Beneath the Ross Ice Shelf – click to enlarge
I’ve been informed of significant new research that discovered Antarctic ice shelf melting—constantly referred to as “catastrophic” in warmster commentaries—is considerably less dramatic than we were led to expect—quelle surprise. It even involved a New Zealand scientist but so far this is the only media coverage. Continue Reading →
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Dear Sir,
Yesterday the Herald’s Jason Patinkin or an editor said: “The mountains of East Africa that inspired Hemingway are being dissolved by climate change.” There are two things wrong with that statement. Continue Reading →
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A reader remarked on our discussion of dangerous sea level rise, asking:
Where is all that ice that is dissapearing [sic] from glaciers and land based ice sheets going to end up and why if the decline of glaciers and land based ice sheets is accelerating will sea level rise not accelerate with it?
I asked for a reference Continue Reading →
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A story on Mother Jones last July by John Vidal described the world’s highest glacier, Khumbu, turning visibly darker as particles of fine dust, blown by fierce winds, settled on the bright, fresh snow. “One-week-old snow was turning black and brown before my eyes,” said American geologist Ulyana Horodyskyj. Unfortunately she lacked the presence of mind to make a photographic record of this startling event. Continue Reading →
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For years we’ve been fed the propaganda that only warming causes less ice (and oh, what a shame!) and now we learn that it causes more ice as well (and oh, what a shame!).
Whether the warmists predict more ice or less ice, it’s still all caused by warming. Amazing.
More ice is bad, it’s caused by our evil kind of warming and our punishment is to give all our toys to the poor people living near the sea. Or far from the sea, so long as they’re poor. The old ice that sinks the earth’s crust into the magma which requires thousands of years to rebound after melting is not evil ice. But this ice is evil. Nor was that old ice caused by warming. But our evil ice is.
Amazing. I’m almost speechless. Continue Reading →
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via BBC News – Everest Sherpas in glacial lake study warning. – h/t Ron.
“The situation has become such that many Sherpas in the region do not even want to hear the words ‘climate change’.”
The Mount Everest region’s Sherpas have said they are angry at the way studies of glaciers and glacial lakes have been conducted in recent years.
They say the studies do not involve them and that results are often spread through alarmist media reports that cause panic among locals in the area.
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The author of the paper that prompted Scientific American’s alarming claim of a “meltdown” sounds caution over predicting the demise of the Greenland ice sheet.
Is it a turnaround? No, because in the abstract we read:
“Our results suggest that the ice mass changes in this sector were primarily caused by short-lived dynamic ice loss events rather than changes in the surface mass balance. This finding challenges predictions about the future response of the Greenland Ice Sheet to increasing global temperatures.”
It’s just that “Scientific” American didn’t mention it. Continue Reading →
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Yes, that’s right, only 67,000 years to go.
David Biello wrote an unlovely piece of non-science a few days ago which Scientific American was happy to publish.
It seems the once-reliable journal doesn’t care about standards now. The headline was uncompromising: Greenland Meltdown Driven by Collapse of Glaciers at Ocean Outlets.
To call what follows a “meltdown” is a hoax, a fraud, a betrayal, a cheat, a perfidy, a sham and a swindle. Not to mention several dozen other words in the thesaurus which all mean deceit.
The subheading gives voice to the first prevarication: The interactions between the island’s glaciers and the surrounding seas may be driving ice loss, according to aerial photographs.
But the opening paragraph got down to brass tacks: “the ice sheet as a whole has lost some 36 billion metric tons of ice each year in recent years.” We shall look at what that means. First, though, consider the next comment: “Thanks to weird weather, nearly the entire ice-covered surface of the world’s largest island melted for a period this year.”
The word “weather” is a hyperlink, as though they have some scientific explanation of weird weather, but they mislead us again. Continue Reading →
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Associated Press
The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consulafft, at Bergen, Norway.
Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone.
Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 metres showed the Gulf Stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.
Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.
Within a few years it is predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise and make most coastal cities uninhabitable.
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Greenland is the world’s largest island, about 2600 km long and 1100 km wide at its widest point. Most of the interior is covered by the world’s second-largest permanent ice sheet. Average temperatures rise above freezing only briefly, during the summer. Here’s a simplified graph of monthly temperatures taken from a tourism site.
Yesterday the NZ Herald reported a study finding faster melting of Arctic and Greenland ice. The scientific team thinks global sea levels could rise by as much as five feet (1.5 metres) this century. Continue Reading →
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Here’s a thread to discuss the migration of gases (or not!) through firn, or old snow, and the ramifications for past levels of atmospheric gases. When I discover how to move comments between threads, I’ll add the relevant comments from other threads.
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