ice sheet losses in Greenland and Antarctica reach new highs

Dunno whether this vid has been mentioned in this thread yet?
[youtube]VbiRNT_gWUQ[/youtube]
 
LockH said:
Dunno whether this vid has been mentioned in this thread yet?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbiRNT_gWUQ
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That video is by far the most watched video on bi insider youtube... over 7million views... everyone's nicely scared..
I got a video from ABC catalyst that shows says a sea marker in the rock where the sea water level reached 175 years ago..
jump to 19:30 to see them talk about it.. anyway they think its risen 17cm from 175 years ago.
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/3633447.htm

Add/edit.. This is one of the oldest known man-made and well-documented sea markers in the world.. The man who put this in Sir James Clark Ross has been noted in several old books and notes from Australian and British archives as saying he wanted the mean sea level marked.. The problem is at least for global warming folks is that the mark has barely moved depending on how you want to interpret it...
That's the amazing thing about climate change etc as you can even mark in a large line in rock 175 years ago and still cause massive debate about its accuracy etc.
http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Joint/Completed_Inquiries/jsct/kyoto/sub44c
http://yourmemento.naa.gov.au/2011/01/archives-conservation-efforts-assist-global-warming-research/
rossmark1_cropped.jpg

BTW the URL on the other post above doesn't work.. this one?
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/science/melting-arctic-permafrost-releasing-ancient-carbon-study-confirms/article31542434/
 
TheBeastie said:
BTW the URL on the other post above doesn't work.. this one?
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/science/melting-arctic-permafrost-releasing-ancient-carbon-study-confirms/article31542434/
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Oooops. Tks... you Beast. Now fixed (hopefully). :)
 
Graffiti sign hung in South Beach, Miami, Florida...
14074930_10154485690502990_1896249004_o
 
So is that marker showing the rate at which everything is remaining constant? Or is it showing that the water level is rising just as fast as that rock ledge?
Why mountains rise: http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/permanent-exhibitions/rose-center-for-earth-and-space/david-s.-and-ruth-l.-gottesman-hall-of-planet-earth/why-are-there-ocean-basins-continents-and-mountains/mountain-building/modeling-mountain-building/why-mountains-rise
 
r3volved said:
So is that marker showing the rate at which everything is remaining constant? Or is it showing that the water level is rising just as fast as that rock ledge?
Why mountains rise: http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/permanent-exhibitions/rose-center-for-earth-and-space/david-s.-and-ruth-l.-gottesman-hall-of-planet-earth/why-are-there-ocean-basins-continents-and-mountains/mountain-building/modeling-mountain-building/why-mountains-rise
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The article talks about the fact the sea level marker was put in a great geological spot to not move over time and is aparently the type of spot they put all the most modern scientific sea level instruments they use today.
 
That aph.gov.au writer doesn't even know how the tides work...how am I to believe his other explanations?

The national archives says:
In 1999 the University of Canberra, the University of Tasmania and the CSIRO established a sea-level monitoring station at Port Arthur. Evaluating the data gained at this monitoring station against Lempriere’s original tidal records has enabled the first comprehensive comparison of 1841 and present-day Port Arthur sea-levels. The results of this study show a rise in the sea-level of at least 13 centimetres since 1841.
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This 13cm result was from this case study: http://soer.justice.tas.gov.au/2003/casestudy/4/index.php
 
Video shot back in 2008:
[youtube]hC3VTgIPoGU[/youtube]

(39 million [V]iews so far on YT)
 
LockH said:
Video shot back in 2008:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC3VTgIPoGU

(39 million [V]iews so far on YT)
Click to expand...

That glaciers mouth is in Sermermiut in the middle southern part of Greenland..Looked it up on google maps to have a gander my self...
https://goo.gl/maps/uT4hK5bZd1S2
 
r3volved said:
Since these are subscriber only articles, could you post their sources?
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Add/Edit.. OK sorry.. was selfish, included entire article as requested. Also included the pic on the article at the bottom.. why not..
All from the article from The Times news paper.

Ice scares aren’t all they’re cracked up to be

Doom-mongering scientists telling us that the melting Arctic is a disaster conveniently overlook vast chunks of history
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ice-scares-arent-all-theyre-cracked-up-to-be-s9fsw6rbc
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/ice-scares-arent-all-theyre-cracked-up-to-be/news-story/147a4aa8d7089adbbf2a0de714237d9d

The sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is approaching its annual nadir. By early September each year about two-thirds of the ice cap has melted, then the sea begins to freeze again. This year looks unlikely to set a record for melting, with more than four million square kilometres of ice remaining, less than the average in the 1980s and 90s, but more than in the record low years of 2007 and 2012. (The amount of sea ice around Antarctica has been increasing in recent years, contrary to predictions.)

This will disappoint some. An expedition led by David Hempleman-Adams to circumnavigate the North Pole through the Northeast and Northwest passages, intending to demonstrate “that the Arctic sea ice coverage shrinks back so far now in the summer months that sea that was permanently locked up now can allow passage through”, was recently held up for weeks north of Siberia by, um, ice. They have only just reached halfway.

Meanwhile, the habit of some scientists of predicting when the ice will disappear completely keeps getting them into trouble. NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally told the Associated Press in 2007: “At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012.” Two years later Al Gore quoted another scientist that “there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years” — that is, by now.

This year Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University has a new book out called Farewell to Ice, which gives a “greater than even chance” that the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free next month. Not likely.

He added: “Next year or the year after that, I think it will be free of ice in summer ... You will be able to cross over the North Pole by ship.” The temptation to predict a total melt of the Arctic ice cap, and thereby get a headline, has been counter-productive, according to other scientists. Crying wolf does not help the cause of global warming; it only gives amusement to sceptics.

Would it matter if it did all melt one year? Here’s the point everybody seems to be missing: the Arctic Ocean’s ice has indeed disappeared during summer in the past, routinely. The evidence comes from various sources, such as beach ridges in northern Greenland, never unfrozen today, which show evidence of wave action in the past. One Danish team concluded in 2012 that 8500 years ago the ice extent was “less than half of the record low 2007 level”. A Swedish team, in a paper published in 2014, went further: between 10,000 years ago and 6000 years ago, the Arctic experienced a “regime dominated by seasonal ice, ie, ice-free summers”.

This was a period known as the “early Holocene insolation maximum” (EHIM). Because the Earth’s axis was tilted away from the vertical more than today (known as obliquity), and because we were then closer to the Sun in July than in January (known as precession), the amount of the Sun’s energy hitting the far north in summer was much greater than today. This “great summer” effect was the chief reason the Earth had emerged from an ice age, because hot northern summers had melted the great ice caps of North America and Eurasia, exposing darker land and sea to absorb more sunlight and warm the whole planet.

The effect was huge: about an extra 50 watts per square metre 80 degrees north in June. By contrast, the total effect of man-made global warming will reach 3.5 watts per square metre (but globally) only by the end of this century.

To put it in context, the EHIM was the period during which agriculture was invented in about seven different parts of the globe at once. Copper smelting began; cattle and sheep were domesticated; wine and cheese were developed; the first towns appeared. The seas being warmer, the climate was generally wet so the Sahara had rivers and forests, hippos and people.

That the Arctic sea ice disappeared each August or September in those days does not seem to have done harm (remember that melting sea ice, as opposed to land ice, does not affect sea level), and nor did it lead to a tipping point towards ever-more rapid warming. Indeed, the reverse was the case: evidence from stalagmites in tropical caves, sea-floor sediments and ice cores on the Greenland ice cap shows that temperatures gradually but erratically cooled over the next few thousand years as the obliquity of the axis and the precession of the equinoxes changed. Sunlight is now weaker in July than January again (on global average).

Barring one especially cold snap 8200 years ago, the coldest spell of the past 10 millennia was the very recent “little ice age” of AD1300-1850, when glaciers advanced, tree lines descended and the Greenland Norse died out.

It seems that the quantity of Arctic sea ice varies more than we used to think. We don’t really know how much ice there was in the 1920s and 30s — satellites only started measuring it in 1979, a relatively cold time in the Arctic — but there is anecdotal evidence of considerable ice retreat in those decades, when temperatures were high in the Arctic.

Today’s melting may be man-made, but the EHIM precedent is still relevant. Polar bears clearly survived the ice-free seasons of 10,000-6000 years ago, as they cope with ice-free summers or autumns in many parts of their range today, such as Hudson Bay. They need sea ice in spring when they feed on seal pups and they sometimes suffer if it is too thick, preventing seals from breeding in an area.

Meanwhile, theory predicts, and data confirms, that today’s carbon-dioxide-induced man-made warming is happening more at night than during the day, more during winter than summer and more in the far north than near the equator. An Arctic winter night is affected much more than a tropical summer day. If it were the other way around, it would be more harmful.

Some time in the next few decades, we may well see the Arctic Ocean without ice in August or September for at least a few weeks, just as it was in the time of our ancestors. The effect on human welfare, and on animal and plant life, will be small. For all the attention it gets, the reduction in Arctic ice is the most visible, but least harmful, effect of global warming.

43a4a48fa1f00329e93f2f6916370cb3

The Times
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TheBeastie said:
Add/Edit.. OK sorry.. was selfish, included entire article as requested. Also included the pic on the article at the bottom.. why not..
All from the article from The Times news paper.

Ice scares aren’t all they’re cracked up to be

Doom-mongering scientists telling us that the melting Arctic is a disaster conveniently overlook vast chunks of history
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ice-scares-arent-all-theyre-cracked-up-to-be-s9fsw6rbc
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/ice-scares-arent-all-theyre-cracked-up-to-be/news-story/147a4aa8d7089adbbf2a0de714237d9d
Click to expand...

A lot of wrong and misleading information in that article and the published journal articles it cites are out of context. For example, see quoted abstract below from the 2002 article that it cites. That article concluded that early Holocene ice-free periods were likely due to a insolation maximum associated with Earth's orbital cycles. Their hypothesis was validated by modeling that suggest this is a plausible explanation. However the the Earth today is not in a part of the orbital cycle that would cause an insolation maxumum in the Arctic so the current melting has to be due to some other explanation. The only plausible explanation is that it is cause by warming due to increased greenhouse gas concentrations, mainly human produced CO2. This explanation for the modern warming is also validated by models.

You can check out the full article here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379113004162. Figure 1 in the article shows that we are at a completely opposite phase in the orbital cycle now, compared to what it was in the early Holocene around 10,000 to 6,000 years ago. Further, that melting phase occurred over several millenia, whereas the current melting is occurring over decades.

Arctic Ocean perennial sea ice breakdown during the Early Holocene Insolation Maximum
Christian Strannea, Martin Jakobssonb, Göran Björka
Abstract

Arctic Ocean sea ice proxies generally suggest a reduction in sea ice during parts of the early and middle Holocene (∼6000–10,000 years BP) compared to present day conditions. This sea ice minimum has been attributed to the northern hemisphere Early Holocene Insolation Maximum (EHIM) associated with Earth's orbital cycles. Here we investigate the transient effect of insolation variations during the final part of the last glaciation and the Holocene by means of continuous climate simulations with the coupled atmosphere–sea ice–ocean column model CCAM. We show that the increased insolation during EHIM has the potential to push the Arctic Ocean sea ice cover into a regime dominated by seasonal ice, i.e. ice free summers. The strong sea ice thickness response is caused by the positive sea ice albedo feedback. Studies of the GRIP ice cores and high latitude North Atlantic sediment cores show that the Bølling–Allerød period (c. 12,700–14,700 years BP) was a climatically unstable period in the northern high latitudes and we speculate that this instability may be linked to dual stability modes of the Arctic sea ice cover characterized by e.g. transitions between periods with and without perennial sea ice cover.
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I think it's angle is not that man-made global warming is false, but that it doesn't matter, because it was just as warmer, or warmer, 8-10,000 years ago.

My main problem with that is I don't think the scenarios are comparable. One seems to be increased warming in the Arctic specifically due to greater tilt of the Earth's axis, the other is *global* warming that also affects the Artic. The former scenario may have had less or no warming effect on the rest of the Earth.

It's probably a happy coincidence that this period of man-made warming is occurring at around the insolation minimum, else things could be a lot worse!
 
Punx0r said:
I think it's angle is not that man-made global warming is false, but that it doesn't matter, because it was just as warmer, or warmer, 8-10,000 years ago.

My main problem with that is I don't think the scenarios are comparable. One seems to be increased warming in the Arctic specifically due to greater tilt of the Earth's axis, the other is *global* warming that also affects the Artic. The former scenario may have had less or no warming effect on the rest of the Earth.

It's probably a happy coincidence that this period of man-made warming is occurring at around the insolation minimum, else things could be a lot worse!
Click to expand...

Amen, Punx0r. I think you are exactly right. Another thing to consider that makes this warming of more concern is that it is happening on a time scale of several decades so there is not time for evolutionary adaptation. Previous warmings took many hundreds or thousands of years for the transition to occur.
 
"Greenland’s ice sheet is melting much faster than scientists thought"
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/greenland-ice-sheet-melting-much-144052272.html
Until recently, researchers believed that Greenland was losing 550 trillion pounds of ice a year. New research published Sept. 21 in Science Advances shows they might have vastly underestimated how bad the situation is.
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But in the new study, a team of scientists used a network of GPS sensors to figure out how quickly the earth was bouncing back up, and concluded that the previous compensation method was inaccurate. In fact, they say, previous methods were underestimating ice loss by 20 million tons a year—or about 40 trillion pounds. So in actuality, Greenland lost an average of 590 trillion pounds of ice every year between 2003 and 2013.
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:oops:
 
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