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Post by StuartG on Feb 12, 2012 13:29:22 GMT 1
With thanks to Howard Nichols who commented, "CO2 is a vital nutrient, crucial to all life on Earth, not a pollutant! And where's the data from 2011? It's satellite data, it's not like it would take more than a hour to see that it also supports your politically-generated "theory", or that it doesn't... CO2 is approximately only 0.039% of the atmosphere. That's it. While water vapor, also a "greenhouse" gas, composes up to 4%. Anyone who's ever been to the tropics knows it's water vapor that holds all the heat. Weathermen report humidity and not CO2 levels for a reason. What's next, a global tax on teapots?" www.space.com/14511-ice-caps-glaciers-melt-satellite.htmlps. www.ehow.com/info_10010711_colonial-teapot-1763-1788.html |
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Post by nickrr on Feb 12, 2012 16:40:58 GMT 1
I don't believe that this is correct. It ties in with the point I made earlier about where you get the information from. It may have appeared this way in the general media but that's because you will only get a simplified (and often distorted) view of any science from this source. Climate scientists have never claimed that CO2 is the only driver of climate change, in the past or now.
Again, incorrect. See above.
This exactly shows my point. The DT's representation of this report has virtually nothing to do with what it actually says. In fact most of the article is the usual Delingpole politically inspired drivel.
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Post by StuartG on Feb 12, 2012 20:59:08 GMT 1
We can argue CO2 all day, it is now found that CO2 also has a cooling effect as well, but to go back to glaciers. This has been argued before, the data is not good enough, for various reasons, to really say that glaciers are melting or indeed tha sea levels are rising. One of the many reasons why it is difficult to measure the rise or fall of anything on the Earth's surface, is the difficulty to decide the datum from which to measure. In the case of satellites the centre of the Earth needs to be known. The centre keeps moving and not at a constant rate so there is a variability in the results. Here is the previous entry ... radio4scienceboards.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=gotopost&board=witter&thread=116&post=12431en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesopauseas it states "Not to be confused with menopause." "The mesopause is the temperature minimum at the boundary between the mesosphere and the thermosphere atmospheric regions. Due to the lack of solar heating and very strong radiative cooling from carbon dioxide, the mesopause is the coldest place on Earth with temperatures as low as -100°C (-146°F or 173 K)." "In recent years the mesopause has also been the focus for studies on global climate change associated with increases in CO2. Unlike the troposphere, where greenhouse gases result in the atmosphere heating up, increased CO2 in the mesosphere acts to cool the atmosphere due to increased radiative emission by CO2. This results in a measurable effect - the mesopause should become cooler with increased CO2. Observations do show a decrease of temperature of the mesopause, though the magnitude of this decrease varies and is subject to further study." That's assuming that CO2 has an effect and is not just an 'indicator'. |
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Post by marchesarosa on Apr 3, 2012 20:39:10 GMT 1
I read this post the other day which postulates a description/explanation of the transition from interglacial (our beloved Holocene) to glacial (that nasty ice-age looming round the corner).
Here it is from Climate Etc.
R. Gates | April 3, 2012 at 2:13 am
I have spent a fair amount of time living with, hiking on, digging in, sleeping on, sleeping under, shoveling, cursing, blessing, and generally still amazed by snow. I have another fair amount of time studying it, and while I may or may not know something about something, I do know that it takes energy to move moisture from the ocean to the land, and the more energy there is the more that can be moved.
In the winter this moisture will often fall as snow, but if there is more energy (i.e. heat) around in the summer that snow will melt. During interglacials, you may get 5 meters of snow that falls in the winter, but all 5 melt in the summer. During periods of glacial advance, [drier and cooler] only 3 meters of snow may fall in the winter, but only 2 will melt in the summer, and thus the glacier grows.
-------
Thanks, R. Gates
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Post by marchesarosa on Apr 5, 2012 20:55:47 GMT 1
This is about a melting ice-cap rather than a glacier, but you'll get the idea!  --------- by David Middleton wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/05/more-glacial-junk-science-journalism/#more-32205A recent publication by a team from the Technical University of Delft (NL) & JPL found that the Greenland ice sheet was melting at half the rate previously thought.
They estimate that the Greenland ice sheet is losing ~230 gigatonnes (Gt) of ice per year. One Gt of water has a volume of 1 cubic km (km^3). 1 Gt of ice has a larger volume than 1 Gt of water… But, for the purpose of this exercise, we’ll assume 1 Gt of ice has a volume of 1 km^3.
If 1 Gt of ice has a volume of 1 km^3 and the current volume of the Greenland ice sheet is ~5 million km^3 and Greenland continues to melt at a rate of 230 km^3/yr over the next 90 years… the Greenland ice sheet will lose a bit more than 0.4% of its ice volume.
~230 gigatonnes (Gt) of ice per year equates to about 0.005% of ice mass loss per year. At the current rate, it would take 1,000 years for the Greenland Ice Sheet to lose 5% of its volume.
The Earth’s climate was at least 2°C warmer during the Holocene Climatic Optimum and the Greenland Ice Sheet did not melt, disappear or destabilise…
There is no scientific evidence to back up the assertion of a “disappearing Greenland Ice Sheet". For a detailed explanation as to why the Greenland ice sheet cannot collapse under any AGW scenario, see Ollier & Pain, 2009 icecap.us/images/uploads/OllierPaine-NoIceSheetCollapse-AIGNewsAug.2009.pdf |
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Post by marchesarosa on Apr 6, 2012 7:51:31 GMT 1
Antarctica shed a 208-mile-long berg in 1956One of the largest known Antarctic icebergs broke off in 1956. Julie Palis and Guy Guthridge of the National Science Foundation and Lyn Lay, the librarian at Byrd Polar Research Center, found an article about it in the Polar Times, vol. 43, page 18. Here is the entire text: A record iceberg seen in Antarctic
"Little America V, Antarctica, Nov. 17- The U.S.S. Glacier, the Navy's most powerful icebreaker, has sighted an iceberg more than twice the size of Connecticut.
"The berg was sighted by the Glacier early this week about 150 miles west of Scott Island. The ship reported it was 60 miles wide and 208 miles long- or more than 12,000 square miles, as against Connecticut's 5,009.
"According to the United States Navy sailing directions for Antarctica, the largest berg hitherto reported was that seen Jan. 7, 1927, off Clarence Island by the Norwegian whale catcher Obb I. The ship said it was 130 feet high and roughly 100 miles long. Both these gargantuan icebergs were of the tabular variety typical of Antarctica. This type consists of a section of continental ice sheet that has pushed out a great distance over the sea before breaking off – a situation that does not arise in the Arctic. The tabular berg has a flat top and is of uniform height, drawing roughly 700 feet of water.
"It was the "calving" that is, breaking off, of such an immense wafer of ice at the Bay of Whales sometime between 1948 and 1955 that deprived the original Little America of its harbor. Hence this camp, built early this year, had to be set up on Kainan Bay, thrity-five miles to the east."www.usatoday.com/weather/resources/coldscience/2005-01-20-1956-antarctic-iceberg_x.htm------------ The ongoing disintegration of the Larsen ice shelves today is being attributed to global warming. Can this be entirely true? What is the period of comparison? Where is the history of observation? Why is information like that above ignored? Why are modern commentators so ignorant of extant information from a mere 60-70 years ago?
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Post by marchesarosa on Apr 6, 2012 8:20:43 GMT 1
Here's another blast from the past that might throw a little doubt on the current alarmism about Antarctic ice. ------------- 5/17/2005 Icebergs carried away Antarctic historyBy Jack Williams, USATODAY.com The base camp for Roald Amundsen's successful journey to the South Pole in 1911-12 and the five Little America camps set up by U.S. Navy Admiral Richard Byrd from 1929 to the mid-1950s were carried out to sea by huge Antarctic icebergs in the 1960s. These historic camps were located near the eastern end of the huge iceberg that broke away from the Ross Ice Shelf in March 2000. At least they were at the latitude and longitude of the eastern end of the iceberg, but the ice that broke off was not the same ice that Amundsen and Byrd built their bases on.The last people to see Amundsen’s Framheim base (named after his ship, the Fram) were Amundsen and his party when they left in 1912 after the successful Pole trip. When Byrd and his party built the Little America I base in the same area in January 1929, they could find no sign of Framheim, but it was probably buried under snow that had fallen over the years, says Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. Sometime, in the 1960s “a berg or a couple of bergs calved off from the same area and carried all that history away,” Scambos says. Everything that had been left in Framheim and the five Little America camps “is now somewhere on the floor of the ocean and there’s no way to know where it is ” because icebergs weren’t tracked until the late 1970s. Both Amundsen and members of Byrd parties wrote about concerns in the camps that the ice they were on could fall into the sea.The location of Framheim and the Little America camps shows that the northern end of the Ross Ice Shelf in this area in 2000 was close to where it was in 1912 and from 1929 into the 1950s. www.usatoday.com/weather/resources/coldscience/aframheim.htm |
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Post by marchesarosa on Apr 6, 2012 8:59:07 GMT 1
"It may be worth noting that the Larsen B iceshelf is 2,750km from the South Pole. Transpose that to the northern hemisphere and that places it fair square in the middle of Alaska and Iceland, Southern Greenland and well inside Canada, Norway, Russia, Finland and Sweden or in the Bering Sea, take your pick."Thanks to old44 for that! Ice shelves break mechanically not by melting.Thanks to Disko Troop for that! wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/05/more-crack-in-the-antarctic/#comment-946920
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Post by marchesarosa on Apr 6, 2012 10:51:37 GMT 1
Caleb says: April 6, 2012 at 2:28 am On the far side of the continent the Amery Ice Shelf has been expanding for at least sixty years. I suppose you could use it as proof Global Cooling is occurring, and we are all going to freeze. However at some point it will break off, at which point we can use it as proof Global Warming is occurring, and we all are going to fry.
On the other hand, maybe we could just calm down. But would that get us grant money?wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/05/more-crack-in-the-antarctic/#comment-947034 |
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Post by marchesarosa on Apr 7, 2012 17:20:39 GMT 1
George E. Smith; says: April 6, 2012 at 11:05 am Well one shouldn’t need to point out that the Antarctic Peninsula is OUTSIDE the Antarctic circle; so the sun shines there EVERY DAY. One also shouldn’t need to point out that the Antarctic Peninsula, has the entire Pacific Ocean on the West side of it, and the entire Atlantic Ocean on the East side of, and those oceans slosh back and forth, in what are known as TIDES, on average, about twice EVERY day. TIDES are typically characterized (on average) by the RISING and FALLING of SEA LEVELS, and since ice floats on sea water, this twice daily lifting and dropping of those ice shelves, will (on average) result in severe stretching stresses on both the top and bottom surfaces of those ice shelves. Try doing that twice a day to your favorite concrete road bridge and see what happens over time. There are OTHER satellite pictures, that show sections of those shelves that collapsed around 50 years ago, and have now grown back, but at a lower altitude, since they are lacking 50 years of snow deposition, that the surrounding areas have received. So the breaking of floating ice shelves, that are in sunshine every day, and stressed daily is not a mystery. ------------ Thank you George eSmith for that account wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/05/more-crack-in-the-antarctic/#comment-947434 |
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Post by marchesarosa on Apr 16, 2012 19:56:37 GMT 1
In an article titled, “Himalayan glaciers actually GAINING ice, space scans show an inconvenient truth” Lewis Page of the Register writes: The study was carried out by comparing two sets of space data, the first gathered by instruments aboard the space shuttle Endeavour in 2000 and the second by the French SPOT5 satellite in 2008. The results were unequivocal. Across the targeted 5,615km2 region of the Karakorum mountains lying on the Chinese border with India and Pakistan, the glaciers had gained substantial amounts of mass by the time the second survey was carried out. Satellite pictures had previously shown the glaciers there spreading to cover more area, but some climate scientists had argued that they might nonetheless be losing ice by becoming thinner: this has now been disproven. “This is a solid, high-grade measurement,” glaciologist Graham Cogley commented, reviewing the paper published in Nature Geoscience. The study was led by Julie Gardelle of Grenoble uni in France. more here www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo1450.html |
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Post by marchesarosa on Apr 18, 2012 16:35:14 GMT 1
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Post by marchesarosa on May 10, 2012 18:11:59 GMT 1
Science 4 May 2012: Vol. 336 no. 6081 pp. 576-578 DOI: 10.1126/science.1219985  Lead author Twila Moon finds that claims of rapid Greenland glacier acceleration are massively overstated. 21st-Century Evolution of Greenland Outlet Glacier VelocitiesT. Moon, I. Joughin, B. Smith, I. Howat + Author Affiliations Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA. Polar Science Center, Applied Physics Lab, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98105, USA. School of Earth Sciences, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA. Byrd Polar Research Center, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA. To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: twilap@uw.edu ABSTRACT Earlier observations on several of Greenland’s outlet glaciers, starting near the turn of the 21st century, indicated rapid (annual-scale) and large (>100%) increases in glacier velocity. Combining data from several satellites, we produce a decade-long (2000 to 2010) record documenting the ongoing velocity evolution of nearly all (200+) of Greenland’s major outlet glaciers, revealing complex spatial and temporal patterns. Changes on fast-flow marine-terminating glaciers contrast with steady velocities on ice-shelf–terminating glaciers and slow speeds on land-terminating glaciers. Regionally, glaciers in the northwest accelerated steadily, with more variability in the southeast and relatively steady flow elsewhere. Intraregional variability shows a complex response to regional and local forcing. Observed acceleration indicates that sea level rise from Greenland may fall well below proposed upper bounds. www.sciencemag.org/content/336/6081/576.abstractHere is the complete concluding paragraph of the Moon et al. study:
Finally, our observations have implications for recent work on sea level rise. Earlier research used a kinematic approach to estimate upper bounds of 0.8 to 2.0 m for 21st-century sea level rise. In Greenland, this work assumed ice-sheet–wide doubling of glacier speeds (low-end scenario) or an order of magnitude increase in speeds (high-end scenario) from 2000 to 2010. Our wide sampling of actual 2000 to 2010 changes shows that glacier acceleration across the ice sheet remains far below these estimates, suggesting that sea level rise associated with Greenland glacier dynamics remains well below the low-end scenario (9.3 cm by 2100) at present. Continued acceleration, however, may cause sea level rise to approach the low-end limit by this century’s end. Our sampling of a large population of glaciers, many of which have sustained considerable thinning and retreat, suggests little potential for the type of widespread extreme (i.e., order of magnitude) acceleration represented in the high-end scenario (46.7 cm by 2100). Our result is consistent with findings from recent numerical flow models.Wow. The current rate of glacier flow is “far below” even low end projections of the increased flow rate between 2000 and 2010 and that there is “little potential” in reaching the high end scenario for the rate of flow. It is worth highlighting again in the low end scenario, Greenland’s glacier contributed 9.3 cm ( 3.7 in.) of total sea level rise by 2100 and in the high end scenario they were projected to contribute 46.7 cm (18.4 in). more from Pat Michaels here www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2012/05/09/no-sea-level-rise-catastrophe/ |
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Post by marchesarosa on May 17, 2012 9:03:57 GMT 1
New paper using RADARSAT data: Antarctic ice shelves slowed down – “…have not been changed in a significant way in the past 12 years”Posted on May 17, 2012 by Anthony Watts wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/17/new-paper-using-radarsat-data-antarctic-ice-shelves-slowed-down-have-not-been-changed-in-a-significant-way-in-the-past-12-years/#commentsA new paper published May 15th in the the journal The Cryosphere utilizes 12 years worth of RADARSAT data to determine the rate at which some well known ice shelves in Antarctica have been moving and changing, and the answer is: “not much”. In fact it appears there has been a slowing down. First a map of Antarctica and the most worrisome Ross Ice Shelf (marked by the red x) is in order:  If you follow the alarmosphere and MSM related to the Ross Ice Shelf and others, you get these kinds of stories: West Antarctic ice sheet collapse even more catastrophic for U.S. coasts
West Antarctic ice shelf – a nudge and a push from collapse?
Antarctic ice shelves ‘tearing apart’, says study
Antarctic Ice Shelf Disintegration Underscores a Warming WorldClearly, there’s lots of gloom and doom surrounding Antarctic ice shelves for the worry that they’ll cause catastrophic sea level rise if they cut loose. This study Twelve years of ice velocity change in Antarctica observed by RADARSAT-1 and -2 satellite radar interferometry (Full paper here) with radar data seems to indicate there not much change in the past 12 years, the authors write: Overall, however, the observed changes have little impact on the mass balance of the region. We therefore conclude that in contrast with their counterparts in the Amundsen and Bellingshausen Seas (Rignot et al., 2008) the ice streams and ice shelves in the broad region under investigation herein have not been changed in a significant way in the past 12 yr, which suggests that the ice dynamics of the entire region does not have a strong impact on the mass budget of the Antarctic continent.That’s quite a statement compared to the news headlines. To paraphrase NSIDC’s Dr. Mark Serreze famous “ The Arctic is screaming” quote, I suggest that from the perspective of the data presented in this paper, I’ll say “The Antarctic is snoring”. more..... www.the-cryosphere-discuss.net/6/1715/2012/tcd-6-1715-2012.pdf |
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Post by marchesarosa on Jun 6, 2012 16:36:23 GMT 1
www.clim-past.net/8/403/2012/cp-8-403-2012.htmlLittle Ice Age advance and retreat of Glaciar Jorge Montt, Chilean PatagoniaA. Rivera1,2, M. Koppes3, C. Bravo1, and J. C. Aravena4 1Centro de Estudios Científicos (CECS), Valdivia, Chile 2Departamento de Geografía, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile 3Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada 4Centro de Estudios del Cuaternario Fuego-Patagonia y Antártica (Fundación CEQUA) Conicyt Regional R07C1002., Punta Arenas, Chile Abstract. Glaciar Jorge Montt (48°20' S/73°30' W), one of the main tidewater glaciers of the Southern Patagonian Icefield (SPI), has experienced the greatest terminal retreat observed in Patagonia during the past century, with a recession of 19.5 km between 1898 and 2011. This retreat has revealed trees laying subglacially until 2003. These trees were dated using radiocarbon, yielding burial ages between 460 and 250 cal yrs BP. The presence of old growth forest during those dates indicates that Glaciar Jorge Montt was upvalley of its present position before the commonly recognized Little Ice Age (LIA) period in Patagonia. The post-LIA retreat was most likely triggered by climatically induced changes during the 20th century; however, Glaciar Jorge Montt has responded more dramatically than its neighbours. The retreat of Jorge Montt opened a 19.5 km long fjord since 1898, which reaches depths in excess of 390 m. The bathymetry is well correlated with glacier retreat rates, suggesting that dynamic responses of the glacier are at least partially connected to near buoyancy conditions at the ice front, resulting in high calving fluxes, accelerating thinning rates and rapid ice velocities.
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