About

Earl Aagaard’s opinions about everything that interests him. Og also enjoys gardening, travel, reading, woodbutchery, and lots of other stuff.

Monthly Archives

Join Og's Mailing List

OgBlog.net

WHAT’S HAPPENING WITH THE ICE IN THE ANTARCTIC?

What we’re reading, seeing, and hearing in the media is mostly similar to the following:

This week Science Magazine’s on-line SciencExpress reports that Antarctica has been losing large amounts of ice mass over the past three years, contributing to sea level rise at a rate of 0.4 ± 0.2 mm/year. This comes on the heels of a paper published by Science two weeks ago that reported that Greenland was also losing big chunks of ice and contributing to sea level rise at a rate of 0.57 mm/yr.

But, is this “fact”......or more global warming “spin”. Well:

This differs from the results published by Davis et al. in Science magazine just last summer, which used a different satellite and over a longer time period—May1982 through May 2003. While Davis et al. did find that the smaller WAIS was losing mass, they also found that the much larger Eastern Antarctic Ice Sheet was gaining mass at a rate that exceeded the loss over the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet. In total, Davis et al. found that Antarctica was gaining mass (from increased snow accumulation) and contributing to a decline in sea level of about 0.09 mm/yr. The differences between these two results likely lie somewhere in the collection of factors that include different time periods, different spatial coverages, and in analysis uncertainties.

So, what are we to believe?! It’s uncomfortable for human beings who want to *know* things (and that’s most of us), but sometimes, you just can’t.

one thing is clear. The beginning of the Velicogna and Wahl analysis occurs during an unusually high point in the longer record of Davis et al. (Figure 3). This means that the apparent decline in the record of Velicogna and Wahl may simply be a short term correction to an anomalously high mass gain during a period of long-term mass growth. But who is to know for sure? It is impossible to tell anything about a trend in a system as vast as Antarctica with less than three years worth of data.

But, the data we do have doesn’t support the Chicken Littles of the current age. READ THE WHOLE THING

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/14 at 01:51 PM

Comments and reactions