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Greenland's ice cap

The take home quote from the paper's conclusions is:

"The observed deficit indicates an annual contribution of 0.74 ± 0.14 mm/yr to global mean sea level ..."

So if Colorado University says sea level is going up 3.4 mm/yr there's another 2.7 mm/yr coming from somewhere else.
 
And speaking of my favorite topic (Sea Level) two things are on the horizon:

CU's publication:

"Is the detection of accelerated sea level rise imminent?" by Fasullo et al.

Sort of says that they've already written the conclusions

And the Jason-3 Satellite was launched earlier this year:

JASON-3 SATELLITE TO TRACK RISING SEA LEVELS, GLOBAL WEATHER

CU's Release #3, which still employs Jason-2, dates from June 30th
so it might be a while until Release #4 comes out. But when it does,
you can bet that the combination of the Fasullo et al paper and the
new Jason-3 satellite will result in a fusillade of "It's Worse than
Previously Thought" headlines for sea level rise.

I'll be tracking what they come up with to see if this graph
2s7yxxz.jpg

changes. I'm guessing that they will make major changes.

If you look carefully at that graph it looks like they have already begun
to lower the past and increase the recent rates. (2011_rel4 vs 2016_rel3)
 
Last edited:
Steve Case said:
The take home quote from the paper's conclusions is:

"The observed deficit indicates an annual contribution of 0.74 ± 0.14 mm/yr to global mean sea level ..."

So if Colorado University says sea level is going up 3.4 mm/yr there's another 2.7 mm/yr coming from somewhere else.
Click to expand...
Part of it is thermal expansion of the waters.

part of it is erosion of land, ending up as silt where rivers join the ocean.

Part of it is other ice sheet loss.

Part of it is the lowering of the aquifers as we pump water out for irrigation and drinking.

Probably a few things I left out.

Did I miss it? I didn't see anything where they said why they thought it was melting. Besides CO2, we know that both soot and increased geothermal activity is contributing to Greenland's ice loss.
 
Steve Case said:
And speaking of my favorite topic (Sea Level) two things are on the horizon:

CU's publication:

"Is the detection of accelerated sea level rise imminent?" by Fasullo et al.

Sort of says that they've already written the conclusions

And the Jason-3 Satellite was launched earlier this year:

JASON-3 SATELLITE TO TRACK RISING SEA LEVELS, GLOBAL WEATHER

CU's Release #3, which still employs Jason-2, dates from June 30th
so it might be a while until Release #4 comes out. But when it does,
you can bet that the combination of the Fasullo et al paper and the
new Jason-3 satellite will result in a fusillade of "It's Worse than
Previously Thought" headlines for sea level rise.

I'll be tracking what they come up with to see if this graph
2s7yxxz.jpg

changes. I'm guessing that they will make major changes.

If you look carefully at that graph it looks like they have already begun
to lower the past and increase the recent rates. (2011_rel4 vs 2016_rel3)
Click to expand...

So... 3.4 mm/yr means what? 294 years for a meter? 7-1/2 years for an inch? 90 years for a foot?

Plenty of time for natural removal and replacement of structures to keep up,
 
Lord of Planar said:
Part of it is thermal expansion of the waters.

part of it is erosion of land, ending up as silt where rivers join the ocean.

Part of it is other ice sheet loss.

Part of it is the lowering of the aquifers as we pump water out for irrigation and drinking.

Probably a few things I left out.

Did I miss it? I didn't see anything where they said why they thought it was melting. Besides CO2, we know that both soot and increased geothermal activity is contributing to Greenland's ice loss.
Click to expand...

Is that what is happening to Mt. Kilimanjaro?
 
Casper said:
Is that what is happening to Mt. Kilimanjaro?
Click to expand...

Small and not really in bad shape. The alarmists predicted years ago a disaster that isn't taking place. If you believe Skeptical Science and John Crook, the primary cause is land use changes. Not greenhouse gasses:


Yet according to the November 2003 issue of Nature magazine, "Although it's tempting to blame the ice loss on global warming, researchers think deforestation of the mountain's foothills is the more likely culprit. Without the forests' humidity, previously moisture-laden winds blew dry. No longer replenished with water, the ice is evaporating in the strong equatorial sunshine.
​

https://www.skepticalscience.com/mount-kilimanjaro-snow.htm

The paper says:


Although it's tempting to blame the ice loss on global warming, researchers think that deforestation of the mountain's foothills is the more likely culprit. Without the forests' humidity, previously moisture-laden winds blew dry. No longer replenished with water, the ice is evaporating in the strong equatorial sunshine.

Quick fix

Reforestation is the best long-term solution, but trees won't grow fast enough to save the ice, argues Nisbet. A temporary band-aid is needed. "The most obvious and simple solution would be to hang a white drape over it to reflect sunlight and reduce wind," he says.
​

African ice under wraps : Nature News
 
Lord of Planar said:
Small and not really in bad shape. The alarmists predicted years ago a disaster that isn't taking place. If you believe Skeptical Science and John Crook, the primary cause is land use changes. Not greenhouse gasses:


Yet according to the November 2003 issue of Nature magazine, "Although it's tempting to blame the ice loss on global warming, researchers think deforestation of the mountain's foothills is the more likely culprit. Without the forests' humidity, previously moisture-laden winds blew dry. No longer replenished with water, the ice is evaporating in the strong equatorial sunshine.
​

https://www.skepticalscience.com/mount-kilimanjaro-snow.htm

The paper says:


Although it's tempting to blame the ice loss on global warming, researchers think that deforestation of the mountain's foothills is the more likely culprit. Without the forests' humidity, previously moisture-laden winds blew dry. No longer replenished with water, the ice is evaporating in the strong equatorial sunshine.

Quick fix

Reforestation is the best long-term solution, but trees won't grow fast enough to save the ice, argues Nisbet. A temporary band-aid is needed. "The most obvious and simple solution would be to hang a white drape over it to reflect sunlight and reduce wind," he says.
​

African ice under wraps : Nature News
Click to expand...

Must be what happened to every other ice sheet and glacier on the planet also, ok, that is clarified.
 
Casper said:
Must be what happened to every other ice sheet and glacier on the planet also, ok, that is clarified.
Click to expand...

Pffftttt....

Seriously?

What a silly response. You shouldn't debate topics that you don't understand.

I personally blame aerosols for loss of ice as the primary cause.

Google "soot on ice."

Here is the first on a Google search minutes ago:

Soot and Dirt Is Melting Snow and Ice Around the World
 
Casper said:
Really I thought we dealt with dirty air, oh wait.....never mind.
Click to expand...
There are multiple factors. CO2 is just one of many. Quantifying each without bias is hard. Man made aerosols are quantified as having a dramatic effect on snow and ice albedo. Generally doubling or more the radiant heat absorbed. The radiant heat of CO2 has only increased by about 5% at best.
 
Steve Case said:
And speaking of my favorite topic (Sea Level) two things are on the horizon:

CU's publication:

"Is the detection of accelerated sea level rise imminent?" by Fasullo et al.

Sort of says that they've already written the conclusions

And the Jason-3 Satellite was launched earlier this year:

JASON-3 SATELLITE TO TRACK RISING SEA LEVELS, GLOBAL WEATHER

CU's Release #3, which still employs Jason-2, dates from June 30th
so it might be a while until Release #4 comes out. But when it does,
you can bet that the combination of the Fasullo et al paper and the
new Jason-3 satellite will result in a fusillade of "It's Worse than
Previously Thought" headlines for sea level rise.

I'll be tracking what they come up with to see if this graph

changes. I'm guessing that they will make major changes.

If you look carefully at that graph it looks like they have already begun
to lower the past and increase the recent rates. (2011_rel4 vs 2016_rel3)
Click to expand...
The Jason 3 uses the same sampling wavelengths and the same single dish altimeter as Jason 2.
The electronics may be updated, but they cannot get away from the physics.
A system with a single transmitter/receiver, is limited to the sampling wavelength.
http://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/jason-3/pdf/Jason-3 Poseidon 3B Altimeter.pdf
Poseidon-3 emits pulses at two frequencies (13.6 GHz in the Ku band and 5.3 GHz in the C band) to measure
very accurately the distance from the satellite to the sea surface and then to derive the surface POSEIDON-3B
(within a few centimeters) using its precise location of the satellite.
Click to expand...
At least they are honest about the accuracy, the shortest wavelength is 3X10^8 meters per second/13.6 Ghz,
or 2.2 cm. In reality other errors cause the accuracy to be even lower.
If the say the sea level is raising 3 mm a year, it means the data moved up 1 minimum resolvable unit over 10 years.
 
Do we know how the land under the Ice sheet is moving due to tectonic action?

Just the altitude is not really enough to know about the ice mass.

Also for sea level changes the shape of the ocean floor is surely important. If the Mid Ocean ridge is rising then that would be far more effective at raising sea levels.
 
[h=2]Arctic Sea Ice — it all melted before and it didn’t matter[/h]
Matt Ridley in The Australian explains how every man and his dog is forecasting the doom of the Arctic sea ice, and not only have they been wrong year after year, but they all assume that if the ice all melts it’ll be a global disaster. But Earth’s already been-there done-that, and for years, and it was no-biggie. Polar bears obviously got through it, as did seals. Humans without protective solar panels somehow spread far and wide, and generally flourished.
I suspect the main climate refugees from the Arctic would have names like Donner and Blitzen. This is the one thing Matt doesn’t explain — in 8,000BC when the ice melted, what the heck happened with Santa?
[h=1]Ice scares aren’t all they’re cracked up to be[/h]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.
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. . . .
 
Arctic / Sea ice
Arctic ice – a historical viewpoint

Guest essay by Roger Graves The subject of the extent of Arctic ice cover has been much in the news, with an apparently unending series of attempts to predict its future extent on the basis of a relatively few years’ worth of data. However, it is possible to make some general predictions, based on a…



 
Greenland ice sheet
[h=1]Good For The Greenland Ice Sheet, Bad For The Corn Belt[/h]Guest essay by David Archibald One thing that climate rationalists and warmers can agree on is that we all would like to have a healthy Greenland Ice Sheet. The good news on that front is that the ice sheet has put on 500 Gt this year as per this diagram provided by the Danish Meteorological…
 
Jack Hays said:

[h=1]Remember when the calving of the Petermann Glacier was a sure sign of ‘global warming’? Never mind.[/h]WUWT readers may recall some articles we did years back debunking the alarm over the Petermann glacier calving off a large iceberg. In case you are unfamiliar, it’s what glaciers do. But, this particular event was seen as a bad omen of the planet, as this 2012 article in The Independent illustrates: The whole Petermann…
Continue reading →
Click to expand...

More idiocy from Watts. Nobody said the glacier would stop advancing after it calved!
 
Surface Detail said:
More idiocy from Watts. Nobody said the glacier would stop advancing after it calved!
Click to expand...

An article in Wired magazine recounts how sea-ice modellers are sharing data and methods and are learning from each other in the process. It’s not obvious whether the sea-ice community have actually made their data and code open to the world or whether this is just a case of sharing within the community, but it’s a step forwards at least.It’s also nice to see Mark Serreze apologising for his role in stirring up scare stories in 2007:
“In hindsight, probably too much was read into 2007, and I would take some blame for that,” Serreze said. “There were so many of us that were astounded by what happened, and maybe we read too much into it.”
​
If climatologists are now going to eschew scaremongering then that is certainly welcome.
 
Lord of Planar said:
Pffftttt....

Seriously?

What a silly response. You shouldn't debate topics that you don't understand.

I personally blame aerosols for loss of ice as the primary cause.

Google "soot on ice."

Here is the first on a Google search minutes ago:

Soot and Dirt Is Melting Snow and Ice Around the World
Click to expand...

Scientists are of mixed opinions on this subject. Many say it is rising air temperatures and rising water temperatures, from CO2 insulation in the atmosphere, that causes most of the melting. Some say it is from darker ice and snow surfaces (soot).

Regardless, the solution is the same - stop burning so damn many fossil fuels.

Atmospheric CO2 was up again, last month - for the first time ever, the level exceeded 407 ppm.

https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/
 
Media_Truth said:
Scientists are of mixed opinions on this subject. Many say it is rising air temperatures and rising water temperatures, from CO2 insulation in the atmosphere, that causes most of the melting. Some say it is from darker ice and snow surfaces (soot).

Regardless, the solution is the same - stop burning so damn many fossil fuels.

Atmospheric CO2 was up again, last month - for the first time ever, the level exceeded 407 ppm.

https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/
Click to expand...

Fossil fuels can be burned without producing atmospheric soot.

Your reliance of "climate" dot NASA is worse than someone using Watts.

You should read the actual papers instead of letting a pundit guide your belief system.
 
Surface Detail said:
More idiocy from Watts. Nobody said the glacier would stop advancing after it calved!
Click to expand...

So when it retreats it's global warming but when it comes back it does not matter untill it retreats again and then it's back to panic?
 
Tim the plumber said:
So when it retreats it's global warming but when it comes back it does not matter untill it retreats again and then it's back to panic?
Click to expand...

It's not hard, Tim. The normal behaviour for the edge of a coastal glacier is to advance at a steady slow speed and, every now and then, for a chunk to break off. In this case, an unexpectedly large chunk broke off, which is indicative of warming. This doesn't mean that the glacier should also have stopped flowing, as Watts seems to be implying!
 
Surface Detail said:
It's not hard, Tim. The normal behaviour for the edge of a coastal glacier is to advance at a steady slow speed and, every now and then, for a chunk to break off. In this case, an unexpectedly large chunk broke off, which is indicative of warming. This doesn't mean that the glacier should also have stopped flowing, as Watts seems to be implying!
Click to expand...

Watts implied no such thing. In fact, he argued the opposite. It's the alarmist scientist who had it wrong. From the link in #18 and #20:

It’s also nice to see Mark Serreze apologising for his role in stirring up scare stories in 2007:
“In hindsight, probably too much was read into 2007, and I would take some blame for that,” Serreze said. “There were so many of us that were astounded by what happened, and maybe we read too much into it.”
If climatologists are now going to eschew scaremongering then that is certainly welcome.
 
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