Polar regions, glaciers and ice
This thread is for discussion of ice in its various forms and regions.
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Glaciers
val majkus says:
October 28, 2010 at 1:18 pm
Nice article by John McLean in Quadrant Online https://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2010/10/glaciergate
John is a member of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition and the article is about IPCC procedures
FALL MEETING OF THE AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION:
Galloping Glaciers of Greenland Have Reined Themselves In
Richard A. Kerr
Science 23 January 2009:
Vol. 323. no. 5913, p. 458
DOI: 10.1126/science.323.5913.458a
Ice loss in Greenland has had some climatologists speculating that global warming might have brought on a scary new regime of wildly heightened ice loss and an ever-faster rise in sea level. But glaciologists reported at the American Geophysical Union meeting that Greenland ice’s Armageddon has come to an end.
New paper shows ‘dramatic slow down of ice loss in southeast Greenland’
A paper published online yesterday in the Journal of Geophysical Research finds “the loss rate in southeast Greenland for the more recent period has become almost negligible, down from 109 ± 28 Gt/yr of just a few years ago. The rapid change in the nature of the regional ice mass in southeast and northwest Greenland, in the course of only several years, further reinforces the idea that the Greenland ice sheet mass balance is very vulnerable to regional climate conditions.” Global warming allegedly due to greenhouse gases would not be expected to cause such regional interannual variability in Greenland ice loss, thus pointing to shifts in weather instead.
JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 116, B07406, 11 PP., 2011
Interannual variability of Greenland ice losses from satellite gravimetry
Key Points:
This study shows dramatic slow down of ice loss in southeast Greenland
Glaciers in northwest Greenland dominate the ice loss since 2007
Greenland ice mass shows significant interannual variability
J. L. Chen et al
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2011/07/new-paper-shows-dramatic-slow-down-of.html
New Zealand Glacier Monitoring:
End of Summer Snowline Survey 2010
NIWA Report
“On average, the latest survey indicated very slight mass positive balance for the index glaciers for the 2009/2010 glacier year”.
Himalayan Glaciers Stable Since 1992 Despite Large Human CO2 Emissions, Scientists Determine
Read here. The IPCC “consensus” science and global warming alarmists stated that Himalayan glaciers are melting at an accelerating rate and predicted their demise from CO2-induced warming would be soon. A recent peer-reviewed study finds that large glaciers in the northwest Himalayas are not experiencing accelerated warming, thus they won’t be disappearing as predicted.
“Working in the Nanga Parbat region of northern Pakistan…used a multi-temporal/multi-scale approach based on historical data, repeat photography and satellite imagery to develop a 70-year history of the behavior of that region’s Raikot Glacier…two German scientists report that visual comparison of repeat photography indicates “relatively small rates of recession and surface changes over the last seven decades,” and they say that “in the 1994 image, no significant retreat of the glacier margin can be detected in comparison with 1985.”…they report that “glacier fluctuations over the past 70 years are characterized by retreat between the 1930s and 1950s, a marked advance between the 1950s and 1980s, and a relatively stable situation after 1992,” adding that “a general trend of reduced glacier thickness does not appear significant over the whole observation period.”" [Susanne Schmidt, Marcus Nusser 2009: Journal of Glaciology]
http://www.c3headlines.com/2011/06/himalayan-glaciers-stable-since-1992-despite-large-human-co2-emissions-scientists-determine.html
Glaciergate no more
They can spin it every which way, does not dare hide the finding that the world’s greatest snow-capped peaks, which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice over the last decade.
The work comes from a survey all the world’s icecaps and glaciers, made possible by the use of satellite data. Overall. And from this, it has been found that the contribution of melting ice outside the two largest caps – Greenland and Antarctica – is much less then previously estimated. Furthermore, the lack of ice loss in the Himalayas and the other high peaks of Asia responsible for most of the discrepancy.
Yet the claim that the Himalayan glaciers were about to disappear was at the heart of Glaciergate, and the “Voodoo Science” jibe by Rajendra Pachauri.
>>>>>>>
http://eureferendum.blogspot.co.nz/2012/02/glaciergate-no-more.html
H/t Andy at ‘Asia’
RIDDLE OF THE GLACIERS. Ice Retreating.
The Sydney Morning Herald Friday 13 January 1939
One of the riddles which is puzzling geologists all over the world is the continuous retreat of the ice glaciers. Does this phenomenon indicate that the sun is getting hotter as some astronomers believe or is it dependent upon comparatively unimportant changes in the earth’s atmosphere ?
Consideration such as these were discussed by Professor R. Speight, formerly professor of geology at Canterbury College, Christchurch, New Zealand and now curator of the Canterbury Museum. In his presidential address to the geology section of the Science Congress today. His subject was “Some Aspects of Glaciation in New Zealand.”
The steady retreat of the glaciers in New Zealand he said had been observed during the last 70 years. Photographs taken in 1896 and 1935 showed that several glaciers had retreated distances varying from 100 yards to half a mile in 40 years
WORLD-WIDE PHENOMENON
The phenomenon, however, was world-wide. Equally impressive records were obtainable from Switzerland, Scandinavia, Iceland and the United States. Attempts had been made to reconcile these observations with the Bruckner cycle of climate change every 16 years. Pro-fessor Speight said, but so many discrepan- cies occurred that in his opinion precise synchronisation with that period could not be accepted.
In Alaska glaciers had been retreating from 100 to 200 years, the average rate of recession being about 50 feet a year. The Antarctic ice-sheet also showed signs of recent retreat.
“In fact,” said Professor Speight, “no case is recorded of a region of the world in which there are present signs of an advance. This is quite apart from the general retreat since the pleistocene age and may be merely a pacing phase. Its precise significance can only be determined by continued observation.”
http://www.real-science.com/1950-climate-science-involved-actual-scientists
Catastrophe postponed:-
By Deborah Zabarenko
Thu May 3, 2012 2:42pm EDT
Deborah Zabarenko has got her facts muddled though because she’s reporting:-
Maybe the catastrophe is back on.
Antarctic
Morgan donates money to climate research
Published: 12:31PM Tuesday June 02, 2009 Source: NZPA
Economist and philanthropist Gareth Morgan has donated $250,000 to Victoria University’s Antarctic Research Centre (ARC).
The grant will fund initiatives including a research fellowship on ice sheets and sea level to improve understanding of how ice sheets are likely to contribute to rising sea levels and the potential effect this could have in the southwest Pacific region.
Morgan said while studying the climate change debate it was clear that good scientific research was critical to ongoing understanding of the global warming issue and its risks.
The grant from his family’s charitable foundation will advance the contribution from the ARC research projects, which focus on understanding Antarctica’s climate history and processes, and their influence on the global climate system.
“Given the estimates of anthropogenic contributions to climate change remain subject to some uncertainty, and given that policy responses cannot wait until we have absolute certainty, it is imperative that the science continues to narrow it down to minimise the chances of inappropriate and costly policy responses,” Morgan said.
Antarctic ice is at a record high and growing at the ’steepest slope ever’
Steven Goddard
Watts Up With That?
June 30, 2010
We have been hearing a lot about how the decline in Arctic ice is following the “steepest slope ever.” The point is largely meaningless, but we can have some fun with it. The Bremen Arctic/Antarctic maps are superimposed above, showing that ice in the Antarctic is at a record high and growing at the “steepest slope ever.” You will also note that most of the world’s sea ice is located in the Antarctic. But those are inconvenient truths when trying to frighten people into believing that “the polar ice caps are melting.”
Scientists probe beneath Antarctic ice shelves
NIWA Media Release 22 November 2010
NIWA looks below Antarctic ice shelves to investigate the polar ocean system with a new high-tech probe.
NIWAs new Ice Tethered Profiler (ITP) places NIWA at the forefront of polar oceanography. It gives NIWA, and international scientists, insight into the interaction between the ocean, Antarcticas sea ice, and ice shelves thereby unlocking mysteries in Antarctic polar oceanography.
NIWA transported the ITP to Antarctica. It was deployed by NIWA scientist Craig Stewart, and IRLs Tim Haskell. The very first set of data from below the ice was sent via satellite on 19 November 2010.
It will provide NIWA with the first-ever year-round data set of what is happening beneath the ice in McMurdo Sound. The ITP collects temperature and salinity profiles. This information is relayed in real-time, via satellite, to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute website.
This will lead to a better understanding of the interactions between the ice sheet, the oceans, and what contribution this is making to sea-level rise. We are trying to understand how the ice shelf interaction is changing over time, says NIWA oceanographer, Dr Mike Williams.
Continues…….(with graphic and animation links)
Peer-Reviewed Study By Amateurs Trumps Bogus Antarctic Temperature Study By The “Experts”
Read here and here. Gotta love that headline. Amateurs taking it to the “experts” and then winning – very cool, in a non-temperature sort of way.
A group of interested individuals (amateur climate enthusiasts) took serious issue with the mathematical/statistical techniques used by climate-scientists to reconstruct Antarctic temperatures in a 2009 peer-reviewed study. As it turns out, this group of amateurs were better versed in proper mathematical/statistical analysis than the experts, and they brought that specific expertise to bear on the 2009 temperature reconstruction study. Objectively, even AGW alarmists are praising their work!
The result of this new peer-reviewed study? The Antarctic climate is not this monolithic warming environment that the IPCC Climategate “experts” attempted to portray to the politicians and taxpayers in the 2009 study. Instead, like all other large regions of the globe, Antarctica exhibits areas of warming, cooling and temperature stability. [Ryan O’Donnell, Nicholas Lewis, Steve McIntyre, Jeff Condon (2010)]
Based on this new analysis (O’Donnell et al.), modern temperature trends are no threat to the continent-sized ice sheets. Antarctica is soooo cold, a half-degree per decade, either way, is of zero significance.
See graphics……
Bottoms up Antarctic ice growth discovered
March 4, 2011 – 5:11PM – smh
New scientific research shows that massive ice sheets in Antarctica do not just grow on top when snow falls, they also grow from the bottom up.
Ice melts at the bottom of ice sheets, and the water helps the sheets slide across the ground below. But the water can refreeze to the bottom of the sheets and push them up, the researchers report on Thursday in the online edition of the journal Science.
The base of a massive ice plateau on the East Antarctic ice sheet called Dome A is about 24 per cent refrozen water, according to the team headed by Robin Bell, a geophysicist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
“The ice sheets are not simple layer cake structures. Water moves around underneath the ice sheet and deforms” it, Bell explained.
Antarctic ice – more accurate estimates
Cracking ice shelves make headlines, but ice loss estimates that are revised downwards don’t. While there is great hand wringing over coastal ice loss in Greenland and the West Antarctic Peninsula, East Antarctica has more than eight times the ice mass of either.
Last week’s Science magazine had a News Focus article on estimates of ice loss in Antarctica. It quietly discussed a paper published in May by two NASA scientists:
H. Jay Zwally & Mario B. Giovinetto (2011) Overview and Assessment of Antarctic Ice-Sheet Mass Balance Estimates: 1992– 2009. Surv Geophys DOI 10.1007/s10712-011-9123-5 (note this is Open Access)
[...]
“Mass balance estimates for the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS) in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and in more recent reports lie between approximately +50 to -250 Gt/year for 1992 to 2009. The 300 Gt/year range is approximately 15% of the annual mass input and 0.8 mm/year Sea Level Equivalent (SLE).”
[...]
Their reanalysis provides much lower estimates of net change in ice, ranging from +27 to -40 billion tons per year. For 1992 – 2001 they are prepared to go even further, estimating a loss of only 31 billion tons per year. These still sound like huge numbers, but to put it in perspective, 2400 billion tons of snow falls in Antarctica each year, so we’re dealing with a gain or loss in the range +1.1 to -1.7%.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/27/antarctic-ice-%E2%80%93-more-accurate-estimates/
Antarctica sea ice shows accelerating increase over past 30 years
A paper published last month in the journal Climate Dynamics finds that “The Antarctic sea ice extent (SIE) shows an increased trend during 1979–2009, with a trend rate of 1.36 ± 0.43% per decade. Ensemble empirical mode decomposition analysis shows that the rate of the increased trend has been accelerating in the past decade.”
Sea ice trends in the Antarctic and their relationship to surface air temperature during 1979–2009
Qi Shu, Fangli Qiao, Zhenya Song and Chunzai Wang
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2011/08/antarctica-sea-ice-shows-accelerating.html
Arctic
A Brief History of Climate Change in the Arctic
White, J.W.C., Alley,R.B., Brigham-Grette, J., Fitzpatrick, J.J., Jennings, A.E., Johnsen, S.J., Miller, G.H., Nerem, R.S. and Polyak, L. 2010. Past rates of climate change in the Arctic. Quaternary Science Reviews 29: 1716-1727.
Background
A long succession of climate models has consistently suggested that anthropogenic-induced global warming should be significantly amplified in earth’s polar regions and, therefore, that the first signs of man’s expected impact on the world’s weather should be manifest in that part of the planet; or as Donella Meadows (2001) has described it, “the place to watch for global warming — the sensitive point, the canary in the coal mine — is the Arctic.” So let’s see what those who have looked for human-induced warming in the Arctic have found there.
What was done
Going to one of the most recent and substantial of such efforts, we encounter the paper of White et al. (2010), who produced a comprehensive review — and thoughtful analysis — of past climate change in earth’s north polar region, which was published in Quaternary Science Reviews.
What was learned
The nine researchers begin by describing how “processes linked with continental drift have affected atmospheric circulation, ocean currents, and the composition of the atmosphere over tens of millions of years,” and that “a global cooling trend over the last 60 million years has altered conditions near sea level in the Arctic from ice-free year-round to completely ice covered.” They also report that “variations in arctic insolation over tens of thousands of years in response to orbital forcing have caused regular cycles of warming and cooling that were roughly half the size of the continental-drift-linked changes,” and that, in turn, this glacial-interglacial cycling “was punctuated by abrupt millennial oscillations, which near the North Atlantic were roughly half as large as the glacial-interglacial cycles.” Last of all, they note that “the current interglacial, the Holocene, has been influenced by brief cooling events from single volcanic eruptions, slower but longer lasting changes from random fluctuations in the frequency of volcanic eruptions, from weak solar variability, and perhaps by other classes of events.”
What it means
In comparing the vast array of past climate changes in the Arctic with what climate alarmists claim to be the “unprecedented” anthropogenic-induced warming of the past several decades, White et al. conclude that “thus far, human influence does not stand out relative to other, natural causes of climate change.” In fact, they state that the data “clearly show” that “strong natural variability has been characteristic of the Arctic at all time scales considered,” and they reiterate that the data suggest “that the human influence on rate and size of climate change thus far does not stand out strongly from other causes of climate change.”
Sub-Arctic
—————————————————————————————————————————-
Ten ships, 600 crew trapped in frozen Sea of Okhotsk
31 December 2010 – BBC
The ice is up to 30cm (12 inches) thick in some places, according to the Russian news agency Itar-Tass.
Signals are reported to have been received from a fishing boat and a research vessel which are in the greatest distress, stuck in the ice about 12 miles (19km) from the coast.
The temperature in the area is -22C, according to Itar-Tass, and forecasts suggest it will fall even lower.
Arctic Adds 2000 Cubic Kilometers Of Ice – Despite Reports Of Accelerating Ice Melt
By P Gosselin on 31. Januar 2011
70 trillion cubic feet of ice have been added to the Arctic core since January 2009. That translates to 2000 cubic km – enough to cover Manhattan with 20 miles of ice (or 32,000 Manhattans with 1 meter of ice).
When your former prime minister goes public and declares that the government should buy a new icebreaker, then you’re not talking about Britain – yet. This is former prime minister and industrialist Tiit Vähi, who comes from Estonia. He believes that the state should urgently order a new icebreaker, “Instead of spending money on buying icebreaking services.”
[snip]
But, what is so much fun here is that, long term-investment is being considered necessary, for what is obviously been seen as an ongoing problem, and the ice is expected to freeze over even more than 1987. Yet EU funded researchers, with €22 million of research grants, are claiming that “the sea surface temperature of the Baltic Sea was warmer in the past”.
Professor Aarno Kotilainen at the Geological Survey of Finland says: “Some estimates suggest that climate change in the Baltic Sea area causes sea surface temperatures to rise, increased winds and shortened ice-cover season.” Perhaps he should be looking out the window a little more often.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2011/03/no-ice-here-move-along-please.html
Arctic Sea Ice — A Climate Change April Fools?
April 01 2011
The Washington Post
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 meters 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.
http://climatechangedispatch.com/home/8830-arctic-sea-ice-a-climate-change-april-fools-not-according-to-snopes
Arctic Sea Ice Extent
Not Even In The Same Ballpark
Posted on September 15, 2011 by Steven Goddard
Green is 2011 ice not present in 2007. Red is the opposite. Pixel counting shows 15% more ice in 2011 than 2007. Bremen shows 2011 and 2007 essentially identical today. Should I laugh, or cry?
[See plots]
http://www.real-science.com/uncategorized/ballpark?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Real-Science%2Ffeed+%28Real+Science%29
Big Trouble For Arctic Alarmists
Posted on January 13, 2012 by Steven Goddard
Not only is ice extent the highest in seven years, but the ice is getting thicker and is positioned exactly where alarmists don’t want it to be. The map above shows 1.5 metre+ ice vs the same date in 2011. The thick ice has shifted towards the west into the Chukchi Sea, where it will slow summer melt.
Combine that with sea surface temperatures in the Bering Sea which are far below normal, and our chicken little friends are looking at a very bad summer.
http://www.real-science.com/big-trouble-arctic-alarmists
Blink comparator – Ice Thickness: 20110120/20120118
http://www.real-science.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Arctic2011-20121.gif