Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

[Raz]

Re: Is this a Climate Change website?

I think others have answered the why question but it's also a great way for us to hear other iTulipers opinion on a fairly wide range of subjects. I know for example that GRG, C1ue, Starving and others don't agree with my ideas regarding global climate change. But I also know that I read and respect their opinions in other areas so it's great to hear their thoughts on this subject as well.

None of us will ever become reasonable thinkers by discussing subjects with only those who agree with us. To me, that's one of the greatest values of iTulip. There are many excellent minds here with very different points of view. Oh, and that EJ guy isn't bad either...;)

I'm glad to see that you are now so open and hospitable to various topics. This is a far cry from the insulting remarks you made to me when I raised a few points in defense of the Christian Church and offered to discuss it on another forum.

[santafe2]

Re: Is this a Climate Change website?

I'm glad to see that you are now so open and hospitable to various topics. This is a far cry from the insulting remarks you made to me when I raised a few points in defense of the Christian Church and offered to discuss it on another forum.

I'm actually not open and hospitable with regard to either politics or religion so I've tried to be as apolitical as I can be while writing in this thread and I've tried to encourage others to do the same. Within the context of iTulip, religious points of view are most often made as a purposeful thread hijack. I offer your post as another example.

[Raz]

Re: Is this a Climate Change website?

I'm actually not open and hospitable with regard to either politics or religion so I've tried to be as apolitical as I can be while writing in this thread and I've tried to encourage others to do the same. Within the context of iTulip, religious points of view are most often made as a purposeful thread hijack. I offer your post as another example.

Amazing. You can read my mind and heart and ascertain my intentions. And I didn't even introduce the subject of religion but only responded to another member who did. Then you chimed in.
According to you I intended to "hijack" the existing thread by offering to defend the slanderous accusations made against the Christian Church on a *new* thread (on Rant and Rave) because I specifically said I did NOT want to hijack an existing thread!

"I will be glad to discuss this with anyone on Rant and Rave - the proper forum for a subject such as this. BUT, I don't want to assist in highjacking another thread here."


"How do you find time to post here? You'd be better served ferreting out and drowning witches. In case I'm not being clear, this is the craziest post I've seen by a paid subscriber on iTulip. Seriously, find a psychologist or join AA if that's the issue. Please never assume you can pay a few hundred dollars and earn the right to post this nonsense here."


I find time the same way that you do - when I'm not working. And though I don't always maintain my cool, I don't go out of my way to insult other people - especially on a topic which I apparently know nothing about.

I hope that one day you will realize that mine are the words of a friend and not an adversary.

[santafe2]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

This article is a good overview of ice shelves and how they've been disintegrating in the Antarctic Peninsula. The last sentence is certainly not self evident and should require more explanation but over all a good report.

http://environmentalresearchweb.org/...e-shelves.html

Disintegrating Ice Shelves

The Wilkins Ice Shelf in West Antarctica has been in the news again lately. As ice shelves go, it is rather small, but it has claimed attention because it is falling to pieces. This is not the breaking off and drifting away of one large iceberg, but a disintegration into lots of slivers, each a few tens of metres thick.
Why not one big chunk? Evidently forces are at work that cause cracks to appear and to propagate through a previously homogeneous block of floating ice, but they are more distributed in the Wilkins collapse than in the really big calving events we sometimes hear about. The slab of ice, weakly supported by the water underneath but pinned more firmly at its sides and at the grounding line, is not strong enough to resist what the engineers call “bending stresses”, originating from variations in the vigour of ice flow or perhaps from the ocean tides.
Why now? Why has the Wilkins joined the growing list of spectacular recent ice-shelf failures? The trouble with the bending explanation is that it does not account for change. Ice shelves are always at risk of bending until they crack, and I know of no evidence that they are suffering more of this now than in the past. In the ordinary way, the loss by calving of icebergs (and perhaps melting on the underside) would balance the gain by snowfall and flow across the grounding line. The shelf would stay roughly the same size.
At this point, enter a now-familiar suspect: global warming. Cracks in ice shelves behave very differently when they have water in them. It is a thousand times denser than air, and magnifies greatly the forces encouraging the tip of the crack to propagate downwards. If the crack propagates all the way to the bottom of the shelf, and also sideways until it meets another crack or the shelf edge, then the job of making a new sliver is done. If there are lots of cracks, and they all fill with water and propagate right through the shelf, then the shelf falls to pieces. This seems to have happened to the Wilkins in recent months. On the other side of the Antarctic Peninsula, continuing study of the collapse of the Larsen B Ice Shelf, an even more dramatic event in summer 2002, is showing that it too disintegrated when, and probably because, its cracks filled with meltwater.
The water can only have come from melting at the surface. All of the West Antarctic ice shelves that have collapsed recently, in whole or in part, are now on the warm side of the -5ºC isotherm of mean annual air temperature at the surface. This isotherm has been migrating rapidly southwards in West Antarctica, a part of the world which, according to weather-station records, has warmed faster than almost any other during the past 50 years.
It would be wrong to think that -5ºC is a kind of tipping point. All it means, given the rather equable climate of West Antarctica, is that an ice shelf which crosses from the cold to the warm side of the isotherm begins to suffer a “significant” summer melt season. At the other end of the world, the ice shelves which once fringed the north coast of Ellesmere Island in Canada have all but disappeared over the last century. The mean annual temperature is much colder than in West Antarctica, but the annual range is much greater, and in northern Canada too the culprit seems to be increased summertime melting.
Why worry? The shelf ice made its contribution to sea-level rise when it flowed across the grounding line, roughly balancing the sea-level fall due to snow accumulating on the grounded ice. The main reason for concern is back stress. At the grounding line, just as there is a force pushing the shelf ice further out to sea, where it will eventually calve and drift away, so there is an opposing force - the back stress - discouraging the grounded ice from accelerating seawards. Take away the ice shelf and you remove the back stress.
Again Larsen B is instructive. Its collapse has provoked the land-based glaciers which formerly fed it to calve icebergs from their grounding lines at greatly increased rates. So the loss of an ice shelf is indeed a cause for concern in the context of sea-level rise. And we think we know why these losses are happening more frequently now.

[Chris Coles]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

This article is a good overview of ice shelves and how they've been disintegrating in the Antarctic Peninsula. The last sentence is certainly not self evident and should require more explanation but over all a good report.

http://environmentalresearchweb.org/...e-shelves.html

These reports give some further information:

ERS-2 helps detect massive rivers under Antarctica


20 April 2006
British scientists have discovered rivers the size of the Thames in London flowing hundreds of miles under the Antarctica ice shelf by examining small changes in elevation, observed by ESA’s ERS-2 satellite, in the surface of the oldest, thickest ice in the region, according to an article published in Nature this week.

The finding, which came as a great surprise to the scientists, challenges the widely held assumption that subglacial lakes evolved in isolated conditions for several millions of years and raises the possibility that large floods of water from deep within the ice’s interior may have generated huge floods that reached the ocean in the past and may do so again.
Prof. Duncan Wingham, of the University College London, who led the team said: "Previously, it was thought that water moves underneath the ice by very slow seepage. But this new data shows that, every so often, the lakes beneath the ice pop off like champagne corks, releasing floods that travel very long distances." .........................

http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMA94OFGLE_index_0.html


The accurate prediction and observation of the ice masses at the poles, and particularly of their rates of change, is of interest to us all, not least because 5% of the Earth’s population live just 1 metre above sea level. Native Arctic populations face profound changes to their way of life and even existence. Economic interests, associated with oil and gas and trans-Arctic shipping, will grow as the pack ice declines, as too may strategic concerns over the sovereignty of the Arctic Ocean. The loss of pack ice may also affect the circulation of the Atlantic, and with it the winter weather of Western Europe. CryoSat is ESA’s first mission dedicated to the observation of the Earth’s polar ice masses. Its goals are to determine if there is indeed a downward trend in the mass of Arctic sea ice, and whether we should regard Antarctica as under threat from global warming.

http://www.esa.int/esapub/bulletin/b...2b_wingham.pdf

[santafe2]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

Attached is a report worth reading even if you disagree with it.

...the IPCC estimates are wildly optimistic.

Yikes, that's not a good thing if you live in Miami or NYC.

Will we start to curb our emissions of greenhouse gases sometime soon, or will we continue to pump ever more into the atmosphere?

We've no respect until we get punched in the face so we'll continue to pollute. Is that all you got Mother Nature?

The second biggest contributor has been thermal expansion of the oceans.

Oh sure, now you'll tell us there's actually science behind that remark:rolleyes:

Greenland is now losing about 300 gigatonnes of ice per year, enough to raise sea level by 0.83 millimetres. Antarctica is losing about 200 gigatonnes per year, almost all of it from West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula, raising levels by 0.55 millimetres. "The mass loss is increasing faster than in Greenland," Rignot says. "It'll overtake Greenland in years to come."

Nothing to worry about. You'll die from natural causes before you drown. Go about your business unless you're very short and live by the sea.

We can't really afford to wait 10 to 20 years to have good ice sheet models to tell people, 'Well, sea level is actually going to rise 2 metres and not 50 centimetres', because the consequences are very significant, and things will be pretty much locked in at that point."

Crazy conservative, just ignore this stuff...

What is clear, though, is that even the lowest, most conservative estimates are now higher than the IPCC's highest estimate.

Those crazy kids at IPCC were not partying hard with those predictions?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...ht.html?page=1

[Starving Steve]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

Dirt and filth (diesel aresols, dust, or whatever) in the upper atmosphere act to warm the upper atmosphere, but they act to COOL the lower atmosphere near the surface of the Earth where temperature readings are taken for climate study. A satellite may read warming of the Earth from dirt and filth in the upper atmosphere while a climate station may on the surface of the Earth, at the same time, read cooling of the Earth from blockage of sunlight.

So we have a problem: How do we get a true reading of what is going-on on this planet with regard to temperature? And the answer that I gave is that we can't. I said that we can not obtain a God's eye-view of the world, and I am not making any religious or non-scientific statement. ( I do not even believe in God, and I hate all religion. ) The scientific fact is that a wholistic temperature measurement of what is going-on on this planet is elusive (sp?) and difficult to obtain, at best.

[peakishmael]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

I said that we can not obtain a God's eye-view of the world

Well, if there was a god (and I agree with you, there doesn't seem to be), then certainly said deity would look down on the world from above, no? Sorta like, umm, spacecraft.

http://neo.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/Search.html?group=69
http://climate.jpl.nasa.gov/

Pretty good vantage point from orbit... lotsa data taken from up there...

[MulaMan]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

I would like to conduct a quick survey:

I believe in climate change:
a) Yes
b) No

I watch Fox News and believe that it is real news:
a) Yes
b) No

I am a Republican that voted Bush, McCain, and Palin:
a) Yes
b) No

[MulaMan]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

Well, if there was a god (and I agree with you, there doesn't seem to be), then certainly said deity would look down on the world from above, no?
...

God will solve the climate change problem by killing 100 million sinners with H1N1 flu this winter.

If you do not want to die this fall, then you must take Jesus to be your savior, go to Church, and vote Republican.

[Mashuri]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

I would like to conduct a quick survey:

I believe in climate change:
a) Yes
b) No

I watch Fox News and believe that it is real news:
a) Yes
b) No

I am a Republican that voted Bush, McCain, and Palin:
a) Yes
b) No

You are too caught up in the "left vs. right" big government trap. Time for you to redraw the axis and recognize that both parties are virtually the same and use their fight to distract you from how they are raping all of us with our clothes one. In answer to your questions: B, B, B.

[santafe2]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

I would like to conduct a quick survey:

I believe in climate change:
a) Yes
b) No

I watch Fox News and believe that it is real news:
a) Yes
b) No

I am a Republican that voted Bush, McCain, and Palin:
a) Yes
b) No

Mula, this is better done with the thread starter if you really want to ask these questions. You can even start a survey on iTulip if you want to know how the community comes down on the question of climate change.

Before you do, you'll have to frame your question more accurately. Although I won't speak for him, I think even C1ue would agree that there is climate change. The question is very different, it's this: Is there human caused climate change, (AGW).

If you spend more time here you'll find that CNN, CBS, NBC and ABC are held in no higher regard than FOX. Network news killed itself many years ago and is in the process of dying and wasting to dust. To single out FOX is to argue that the others are different by more than degree.

[Starving Steve]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

Well, if there was a god (and I agree with you, there doesn't seem to be), then certainly said deity would look down on the world from above, no? Sorta like, umm, spacecraft.

http://neo.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/Search.html?group=69
http://climate.jpl.nasa.gov/

Pretty good vantage point from orbit... lotsa data taken from up there...

Yes, an orbiting satellite is a pretty good vantage point for studying what is taking-place over the entire Earth. Show me more, especially the direct temperature measurements that lead you to believe there is AGW happening in any significant amount. Then we can think about your data and discuss it further.

[peakishmael]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

Yes, an orbiting satellite is a pretty good vantage point for studying what is taking-place over the entire Earth. Show me more, especially the direct temperature measurements that lead you to believe there is AGW happening in any significant amount. Then we can think about your data and discuss it further.

Direct temperature measurements can't prove AGW, as I'm sure you know, and would argue yourself.