reporting scientists do the same?!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.