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.
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!
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.