A new paper about to be in press, comes at the end of a flurry of papers and reports published this week that claims Antarctica was losing ice mass. Zwally says ice growth is anywhere from 50 gigatons to 200 gigatons a year. NASA glaciologist Jay Zwally says his new study will show, once again, the eastern Antarctic ice sheet is gaining enough ice to offset losses in the west.
by Tony Heller, June 4, 2018 in TheDeplorableClimSciBlog
According to the Danish Meteorological Institute, Arctic sea ice volume is highest for the past eleven years and above the fifteen year mean since the start of DMI records in 2003.
That’s more than a 25% adjustment (15,000 sq. km to 19,000 sq km). So while chunks the size of Manhattans may break off from time to time, about 300 Manhattans of new ice gets added annually.
The report notes that in the Antarctic Ocean: “the annual maximum and annual mean sea ice extents have shown a long-term trend of increase since 1979”.
In describing their findings, Lovell et al. state that “between 1972 and 2013, 36% of glacier termini in the entire study area advanced and 25% of glacier termini retreated, with the remainder showing no discernible change outside of the measurement error (± 66 m or ± 1.6 m yr-1) and classified as ‘no change'” (see figure below). Although there were some regional differences in glacier termini changes, these regions over the last four decades were more closely linked to non-climatic drivers, such as terminus type and geometry, than any obvious climatic or oceanic forcing.”
Meanwhile, other scientists have been busy determining that only about 50% of the warming and sea ice losses for the Arctic region are anthropogenic, or connected to the rise in CO2 concentrations.
The rest of the warming and ice declines can be attributed to unforced natural variability.
by James E. Kamis, April 16, 2018 in ClimateChangeDispatch
Recent changes to Lake Hazen, the world’s largest high-Arctic lake, are from increased heat flow from the area’s known geological features, and not from global warming as per the many alarmist media reports.
Evidence supporting this is abundant and reliable.
By Tony Heller, April 1, 2018 in TheDeplorableClimSciBlog
With temperatures of -30C and Arctic sea ice nearing its winter maximum, government climate scientists and their useful idiots in the press announce that Arctic sea ice is “near an all time low.”
In the actual Arctic, sea ice extent is increasing, more than
double six months ago, and essentially identical to all recent years (…)
Although a number of scientists are hollering that 2017 was “among the warmest on record”, we are not seeing any manifestation of this, at least over the northern hemisphere, where ironically snow and ice have shown surprising extents. This year the northern hemisphere winter has been surprisingly cold and brutal over a number of regions.
On March 20, 2018, northern hemisphere snow and ice cover was over 1 standard deviation above normal. Source: Environment Canada.
Sea ice in the Arctic grew to its annual maximum extent last week, and joined 2015, 2016 and 2017 as the four lowest maximum extents on record, according to scientists at the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and NASA.
On March 17, the Arctic sea ice cover peaked at 5.59 million square miles (14.48 million square kilometers), making it the second lowest maximum on record, at about 23,200 square miles (60,000 square kilometers) larger than the record low maximum reached on March 7, 2017 (…)
How Does the Recent Melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet Compare to the Early Holocene?
Short answer: Same as it ever was. Vinther et al., 2009 reconstructed the elevations of four ice core sites over the Holocene. There has been very little change in elevation of the two interior ice core sites (NGRIP and GRIP), while the two outboard sites (Camp Century and DYE3) have lost 546 and 342 m of ice respectively.
The sunspot number for February 2018 was 10.6 and thus was some 30% below the meanfor this time into the cycle. At the moment solar activity is close to quiet.
Just 10 years ago, all the talk was about the Arctic sea ice “death spiral”, with some of scientists hysterically predicting the sea ice would soon disappear altogether in the summertime. Ten years later the scientists are now scratching their heads as sea ice has stabilized and is showing some clear signs of a rebound.
German skeptic and weather expert ‘Schneefan’ here writes how climate activist Mark C. Serreze recently announced this year’s sea ice extent was at the smallest all-time area. But since then Arctic temperatures have plummeted and sea ice area has grown to over 14 million square kilometers (…)
by Douglas Fox, February 16, 2018 in NationalGeographic
Scientists have peered into one of the least-explored swaths of ocean on Earth, a vast region located off the coast of West Antarctica. It is locked beneath a crust of ice larger than Spain and more than 1,000 feet thick, making its waters perpetually dark—and extremely difficult for humans to access. Now, a team of researchers has bored a hole through the ice and sampled the ocean beneath it. Their work could shed light on a poorly understood, but ominous episode in Antarctica’s recent past… (…)
by R.F. Cronin, March 5, 2018 in ClimateChangeDispatch
Actually, the glaciers of Antarctica form in a very different way than Arctic or mountain glaciers. Steam and meltwater feed the glaciers from below. It is the steam from multiple subglacial volcanoes, rifts, and trenches. Antarctica is very seismically active.
In his seminal 1982 book Climate, History, and the Modern World, the renown climatologist Dr. H.H. Lamb revealed that sea ice in the subarctic and Arctic regions was much less extensive during the Medieval Warm Period (9th-13th centuries) compared to today.
For example, records indicate that there were decadal and centennial-scale periods without any sea ice invading any of Iceland’s coasts. These no-ice periods coincided with atmospheric CO2 concentrations of 275 ppm, which is about 130 ppm less than today’s calculated CO2 values.
“It blew our minds”… Of course it blew their minds. It always blows their minds when it’s not worse than previously expected. The climate science community probably has more blown minds per capita than UC Berkeley did in 1969.
A few years ago, 10 glaciologists publishing in the journal Nature Geoscience asserted that “large parts of the north-central Greenland ice sheet are melting from below” due to high geothermal heat flux forcing (Rogozhina et al., 2016).
In a new paper published in Scientific Reports, 4 more glaciologists (Rysgaardet al., 2018) report that “hot vents” (or hot springs) of geothermally-heated water underneath the Greenland ice sheet can explain localized rising temperatures and glacial melting.
The short answer to the question posed in the title to this article is virtually and practically nothing. They definitely do not tell us what is claimed, that is, accurate representation of the state of the atmosphere including temperature in individual years. This is why one of the world’s experts on atmospheric chemistry and ice cores Zbigniew Jaworowski M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc., wrote,
“It was never experimentally demonstrated that ice core records reliably represent the original atmospheric composition.”
A new study published Jan. 8 in the journal Nature Geoscience reveals that strong El Nino events can cause significant ice loss in some Antarctic ice shelves while the opposite may occur during strong La Nina events.
The East Antarctic Ice Sheet locks away enough water to raise sea level an estimated 53 meters (174 feet), more than any other ice sheet on the planet. It’s also thought to be among the most stable, not gaining or losing mass even as ice sheets in West Antarctica and Greenland shrink.
This is the seventh and last post in my series on the hazards of climate change. In this post we examine the effects of climate change on glaciers and sea level rise. The first six examined the effect of humans on the environment, the effect of the growing human population, climate change and the food supply, the cost of global warming, the effect of man and climate change on extinctions, climate (or weather) related deaths, and extreme weather and climate change.
For the first time scientists have directly observed living bacteria in polar ice and snow — an environment once considered sterile. “As microbial activity and its influence on its local environment has never been taken into account when looking at ice-core gas samples it could provide a moderate source of error in climate history interpretations.”
