Climate Conversation Group

Arctic sea ice. Where the notion of “rolling hills” gains a whole new dimension.

NASA admission

Arctic cyclone in August ‘wreaked havoc’ on sea ice

via NASA finally admits Arctic cyclone in August ‘broke up’ and ‘wreaked havoc’ on sea ice — Reuters reports Arctic storm played ‘key role’ in ice reduction | Climate Depot.

NASA has announced that an Arctic storm played a ‘key role’ in a dramatic new summer minimum ice extent recorded in August.

Reuters news service filed a September 21 report based on NASA’s video admission titled: “NASA says Arctic cyclone played ‘key role’ in record ice melt.” The news segment details how the Arctic sea ice was reduced due to “a powerful cyclone that scientists say ‘wreaked havoc’ on ice cover during the month of August.” (Reuters on “Arctic Cyclone” — 0:47 second long segment — Rob Muir reporting.)

Video: Arctic storm breaks up sea ice

Why does everyone feel guilty about the disappearance of the Arctic ice? All it proves is a bit of warming; it most certainly does not prove a human cause for that warming. Read more… »

Part of the mighty West Antarctic Ice Sheet, pinned to the continent by a series of mountains along the sheet’s ocean boundary. With an area of 2 million square km, it’s the size of Texas, 2.2 million cubic km, up to 14 km thick, weighs 1870 trillion tonnes and it’s crushing the crust of the Earth a full kilometre into the raw, molten mantle. This puppy’s going nowhere fast. Melt it? Hah. We could chuck our spare nuclear weapons at it and the ice would survive – though it’d make just the “coolest” firestorm.

A five-year study just published says methane hydrates buried under kilometres of Antarctic ice and sediment could accelerate global warming if released into the atmosphere. This has given the warmists much grist for their mills of alarm.

The paper, Potential methane reservoirs beneath Antarctica, published on 30 August as a letter in Nature, is behind a paywall, so I’ve only seen the abstract and Supplementary Information (pdf).

The paper contains some interesting information. The sediments are in surprisingly deep basins – down to 10 km or even 14 km in rifts (measured from the earth surface, not the top of the ice), although most are between 0.3 km and 3 km deep. That’s a lot of silt. The amount of overlying ice is similar, from 1 km to 3.5 km. That must all melt before the sediment has any hope of warming enough to release the methane clathrates. Chance would be a fine thing. Read more… »

The author of the paper that prompted Scientific American’s alarming claim of a “meltdown” sounds caution over predicting the demise of the Greenland ice sheet.

Is it a turnaround? No, because in the abstract we read:

“Our results suggest that the ice mass changes in this sector were primarily caused by short-lived dynamic ice loss events rather than changes in the surface mass balance. This finding challenges predictions about the future response of the Greenland Ice Sheet to increasing global temperatures.”

It’s just that “Scientific” American didn’t mention it. Read more… »

Inside the Greenland ice cap. The deadly beauty of the place sends shivers down my spine.

Yes, that’s right, only 67,000 years to go.

David Biello wrote an unlovely piece of non-science a few days ago which Scientific American was happy to publish.

It seems the once-reliable journal doesn’t care about standards now. The headline was uncompromising: Greenland Meltdown Driven by Collapse of Glaciers at Ocean Outlets.

To call what follows a “meltdown” is a hoax, a fraud, a betrayal, a cheat, a perfidy, a sham and a swindle. Not to mention several dozen other words in the thesaurus which all mean deceit.

The subheading gives voice to the first prevarication: The interactions between the island’s glaciers and the surrounding seas may be driving ice loss, according to aerial photographs.

Global weirding

But the opening paragraph got down to brass tacks: “the ice sheet as a whole has lost some 36 billion metric tons of ice each year in recent years.” We shall look at what that means. First, though, consider the next comment: “Thanks to weird weather, nearly the entire ice-covered surface of the world’s largest island melted for a period this year.”

The word “weather” is a hyperlink, as though they have some scientific explanation of weird weather, but they mislead us again. Read more… »

The heroic Ross Ice Shelf. The tiny figures on top are people, 60 metres (200 feet) above the waves. Beneath the water, the ice cliff continues a further 1000 feet straight down. You might travel south from here for over 600 km before reaching land; you might go straight across the great shelf for over 800 km. At 500,000 km² it’s nearly twice the area of NZ. You won’t melt this with the smoke from your puny fires. This sucker’s not going anywhere in a hurry. Oh, and when it calves those bergs the size of Manhattan, it’s not from melting — they snap off.

Rob Fenwick, in Accelerating melt reason to worry (The Press, 21 May 2012), launches into a worry-fest about all the fabulous calamities said to be on the way with “continued” man-made global warming.

The astute reader will know that the word “fabulous” is derived from “fable”. It means unreal or imagined more than it means magnificent. I chose that word because all the disasters Mr Fenwick briefly catalogues are fantastic (cf. “fantasy”). But I should begin at the beginning of his niggle-gala. He says:

When the world’s polar scientists gathered in Montreal last month – all 3000 of them – it seemed like a case of preaching to the choir.

After 20 years of intense study of the effects of changing climate conditions at the poles, there is certainly no longer any debate over what is going on. Read more… »

The mighty Merz Glacier. When sea ice fills this area after a piece is knocked off and floats away, why and how is the freezing of the water influenced?

A story in the NZ Herald a few days ago talked about giant Antarctic icebergs:

A massive iceberg struck Antarctica, dislodging another giant block of ice from a glacier, Australian and French scientists said.

The end of the mighty Mertz Glacier had been repeatedly hammered by the 97-kilometre-long iceberg as it moved in the ocean currents. Note that there’s no mention of global warming to explain this “breakup” of ice.

This event was driven entirely by mechanical forces …

… until the final paragraph, when the article talks about oxygen levels and quotes “a leading climate expert”, Steve Rintoul:

Oxygen levels being fed into the world’s ocean currents are now changing “and the overturning circulation currents will respond to that change,” Rintoul said. Observing what happens “will … allow us to improve predictions of future climate change.”

One wonders whether Rintoul is accurately quoted.

It is understandable that the overturning circulation might transport water of differing oxygen levels around the oceans, but it is incredible that differing oxygen levels might affect the overturning circulation.

I do not understand how observing the effects of oxygen on the overturning circulation might have any effect on our predictions of “climate change”, much less allow us to improve them.

Further explanation is required, and it ought to have been obtained by our beloved Herald before publication of this nonsense.

This story is datelined London, December 1, and comes from the Australian Associated Press. It was posted on the web site of the Royal Society of New Zealand—behind a paywall. [Full article at the end.]

First: it is frustrating, suspicious and avaricious for our Royal Society to hide its “news” behind a paywall. How widely, really, does it wish the news to spread, when it publishes only to its members?

Second: the level of uninterest evinced by this reporter in the matter he is reporting is quite awe-inspiring. There is not the merest evidence of curiosity, investigation or the most rudimentary checking of facts.

Be a journo — or join our Royal Society

The main assertions in this story are inane, blatantly alarmist, undisguised advocacy and wrong. That the story is promulgated by our once-proud, independent, trustworthy and in particular scientific Royal Society is now a source of shame to all New Zealanders. There is no doubt that our Royal Society has abandoned, in respect of the global warming controversy, any pretence to objective investigation. It has instead adopted such a strong intention to champion the hypothesis of man-made control of the climate that it blinds itself to the necessity of finding evidence.

Their intention moves them to breach their founding principles. Look them up. Their behaviour is a matter of law, so it will give way, given enough pressure, to legal or parliamentary sanction. Swell, public opinion, swell!

Our Royal Society even helps champion, through web site connections, the blatantly alarmist web site Hot Topic, which routinely insults scientific sceptics asking reasonable questions with terms like crank, denialist and worse. We have come to expect that from the likes of Mr Renowden and his bigots, but the support for it from the scientists of the Royal Society is reprehensible. It is scientific misbehaviour.

Here is a sampling of the AAP story’s errors, inadequacies and naked prejudice. Read more… »

Science Daily reports a week ago that the Pine Island Glacier, in Antarctica, is thinning four times faster than it did ten years ago. Gareth Renowden at Hot Topic pounces on this news with an enthusiastic lack of scepticism and hastens to paint it as alarming, saying:

At this rate of thinning, the glacier could disappear in 100 years, instead of the 600 years earlier estimates had suggested.

Although that merely confirms the error in the previous estimate. To raise alarm, one should always quote facts, even out of context, so he says: Read more… »