Arctic sea ice loss due to global warming II

From your article...

"with this year's ice loss the second-lowest ever."

HUH? The article purports to say ice loss is high. Nonsensical

"This is admittedly a tiny sample set, especially when dealing with long-term climate changes that last hundreds or thousands of years."

Well if it 'fits' the AGW/GW 'consensus' even 1 data point will be used. LOL

Yes when REAL data isn't available....just make it up.

And then this in the very same paragraph...

Ha Ha Ha...What a hoot!!!

 

What about proxy data isn't real?

 

You ever see that movie chicken little? That is what you remind me of.

 

That quote deserves repeating:

The sky is falling, the sky is falling!

 

Exactly...THEN after they 'admit' that sea ice loss is 'hard to determine' the statement is made that it is caused by global warming. How is it that the warmist fanatics cannot process this? Have they lost the last vestiges of objectivity?

Besides, I remember when posing them (warmist fanatics) with an INCREASE of sea ice being told that LAND ICE is more important. I guess it just depends on which way the wind blows....LOL

 

Your delusions are pretty funny but in fact there has been no "INCREASE" in Arctic sea ice, as your cultic myths misinform you. Just the opposite. Arctic sea ice is still way, way below normal.

National Snow and Ice Data Center
December 5, 2011

Arctic sea ice continued its winter expansion, although ice growth slowed briefly in early November. The slowdown may have been related to a strong Arctic storm that tracked from the Bering Sea into the Beaufort and Chukchi seas. In the Southern Hemisphere, Antarctic sea ice is tracking near average for this time of year.

Overview of conditions

Average ice extent for November 2011 was 10.01 million square kilometers (3.86 million square miles), 1.30 million square kilometers (502,000 square miles) below the 1979 to 2000 average.

At the end of November, ice extent remained below the 1979 to 2000 average in the Chukchi, Barents and Kara seas, and Hudson Bay was still nearly ice free. Ice extent was near average in the East Greenland and the Bering seas.

Conditions in context

The Arctic sea ice cover grew at an average pace through November, despite a brief slowdown early in the month. However, the ice extent remained far below average.

 

So what? Where does it say it is attributable to global warming? What about Arctic Oscillation?

an atmospheric circulation pattern in which the atmospheric pressure over the polar regions varies in opposition with that over middle latitudes (about 45 degrees N) on time scales ranging from weeks to decades; the oscillation extends through the depth of the troposphere, and from January to March, it extends upward into the stratosphere where it modulates in the strength of the westerly vortex that encircles the arctic polar cap region; the north atlantic oscillation and arctic oscillation are different ways of describing the same phenomenon.

Also the antarctic is NOT losing ice.

From your link

"Since reaching its seasonal maximum in September, Antarctic sea ice has been near average in recent months. In November, Antarctic extent was 16.15 million square kilometers (6.24 million square miles), 87,000 square kilometers (33,600 square miles) less than the 1979 to 2000 average. In recent years, the sea ice cover that surrounds the Antarctic continent has been higher than average, even reaching near-record highs."

If the GLOBE is warming how is it that Antarctica has growing ice?

 

Glaciers are growing around the world, including the United States:

http://www.iceagenow.com/Growing_Glaciers.htm

 

Because you claim something is false that does not make it so

 

So you have nothing..

Computer models are false. If they are wrong for hurricanes how can we trust them for climate change?

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/mobile/story.html?id=5847032

 

More ice than last year would mean it is recovering from last year.

From the article

Of course the Antarctica is growing


http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2011/09/inconvenient-truth-antarctica-sea-ice.html

 

Well, that's not an outright lie, but it is deliberately deceptive. Glaciers grow and shrink every year, and like all variable data it's possible to cherry-pick only the data you like. But that's not science, and it's not honest.

If you want to convince anyone, look at all the data without cherry-picking. If you do, you get a picture like this, from the World Glacier Monitoring Service.



You get a completely different view, don't you?

 

This has been explained so many times, it is hard to believe that your confusion is genuine. Are you really so completely clueless about this that you don't understand the difference between Antarctic sea ice, which is only a thin fringe of ice a yard or two thick that floats on the ocean around portions of the Antarctic coastline, and the vastly larger ice sheets and ice shelves that are several miles thick and that rest on the continent on Antarctica and that hold almost all of the ice in Antarctica? The sea ice, as the article I cited said, may be growing a bit but that is totally insignificant compared to the massive and accelerating ice loss from the continental ice sheets. The globe is warming and Antarctica is losing ice mass. Once again you are completely wrong about this subject. Try reading some actual science instead of filling your head with that bs you scrape off of denier cult blogs.

Is Antarctica Melting?
NASA
01.12.10
(government publication - free to reproduce)


The continent of Antarctica has been losing more than 100 cubic kilometers (24 cubic miles) of ice per year since 2002.

There has been lots of talk lately about Antarctica and whether or not the continent's giant ice sheet is melting. One new paper, which states there’s less surface melting recently than in past years, has been cited as "proof" that there’s no global warming. Other evidence that the amount of sea ice around Antarctica seems to be increasing slightly is being used in the same way. But both of these data points are misleading. Gravity data collected from space using NASA's Grace satellite show that Antarctica has been losing more than a hundred cubic kilometers (24 cubic miles) of ice each year since 2002. The latest data reveal that Antarctica is losing ice at an accelerating rate, too. How is it possible for surface melting to decrease, but for the continent to lose mass anyway? The answer boils down to the fact that ice can flow without melting.

Two-thirds of Antarctica is a high, cold desert. Known as East Antarctica, this section has an average altitude of about 2 kilometer (1.2 miles), higher than the American Colorado Plateau. There is a continent about the size of Australia underneath all this ice; the ice sheet sitting on top averages at a little over 2 kilometer (1.2 miles) thick. If all of this ice melted, it would raise global sea level by about 60 meter (197 feet). But little, if any, surface warming is occurring over East Antarctica. Radar and laser-based satellite data show a little mass loss at the edges of East Antarctica, which is being partly offset by accumulation of snow in the interior, although a very recent result from the NASA/German Aerospace Center's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) suggests that since 2006 there has been more ice loss from East Antarctica than previously thought. Overall, not much is going on in East Antarctica -- yet.

A Frozen Hawaii

West Antarctica is very different. Instead of a single continent, it is a series of islands covered by ice -- think of it as a frozen Hawaii, with penguins. Because it's a group of islands, much of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS, in the jargon) is actually sitting on the floor of the Southern Ocean, not on dry land. Parts of it are more than 1.7 kilometer (1 mile) below sea level. Pine Island is the largest of these islands and the largest ice stream in West Antarctica is called Pine Island Glacier. The WAIS, if it melted completely, would raise sea level by 5 to 7 meter (16 to 23 feet). And the Pine Island Glacier would contribute about 10 percent of that.

Since the early 1990s, European and Canadian satellites have been collecting radar data from West Antarctica. These radar data can reveal ice motion and, by the late 1990s, there was enough data for scientists to measure the annual motion of the Pine Island Glacier. Using radar information collected between 1992 and 1996, oceanographer Eric Rignot, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), found that the Pine Island Glacier's "grounding line" -- the line between the glacier's floating section and the part of the glacier that rests on the sea floor -- had retreated rapidly towards the land. That meant that the glacier was losing mass. He attributed the retreat to the warming waters around West Antarctica. But with only a few years of data, he couldn't say whether the retreat was a temporary, natural anomaly or a longer-term trend from global warming.

Rignot's paper surprised many people. JPL scientist Ron Kwok saw it as demonstrating that "the old idea that glaciers move really slowly isn't true any more." One result was that a lot more people started to use the radar data to examine much more of Antarctica. A major review published in 2009 found that Rignot's Pine Island Glacier finding hadn't been a fluke: a large majority of the marine glaciers of the Antarctic Peninsula were retreating, and their retreat was speeding up. This summer, a British group revisited the Pine Island Glacier finding and found that its rate of retreat had quadrupled between 1995 and 2006.

How the Ice Shelf Crumbles

The retreat of West Antarctica's glaciers is being accelerated by ice shelf collapse. Ice shelves are the part of a glacier that extends past the grounding line towards the ocean they are the most vulnerable to warming seas. A longstanding theory in glaciology is that these ice shelves tend to buttress (support the end wall of) glaciers, with their mass slowing the ice movement towards the sea, and this was confirmed by the spectacular collapse of the Rhode Island-sized Larsen B shelf along the Eastern edge of the Antarctic Peninsula in 2002. The disintegration, which was caught on camera by NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) imaging instruments on board its Terra and Aqua satellites, was dramatic: it took just three weeks to crumble a 12,000-year old ice shelf. Over the next few years, satellite radar data showed that some of the ice streams flowing behind Larsen B had accelerated significantly, while others, still supported by smaller ice shelves, had not. This dynamic process of ice flowing downhill to the sea is what enables Antarctica to continue losing mass even as surface melting declines.

Michael Schodlok, a JPL scientist who models the way ice shelves and the ocean interact, says melting of the underside of the shelf is a pre-requisite to these collapses. Thinning of the ice shelf reduces its buttressing effect on the glacier behind it, allowing glacier flow to speed up. The thinner shelf is also more likely to crack. In the summer, meltwater ponds on the surface can drain into the cracks. Since liquid water is denser than solid ice, enough meltwater on the surface can open the cracks up deeper down into the ice, leading to disintegration of the shelf. The oceans surrounding Antarctica have been warming, so Schodlok doesn't doubt that the ice shelves are being undermined by warmer water being brought up from the depths. But he admits that it hasn't been proven rigorously, because satellites can’t measure underneath the ice.

Glaciologist Robert Bindschadler of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center intends to show just that. He's leading an expedition scheduled to start in 2011 to drill through the Pine Island Glacier and place an automated buoy into the water below it. According to Bindschadler, Pine Island Glacier "is the place to go because that is where the changes are the largest. If we want to understand how the ocean is impacting the ice sheet, go to where it's hitting the ice sheet with a sledgehammer, not with a little tack hammer."

Meanwhile, measurements from the Grace satellites confirm that Antarctica is losing mass. Isabella Velicogna of JPL and the University of California, Irvine, uses Grace data to weigh the Antarctic ice sheet from space. Her work shows that the ice sheet is not only losing mass, but it is losing mass at an accelerating rate. "The important message is that it is not a linear trend. A linear trend means you have the same mass loss every year. The fact that it’s above linear, this is the important idea, that ice loss is increasing with time," she says. And she points out that it isn’t just the Grace data that show accelerating loss; the radar data do, too. "It isn't just one type of measurement. It's a series of independent measurements that are giving the same results, which makes it more robust."

 

To use your own words :"So you have nothing.." All you can do is to try and deflect. You cannot disprove any of the concepts and data on which AGW is based. All you can do is scream "conspiracy" and "prove it" while offering no "proof" of your side. And you call us "religious"

 

If they are not working for hurricanes how can they work for long periods of time. Logic tells us man has never been right on predictions dealing with weather or climate change

 

From your link...

Two-thirds of Antarctica is a high, cold desert. Known as East Antarctica

Then it states...

Overall, not much is going on in East Antarctica

OK..so...MOST of Antarctica is NOT melting, but what of the West?

West Antarctica is very different. Instead of a single continent, it is a series of islands covered by ice -- think of it as a frozen Hawaii, with penguins. Because it's a group of islands, much of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS, in the jargon) is actually sitting on the floor of the Southern Ocean, not on dry land.

About the collected data...

there was enough data for scientists to measure the annual motion of the Pine Island Glacier.

OK...1 glacier...

the line between the glacier's floating section and the part of the glacier that rests on the sea floor -- had retreated rapidly towards the land. That meant that the glacier was losing mass. He attributed the retreat to the warming waters around West Antarctica 6. But with only a few years of data, he couldn't say whether the retreat was a temporary, natural anomaly or a longer-term trend from global warming.

The article goes on to state that 'Antarctica is losing mass' which conflicts with its earlier statement that not much is going on in East Antarctica. What I find interesting and amusing is that they delineate East from West then, when they find ice melting in the lessor 1/3 suddenly it is no longer East or West it is 'Antarctica.'

Bottom line...MOST of Antarctica is NOT melting and the findings are from 1 place "Pine Island" where they 'attributed' the retreat of ice to warmer waters.

Then there is this..

Schodlok doesn't doubt that the ice shelves are being undermined by warmer water being brought up from the depths. But he admits that it hasn't been proven rigorously, because satellites can’t measure underneath the ice.

OK so...Most of Antarctica is NOT melting, one island has been studied, a presumption (hypothesis) is made that warmer water 'from the depths' may be the cause of ice melting on 1 island in only 1/3 (West Antarctica). BTW physics tells us that colder water sinks and would probably not come from 'the depths.'

This is on-going research which has little to do with global warming.

 

Deflecting again, I see!

"So you have nothing.." All you can do is to try and deflect. You cannot disprove any of the concepts and data on which AGW is based. All you can do is scream "conspiracy" and "prove it" while offering no "proof" of your side. And you call us "religious"

 

Likewise, just because monckton claims something is true doesn't make it so...but don't let that get in the way of your bias.

 

You are screaming about nothing. Computer models have been wrong. They do not work for hurricanes or climate change.

 

"Prove it" with science/peer review. Show us a model that has been proven wrong and explain to us why it was wrong. Show us the error analysis of why the models are wrong. Blogs are not "proof". Weathermen making claims without analysis is not "proof".
I will be looking forward as to your spin and/or deflection.

 

The very slight growth in sea ice around Antarctica is predicted by climate models, and is an expected consequence of global warming.

That's because the Southern Ocean gets more rain and snow, because global warming is accelerating the hydrological cycle. More precipitation makes the sea surface fresher, which makes ice formation easier.

So the fresher water makes ice easier to form, while warmer temps makes ice harder to form. The two effects nearly balance out, resulting in almost no change in Antarctic sea ice. Some models show a tiny increase, some show a tiny decrease. The world matches the models: almost no change, with a small (statistically insignificant) increase.

 

I do suppose you all know of the "Climatgate" as for false results on climte measures, which left IPCC as what it is: a Washington climatologist proppaganda platform
Don't miss the real agenda on the Durban meeting: all the power for the UN, an agenda of desindustrialization, the new ecologic dictatorship that nobody wants. And they don't say a word about stopping the deforestation or claning th BP spill....

http://climatedepot.com/

 

Actually, including the word you deliberately left out, it states: "Overall, not much is going on in East Antarctica -- yet."

No, not just "one glacier". That's just your usual inability to comprehend what is being said. Scientists are studying the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Is Pine Island Glacier the Weak Underbelly of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet?
(excerpts)

It is popularly understood that glaciologists consider West Antarctica the biggest source of uncertainty in sea level projections. The base of the 3000-m thick West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) – unlike the much larger East Antarctic Ice Sheet – lies below sea level, and it has been recognized for a long time that this means it has the potential to change very rapidly. Most of the grounded West Antarctic ice sheet drains into the floating Ross and Ronne-Filchner ice shelves, but a significant fraction also drains into the much smaller Pine Island Glacier. Glaciologists are paying very close attention to Pine Island Glacier (“PIG” on map, right) and nearby Thwaites Glacier.

I'm afraid you're reading your own denier cult myths into that article and imagining things that it isn't saying. This line from that NASA article demonstrates just how silly and off base your understanding of this is.

Gravity data collected from space using NASA's Grace satellite show that Antarctica has been losing more than a hundred cubic kilometers (24 cubic miles) of ice each year since 2002. The latest data reveal that Antarctica is losing ice at an accelerating rate, too.

 

Yeah right I have heard this BS before now show proof it is part of global warming

 

He showed what is going on in Durban. No one has shown it to be false.