Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

[Starving Steve]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

Let's not play games. The word ISLAND was used by BBC and the posts above to describe up to 1800 square kilometres of ice floating away. Show me the ice that is now surrounded by WATER--- not ice.


One thing I don't like is games. I like nice simple assertions: The assertion was that up to 1800 sq. km is floating-away and that the Wilkins Ice Sheet is going to disappear..... OK, simple enough, so show me.

Cheriot Island is not what we are talking about, and you know it. We are talking about ice floating away as proof of rapid global warming. We are talking about the rapid break-up of the Wilkins Ice Sheet.... SO SHOW ME.

And I am waiting... Just like with that ficticious growing ozone hole in the atmosphere around Antarctica caused by mankind's cloro-florocarbons, I am still waiting for the details. SHOW ME.

[santafe2]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

Let's not play games. The word ISLAND was used by BBC and the posts above to describe up to 1800 square kilometres of ice floating away. Show me the ice that is now surrounded by WATER--- not ice.

Sorry, the BBC are your boys and girls. None of us has control over them but they've obviously got their facts wrong. Maybe you could direct this ire at them.

One thing I don't like is games. I like nice simple assertions: The assertion was that up to 1800 sq. km is floating-away and that the Wilkins Ice Sheet is going to disappear..... OK, simple enough, so show me.

Wilkins disconnected from Charcot. The Wilkins Sound used to be solid ice and now it's more like a group of very friendly icebergs in the summer. Give it a few years and you might be able to take a swim among the ice cubes.

The floating away scenario is my fault. I tried a bit of humor when opening this up but obviously not everyone finds traveling ice sheets funny.

And sorry, no one can show melting ice when winter is approaching. You'll just have to wait until next year. But given the trend, Wilkins Sound should put on a good show and Larsen won't be more than a few years behind.

[Starving Steve]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

BBC World Television knows me because I have corresponded with them many times about their pro-Hamas and pro-Hesbollah bias in programming, also their nightly rubbish on TV about global warming. So far the only issue that BBC has paid any attention to my comments about is the speed of their ticker-tape and the speed of their program delivery in general. In recent weeks, they have slowed their pace down considerably, so now we can all at least hear what they have to say and more easily read the news on their ticker-tape.

[Guest]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

I been away for a couple of days and could have sworn I'd find at least a couple of "dismembered corpses on the field of battle" lying around in the general blood and gore on this thread. (Gore? Did sombody mention Al Gore? :eek. Where are the dismembered corpses and the traces of an unholy battle? Are you guys getting tame? This is GLOBAL WARMING! You guys are supposed to be chopping off limbs and beheading each other with swords here ferchrissake. :rolleyes:

[Guest]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

Take it easy Steve or you'll get an aneurysm.

BBC World Television knows me because I have corresponded with them many times about their pro-Hamas and pro-Hesbollah bias in programming, also their nightly rubbish on TV about global warming. So far the only issue that BBC has paid any attention to my comments about is the speed of their ticker-tape and the speed of their program delivery in general. In recent weeks, they have slowed their pace down considerably, so now we can all at least hear what they have to say and read the news on their ticker-tape.

[santafe2]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

I been away for a couple of days and could have sworn I'd find at least a couple of "dismembered corpses on the field of battle" lying around in the general blood and gore on this thread. (Gore? Did sombody mention Al Gore? :eek. Where are the dismembered corpses and the traces of an unholy battle? Are you guys getting tame? This is GLOBAL WARMING! You guys are supposed to be chopping off limbs and beheading each other with swords here ferchrissake. :rolleyes:

Luke, it's just a little bit of dismembered ice and one continent's warming I was pointing out. I was trying to focus on a particular issue and not talk and/or sell my book to much.

Starvings points with regard to the BBC are well taken. I was visiting family in London a few years ago and they turned the telly to BBC - the damn thing almost put me to sleep. I'm happy to hear they're making things up now, maybe fabricating geologic formations and the meanderings of ice flows or all of England might be asleep.

[Guest]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

I'm 100% in your camp on this question. But I flinch at the idea of getting into another tangle with Starving Steve on this.

Luke, it's just a little bit of dismembered ice and one continent's warming I was pointing out. I was trying to focus on a particular issue and not talk and/or sell my book to much.

Starvings points with regard to the BBC are well taken. I was visiting family in London a few years ago and they turned the telly to BBC - the damn thing almost put me to sleep. I'm happy to hear they're making things up now, maybe fabricating geologic formations and the meanderings of ice flows or all of England might be asleep.

[GRG55]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

Is it any wonder there seems so much confusion, concern and conflict around this issue?

Do any of our Southern Hemisphere iTulip members know if this [The Australian] is a credible publication? I googled both Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-Operative Research Centre and Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research[SCAR is the acronym; hows that for an organization trying to save the South Pole ]and spent some time snowshoeing around their sites without finding any reference to the subject ice core research [the search feature on both sites appears restricted to members].

Maybe someone more adept at this sort of thing, like Rajiv, might be able to find something to determine if this is legitimate or a well written hoax.

Antarctic ice growing, not shrinking

Greg Roberts | April 18, 2009

Article from: The Australian

ICE is expanding in much of Antarctica, contrary to the widespread public belief that global warming is melting the continental ice cap.

The results of ice-core drilling and sea ice monitoring indicate there is no large-scale melting of ice over most of Antarctica, although experts are concerned at ice losses on the continent's western coast.

Antarctica has 90 per cent of the Earth's ice and 80 per cent of its fresh water. Extensive melting of Antarctic ice sheets would be required to raise sea levels substantially, and ice is melting in parts of west Antarctica. The destabilisation of the Wilkins ice shelf generated international headlines this month.
However, the picture is very different in east Antarctica, which includes the territory claimed by Australia.

East Antarctica is four times the size of west Antarctica and parts of it are cooling. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research report prepared for last week's meeting of Antarctic Treaty nations in Washington noted the South Pole had shown "significant cooling in recent decades".

Australian Antarctic Division glaciology program head Ian Allison said sea ice losses in west Antarctica over the past 30 years had been more than offset by increases in the Ross Sea region, just one sector of east Antarctica.

"Sea ice conditions have remained stable in Antarctica generally," Dr Allison said.

The melting of sea ice -- fast ice and pack ice -- does not cause sea levels to rise because the ice is in the water. Sea levels may rise with losses from freshwater ice sheets on the polar caps. In Antarctica, these losses are in the form of icebergs calved from ice shelves formed by glacial movements on the mainland.

Last week, federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett said experts predicted sea level rises of up to 6m from Antarctic melting by 2100, but the worst case scenario foreshadowed by the SCAR report was a 1.25m rise.

Mr Garrett insisted global warming was causing ice losses throughout Antarctica. "I don't think there's any doubt it is contributing to what we've seen both on the Wilkins shelf and more generally in Antarctica," he said.

Dr Allison said there was not any evidence of significant change in the mass of ice shelves in east Antarctica nor any indication that its ice cap was melting. "The only significant calvings in Antarctica have been in the west," he said. And he cautioned that calvings of the magnitude seen recently in west Antarctica might not be unusual.

"Ice shelves in general have episodic carvings and there can be large icebergs breaking off -- I'm talking 100km or 200km long -- every 10 or 20 or 50 years."

Ice core drilling in the fast ice off Australia's Davis Station in East Antarctica by the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-Operative Research Centre shows that last year, the ice had a maximum thickness of 1.89m, its densest in 10 years. The average thickness of the ice at Davis since the 1950s is 1.67m.

A paper to be published soon by the British Antarctic Survey in the journal Geophysical Research Letters is expected to confirm that over the past 30 years, the area of sea ice around the continent has expanded.

[santafe2]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

Is it any wonder there seems so much confusion, concern and conflict around this issue?

Do any of our Southern Hemisphere iTulip members know if this [The Australian] is a credible publication? I googled both Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-Operative Research Centre and Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research[SCAR is the acronym; hows that for an organization trying to save the South Pole ]and spent some time snowshoeing around their sites without finding any reference to the subject ice core research [the search feature on both sites appears restricted to members].

Thanks for posting GRG. The assertions in the article and the funding for the "The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research" should be better understood. I've found the report which was apparently the basis for parts of the article here:

http://www.scar.org/publications/bul...ulletin170.pdf

And their publications are all here as pdfs:

http://www.scar.org/publications/bulletins/

That this article was published in a Murdoch owned paper will certainly leave the article open to criticism from many Americans who are familiar with his Fox network. But, the angle I look for with Murdoch is this: Which side of this issue will make him the most money?

[Guest]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

There you go Santafe2, besmirching Rupert Murdoch's good name.

Thanks for posting GRG. The assertions in the article and the funding for the "The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research" should be better understood. I've found the report which was apparently the basis for parts of the article here:

http://www.scar.org/publications/bul...ulletin170.pdf

And their publications are all here as pdfs:

http://www.scar.org/publications/bulletins/

That this article was published in a Murdoch owned paper will certainly leave the article open to criticism from many Americans who are familiar with his Fox network. But, the angle I look for with Murdoch is this: Which side of this issue will make him the most money?

[santafe2]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

There you go Santafe2, besmirching Rupert Murdoch's good name.

Come on Luke, really?!? Besmirch? Sullying maybe but hardly besmirching! And thanks for including the Reaganesque...There you go...I'm duly chastised.

[GRG55]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

Come on Luke, really?!? Besmirch? Sullying maybe but hardly besmirching! And thanks for including the Reaganesque...There you go...I'm duly chastised.

Just for historical accuracy I believe it should have been "There you go again"...

[Starving Steve]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

How come BBC won't cover this story about more ice now than in decades in Antarctica? Why won't BBC say that any losses at the Wilkins Ice Sheet are more than replaced by ice gains in Eastern Antarctica? How come BBC won't cover the all-time daily low temperature this year set on Maui in Hawaii? How come BBC refused to cover the winter driving conditions above 8000 feet on the Island of Hawaii this year??????? How come BBC isn't commenting upon the record cold and record snowpack in the Red River Valley of North Dakota, Minnesota, and Manitoba? Why wasn't Victoria's heavy snowpack covered by BBC this past winter? Why isn't the BBC commenting upon re-glaciation on Mt. Robsin and Mt. Shasta along the West Coast? Why isn't BBC commenting upon New York City's tobogganing weather this past winter or even London's unusually cold winter weather this year?

This scam with global warming reminds me of the scam with the ozone hole in the Southern Hemisphere in the 1990s.... And the more we started looking for the evidence of such a hole really existing, the more the ozone hole would move......Finally the ozone hole vanished, not to have re-appeared since.

The eco-frauds are well-organized in the universities. Along with the Keynsian economists, they too should be heckled.

[Guest]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

Starving Steve on Global Warming - like a tireless pneumatic jackhammer making brisk work busting up concrete. Bratatatatatatatat! Bratatatatatatatat! I love it. I believe in global warming but this guy has me cracking a grin every time he goes into a sour rant about "the potheads". :p

[santafe2]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

The eco-frauds are well-organized in the universities. Along with the Keynsian economists, they too should be heckled.

Your heckling here is noted but I have to say I prefer it when you're more thoughtful. Although we may not agree on the likely outcome of this debate, I've read much better posts from you that completely avoid name calling and the 'kitchen sink' approach to cementing your argument.

Take the time to read the source SCAR documents and don't parrot the Murdoch press assertion as if it were truth. Bring something new to the table. Help us all think this thing through. For all we know, there may be a scientist with time on the ground in Antarctica reading this thread. iTulip is like that. All of us need to know more about Antartica, let's not limit our opportunities by railing at each other as if we know the outcome 100 years from now.

To encourage you to study this issue here's a gimme: It took me 10 minutes to find a reference in the 2008 SCAR annual report to their concern that their methodologies for measuring sea ice extinction were incomplete. And their fear? The IPCC is using their incomplete conclusions to form policy. These scientists want another 5-10 years to study and develop models but the politicians are moving forward.

So stoke up your nuclear reactor, light your pipe and cruise the net until you find some seminal study that proves global climate change is a complete tempest in a teapot. My kids will thank you for it, they hate my prognosis.