Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

[Chris Coles]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

It is my understanding that the Eastern side of Antarctica is indeed cooling slightly. However, what is described as the Western side is well documented as having lost all its ice in the past. Secondly, ice melting is not expected to be the main mechanism setting off a sudden rise in sea levels. It was Scientific American that has opened that debate with a scenario that relates to the idea of the ice sliding into the sea from land causing anything between 20 and 170 foot sudden rise in sea levels.

From the February 2008 Scientific American Magazine | 9 comments
Unquiet Ice Speaks Volumes on Global Warming

Abundant liquid water newly discovered underneath the world's great ice sheets could intensify the destabilizing effects of global warming on the sheets. Then, even without melting, the sheets may slide into the sea and raise sea level catastrophically

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-unquiet-ice

[Guinnesstime]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

Here is something cool to look at.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal



I remember my college physics (astronomy) prof told our class one time....

(paraphrase) Humans are small specks of s#%@ on the a@# of the world. The sun hiccups explosions that fry the earth in a heartbeat and yet with all our bombs we might be lucky to leave a temporary pockmark. The earth itself can wipe things out in one day that takes us years to build. Yet will all these facts in our face we are still so self righteous and indignant to think otherwise. The moral to my speech? Well class no matter what we would like to think we are all just along for the ride.....

[Diarmuid]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

I saw this article but have not the time or to be honest the drive at the moment to further investigate the claims made here maybe some more intrepid itulippers might be more inclined to do so.... interesting none the less

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/1...revious-years/

The Antarctic Wilkins Ice Shelf Collapse: Media recycles photos and storylines from previous years

17 04 2009 Those masters of disaster are at it again, and it appears our friendly scientists at that National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) help this story along each year.
Thanks to WUWT reader Ron de Haan who spotted this on:
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarmin...nsIceShelf.htm
Note the dates for these two stories are a year apart, but use the same photo.
click for a full sized image

It seems that not only is the photography recycled, so is the storyline. It seems to happen every year, about this time. Note the photos show shear failure and cracks, not melted ice. Shear failure is mostly mechanical-stress related, though ice does tend to be more brittle at colder temperatures.
National Geographic reported this story headline last year, March 25th 2008
PHOTO IN THE NEWS: Giant Antarctic Ice Shelf Collapses
click for a larger image

Don’t let the date in the upper right fool you, thats just an automatic “today’s date” javascript element found in many webpages.
From the Nat Geo story:

“[It's] an event we don’t get to see very often,” Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, said in a press statement.

Now, how is it that an ice shelf breaks up in the spring of 2008 and again in the spring of 2009 and it’s “not very often”? Hmmm.

It seems NSIDC’s Ted Scambos gets around. Doing a Google search for

Wilkins ice shelf + “Ted Scambos”

yields about 4,930 results. Yep, he sure gets the word out every year.
Ted Scambos said something similar in 1999:

“On the southwest side of the peninsula, the Wilkins ice shelf retreated nearly 1,100 square kilometers in early March of last year [1998], said Scambos. … Within a few years, much of the Wilkins ice shelf will likely be gone” [http://www.heatisonline.org/contents...es&Cache=False].

But, as can be seen from the following January 1996 and March 2008 images, there has been hardly any change in a decade. Look at the photos below from the appinsys web site:

But wait, there’s more examples of that “not very often” Wilkins ice shelf breakup, again from the appinsys web site:

As the following historical satellite images of the Wilkins Ice Shelf show, the disintegration / re-growth is an annual event (winter ice re-growth season; summer melt season).

Wilkins Ice Shelf Dec 1993

Wilkins disintegration in Feb 1994

Wilkins in Oct 2003, on the mend

Wilkins in Mar 2004 - breaking up again

Wilkins in Nov 2008 - icing up

Wilkins in Feb 2009 - uh oh!

But we just know warming is involved, NSIDC says so:
The MSNBC 2008 article reports on a NSIDC article which states:

“NSIDC Lead Scientist Ted Scambos, who first spotted the disintegration in March, said, “We believe the Wilkins has been in place for at least a few hundred years. But warm air and exposure to ocean waves are causing a break-up.”

The closest station to the Wilkins Ice Shelf in the NOAA Global Historical Climate Network database is Rothera Point. The following figure shows the historical data for Rothera Point, with monthly temperatures in blue and the annual January temperature in red. Summer (Dec – Mar) temperatures have not increased – the 2000s January temperatures are similar to the 1940s (the oldest data available). So why does NSIDC’s Scambos blame it on air temperatures?

[http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarmin...MR70089062000x]
The appinsys article goes on to talk about ocean currents and sea surface temperatures being a contributor, and it is worth the read. See it here.
The real question is, how often are we going to see the Wilkins Ice Shelf be a lead news story as poster child for “global warming” to illustrate ice loss in Antarctica that is actually growing.
I guess as long as we have NSIDC’s Ted Scambos to help the media, it will be “something we get to see fairly often”.

[Diarmuid]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

Hey T these are some of the Alex Chi like sites I used for information for comments from my previous post

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2...larcycle24.htm

http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/Sola...nd_October.pdf

Hi T still waiting on you to get back on your original comment - think it would be a good idea to do your your own due diligence before lambasting others for their supposed lack there of

[jandkmeyer]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

McGurme: Game, Set, Match. Nice work. Your arguments almost exactly parallel those of Alex Filippenko (Berkley Astronomer and fellow cautious scientist)

Just some points for others:

- Hanson (perhaps the leading global warming spokesman) advocates 4th gen nuclear power plants and Thorium reactors

- Other physicists here in Boulder do not because they believe solar can advance so fast as to be cheaper by the time nukes come on line. Remember NREL (and Rocky Flats) is just down the road.

- East Antarctic ice is indeed growing - the climate models predicted it back in 2005. (chalk up one for the modelers!) In fact it is warming, and whereas before it was too cold to snow (much) there the warming has increased the snowfall so much that it is offsetting some of the melting in Greenland and so offsetting the rise in the oceans - for now.

- biofuels - we tried that back in 15th/16th century and deforested all of Europe with a much smaller population and much smaller energy use per person. That's when Britain started digging coal.

Me? USAF - Retired and former DARPA program manager

[BadJuju]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

- biofuels - we tried that back in 15th/16th century and deforested all of Europe with a much smaller population and much smaller energy use per person. That's when Britain started digging coal.

Algae would not require deforestation. =3

[jandkmeyer]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

We'll have to see where the algae thing takes us. It is after all just photosynthesis and comparing algae growth to the millions of years worth of photosysthesis it took to create fossil fuels is, well, incomparable. It'll take a much more efficient society to run on "real-time" photosynthesis whether harvesting the sun's energy with bio or manmade PV than it does now to run on fossil photosynthesis.

If you plan to grow in and harvest from the oceans then that is another environmental can of worms.

I'm not a "doomer" like Kunstler. I think an efficient industrialized society is our future. Unfortunately, we won't tackle global warming until they are ankle deep in ocean water in Miami so we'll have to mobilize with a tech solution when the time comes. That's because of the political/economic crisis we mostly talk about at ITulip. Too bad, because the earth provides so much value for free and we are wasting it. By then of course we'll be following the Chinese lead.

[Diarmuid]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

McGurme: Game, Set, Match. Nice work. Your arguments almost exactly parallel those of Alex Filippenko (Berkley Astronomer and fellow cautious scientist)

Just some points for others:

- Hanson (perhaps the leading global warming spokesman) advocates 4th gen nuclear power plants and Thorium reactors

- Other physicists here in Boulder do not because they believe solar can advance so fast as to be cheaper by the time nukes come on line. Remember NREL (and Rocky Flats) is just down the road.

- East Antarctic ice is indeed growing - the climate models predicted it back in 2005. (chalk up one for the modelers!) In fact it is warming, and whereas before it was too cold to snow (much) there the warming has increased the snowfall so much that it is offsetting some of the melting in Greenland and so offsetting the rise in the oceans - for now.

- biofuels - we tried that back in 15th/16th century and deforested all of Europe with a much smaller population and much smaller energy use per person. That's when Britain started digging coal.

Me? USAF - Retired and former DARPA program manager

I posted this memo in another thread but I think it is just as relevant to this thread I think whether you believe in global warming attributed to CO2 emissions or not I pose the question do you think the solution proposed will further advance emissions reduction (considering the current lack of nuclear power (& lead time associated with their construction) and the current inefficiencies in wind, solar, tidal etc of which the carbon trading will do nothing to address or will it advance some of the arguments in the memo posted below?

Extract

In 1991, Larry Summers signed a memo when he was vice president and chief economist of the World Bank concerning the handling of pollution in less wealthy lands. When an excerpt of the memo was leaked, more than a few people became upset. Summers initially took responsibility for the memo but claimed it was satirical. Later, blame for writing the memo was taken by aide Lant Pritchett. Pritichett went on to lecture at the Harvard Kennedy School and Summers went on to be president of Harvard.

If the memo was in fact intended to be humorous, whoever wrote it didn't understand that humor used against the poor and defenseless is not satire but ridicule and bigotry. The fact that Summers thought it funny should disqualify him from any government position.

The excerpt:

'Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:

1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I've always though that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.

3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.

The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.

While Summers and Pritchett survived the memo incident, the Brazilian secretary of the environment was not as fortunate. He was fired after writing to Summers:"Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane ... Your thoughts [provide] a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional 'economists' concerning the nature of the world we live in ... If the World Bank keeps you as vice president it will lose all credibility.

[we_are_toast]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

I guess as long as we have NSIDC’s Ted Scambos to help the media, it will be “something we get to see fairly often”.

Yep, when all your "facts" are out of context distortions, quotes from wingnut web sites, and photos you have no understanding of, you might as well stoop to character assassination.

wattsupwiththat.com HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! A real right wingnut misinformation center that Limbaugh is proud of.

Ted Scambos is one of the worlds leading Antarctic researchers and has a long list of distinguished publications in scientific peer reviewed journals. When I tell him of this posting he will get a good laugh and will be proud to know that his research is having such an impact that the wingnuts have to resort to character assassination because their ridiculous attempts to lie to the public have become embarrassingly silly.

[Diarmuid]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

Yep, when all your "facts" are out of context distortions, quotes from wingnut web sites, and photos you have no understanding of, you might as well stoop to character assassination.

wattsupwiththat.com HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! A real right wingnut misinformation center that Limbaugh is proud of.

Ted Scambos is one of the worlds leading Antarctic researchers and has a long list of distinguished publications in scientific peer reviewed journals. When I tell him of this posting he will get a good laugh and will be proud to know that his research is having such an impact that the wingnuts have to resort to character assassination because their ridiculous attempts to lie to the public have become embarrassingly silly.

Personally I believe you need to be a wingnut not to question the results coming from "leading" climatologists considering what has been disclosed in the past

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/ear...l-warming.html

One of the greatest problems Gore and his allies faced at this time was the mass of evidence showing that in the past, global temperatures had been higher than in the late 20th century.
In 1998 came the answer they were looking for: a new temperature chart, devised by a young American physicist, Michael Mann. This became known as the "hockey stick" because it showed historic temperatures running in an almost flat line over the past 1,000 years, then suddenly flicking up at the end to record levels.
Mann's hockey stick was just what the IPCC wanted. When its 2001 report came out it was given pride of place at the top of page 1. The Mediaeval Warming, the Little Ice Age, the 20th century Little Cooling, when CO2 had already been rising, all had been wiped away.
But then a growing number of academics began to raise doubts about Mann and his graph. This culminated in 2003 with a devastating study by two Canadians showing how Mann had not only ignored most of the evidence before him but had used an algorithm that would produce a hockey stick graph whatever evidence was fed into the computer. When this was removed, the graph re-emerged just as it had looked before, showing the Middle Ages as hotter than today.
It is hard to recall any scientific thesis ever being so comprehensively discredited as the "hockey stick". Yet the global warming juggernaut rolled on regardless, now led by the European Union. In 2004, thanks to a highly dubious deal between the EU and Putin's Russia, stage four of the story began when the Kyoto treaty was finally ratified.

Secondly I made fair disclosure in so far as to not having done any due diligence on the article nor the website in regard to further research, which I posted having found it on a random google search and finally I personally did not make any character assassination on Ted Scambos. If Ted Scambos is a genuine researcher with no alterior motives then I would say to him that the likes of Micheal Mann and Al Gore have done he and any other genuine colleagues in AGW research a grave disservice due to the fraud Mann, Gore et al have perpetrated, it has left many people including myself very sceptical regarding any further AGW research.

[*T*]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

Hi T still waiting on you to get back on your original comment - think it would be a good idea to do your your own due diligence before lambasting others for their supposed lack there of

[*T*]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

I posted this memo in another thread but I think it is just as relevant to this thread I think whether you believe in global warming attributed to CO2 emissions or not I pose the question do you think the solution proposed will further advance emissions reduction (considering the current lack of nuclear power (& lead time associated with their construction) and the current inefficiencies in wind, solar, tidal etc of which the carbon trading will do nothing to address or will it advance some of the arguments in the memo posted below?

Extract

In 1991, Larry Summers signed a memo when he was vice president and chief economist of the World Bank concerning the handling of pollution in less wealthy lands. When an excerpt of the memo was leaked, more than a few people became upset. Summers initially took responsibility for the memo but claimed it was satirical. Later, blame for writing the memo was taken by aide Lant Pritchett. Pritichett went on to lecture at the Harvard Kennedy School and Summers went on to be president of Harvard.

If the memo was in fact intended to be humorous, whoever wrote it didn't understand that humor used against the poor and defenseless is not satire but ridicule and bigotry. The fact that Summers thought it funny should disqualify him from any government position.

The excerpt:

'Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:

1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I've always though that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.

3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.

The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.

While Summers and Pritchett survived the memo incident, the Brazilian secretary of the environment was not as fortunate. He was fired after writing to Summers:"Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane ... Your thoughts [provide] a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional 'economists' concerning the nature of the world we live in ... If the World Bank keeps you as vice president it will lose all credibility.

Ironic in the light of claims made by some in these pages of dumping off Somalia.

[Diarmuid]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

Let us make surre we correctly define corollary before we start,

Crollary: Mathematics. a proposition that is incidentally proved in proving another proposition.

i.e you can say with authority sun activity or any other myriad of factors acting in concert or otherwise including the El Nino/La Nina phenomenon (Southern Oscillation), and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, is incindental to temperature increases on the planet in the last 100 years

yet you will say definitively the CAUSATIVE is CO2 and other green house gasses without any further debate beyond the pedantic?

If so please keep posting your intellectually stunted arguments using comic pictures and blatantly false characature graphs puporting to reperesent the position I put forward.

It is a good repersentation of the modus operandi of religious AGW zealots.


Here is another source on the info I posted in my previous post or does this not meet your source standard requirements (i.e agree with what you think).


http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.c...a-7afbc4ee72f3


Testimony of Roy W. Spencer before the
Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on 22 July 2008

Quote

Despite decades of persistent uncertainty over how sensitive the climate system is to increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, we now have new satellite evidence which strongly suggests that the climate system is much less sensitive than is claimed by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Another way of saying this is that the real climate system appears to be dominated by “negative feedbacks” — instead of the “positive feedbacks” which are displayed by all twenty computerized climate models utilized by the IPCC. (Feedback parameters larger than 3.3 Watts per square meter per degree Kelvin (Wm-2K-1) indicate negative feedback, while feedback parameters smaller than 3.3 indicate positive feedback.)


If true, an insensitive climate system would mean that we have little to worry about in the way of manmade global warming and associated climate change. And, as we will see, it would also mean that the warming we have experienced in the last 100 years is mostly natural. Of course, if climate change is mostly natural then it is largely out of our control, and is likely to end — if it has not ended already, since satellite-measured global temperatures have not warmed for at least seven years now.

One necessary result of low climate sensitivity is that the radiative forcing from greenhouse gas emissions in the last century is not nearly enough to explain the upward trend of 0.7 deg. C in the last 100 years. This raises the question of whether there are natural processes at work which have caused most of that warming.
On this issue, it can be shown with a simple climate model that small cloud fluctuations assumed to occur with two modes of natural climate variability — the El Nino/La Nina phenomenon (Southern Oscillation), and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation — can explain 70% of the warming trend since 1900, as well as the nature of that trend: warming until the 1940s, no warming until the 1970s, and resumed warming since then.

[Diarmuid]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

Ironic in the light of claims made by some in these pages of dumping off Somalia.

Since you are using over simplistic graphs to falsely characterise my position I have created a few graphs for you too to present an over simplified version of my position to help your challenged mind grasp my point of view as to why I believe the memo is relevant to both threads.



graphs.jpg

[santafe2]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

We'll have to see where the algae thing takes us. It is after all just photosynthesis and comparing algae growth to the millions of years worth of photosysthesis it took to create fossil fuels is, well, incomparable. It'll take a much more efficient society to run on "real-time" photosynthesis whether harvesting the sun's energy with bio or manmade PV than it does now to run on fossil photosynthesis.

Welcome and thanks for posting. This really is the point isn't it? We're going to have to produce energy from sources that allow us to create energy in real time. That will likely require net energy producing buildings, much better energy storage devices and extremely efficient mobility. It might be a long 50-60 years while we work this out.

While we debate on this thread whether global climate change is caused by or even contributed to by humans, we continue to march toward that date where the earth no longer has enough stored energy for us to use at our current consumption rate. And unfortunately, while we can be wrong about warming raising sea level over the next 50 years, it's doubtful peak/cheap oil will be here 50 years from today. We'd better invest in energy technology in a very smart way.