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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!
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.
This is only counterintuitive to people who subscribe to the Church of Alarmism. To anybody paying attention, it's natural and expected. The Earth is naturally habitable. Despite massive traumatic perturbations over the course of the past several billion years, including cometary impacts and continental drift that has rearranged the Earth and its oceans again and again, Earth still supports life. It is not going to become Venus. It is not going to become Mars. It will remain livable. Is it always going to be perfectly comfortable for every animal and every person everywhere? Obviously not. It never has been that. But of all the things we have seen in the fossil record, a warmer Earth is the least of the threats. Life likes warmth, and Earth can be warmer, but doesn't get too warm, even with massive fluctuations in atmospheric carbon. What life on Earth fears, and what we as humans should fear to the exclusion of all else, is the return of the ice. Our current population can not live in an Ice Age. We as a species very nearly didn't make it through one Ice Age already. Ice is a threat. Warmth is not. Earth tends toward a kind of equilibrium. It's chaotic, but it's an equilibrium. If it wasn't and didn't, one of the astronomical mishaps of the ancient past would have pushed it into uninhabitability already.
The only things that will end life on Earth will be astronomical in nature. The cooling and congealing of Earth's core, and the subsequent collapse of the magnetic field, would eventually end life on Earth. The expansion of the Sun into a red giant will eventually end life on Earth, regardless of all other eventualities. But short of astronomical scale disasters, life on Earth will continue.
Can we take steps to keep things comfortable for us? Yes, obviously, because we have, and in much of the world, laws in place and enforced see to it that rivers no longer catch fire, forests are not willfully obliterated in their entirety, and large wild animals are not hunted to extinction. But let's face it, these are comfort measures, not habitability requirements. Flaming rivers eventually go out, forests eventually regrow, and wild animal populations expand everywhere humans are not, even in the face of pockets of outrageous radiation.
In the particular case of carbon, the last time all of the carbon that human activity is currently liberating was active in the biosphere, life on Earth was incredibly fecund and prolific. Megafauna walked the Earth for millions of years, millions of years, with all of that carbon circulating, and by all accounts, life was easy everywhere. This is not something to fear. Ice is. So don't be too happy about growing ice in the Antarctic.
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.
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.
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.
Weren't you among those, "threatening" to emigrate to Canada, ;)
No I weren't. I don't live in the states
The rest of your rant only shows two things: you are an idiot and I hope if you live according to your attitude one will take care about you.
The other thing is: the idiots modding you up, are the same kind as you are.
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"?
I did not say that, idiot.
It is not â" good people are supposed to do it themselves, government spending tax-monies on it is not benevolence.
Nevertheless: yes it is Or do you expect me to run around and fix the fact that capitalism does not work? I don't have enough money to help everyone, and if I would help as many as I can I have no time to make money to help anyone.
As I pointed out in another post where you angried out, the government has three prime objectives:
a) house its citizens
b) cloth its citizens
c) feed its citizens
In that order.
And on top of that: take care of their education.
If you beleive otherwise: you are not a civilized being but a wild animal and don't deserve to live in the protection of a society.
It is left as an excercise to you to figure who said this. (But I guess google wont help much ;) ... as a hint, one of those I remember saying that lived 3300 years ago.)
And as a final word: I don't get why you americans always use 'libertian' and 'socialist' etc. as if they where swear words.
The names of politicians you mention: sorry, never heard about them ;)
You seem to hate a lot of people. I guess it is superflouvious to ask: who is your mother?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.