The Most Extra New Super Global Warming Thread

[bkelly]

Originally Posted by Kerostasis

...can someone explain to me how shrinking glaciers are bad in and of themselves?

The environmentalist arguments aside, I can think of three reasons.

1) Many glaciers give runoff year-round. If the glacier melts the river it feeds will often become seasonal which would have a big impact on people and ecosystems downstream.

2) A melting of the glacier is a shrinking of available water reserves, like draining Lake Powell. The concern isn't that the water is no longer available but that it has drained to the oceans causing sea level to rise.

3) A melting glacier is a big change to the environment and a potential disaster with all that stored water. For example, consider Tsho Rolpa, a natural lake in Nepal that has grown sixfold and threatens to release a devastating flood on the towns below.

bkelly

[GhostintheShell]

Glaciers are also one of the most unreliable sources of data available to us. I don't know exactly what GlobalWarmin is trying to say in his post about the Gangotri Glacier and the Ganges river but I hope he isn't trying to attach those two things. A relatively small (30km) long glacier responsible for the supply of a 2500km long river that drains an area over 1 million sqkm? Laughable.

In Canada we have no idea of how many glaciers we actually have, talk about their accurate rate of advance of retreat. Source: Natural Resources Canada
http://atlas.nrcan.gc.ca/site/englis...ion/glaciers/1
Last estimates I read put our glaciers at around 200,000 sqkm and estimated around 90% of Canadian glaciers are identified but with no historical data on their size or rate of retreat.

There is very little accurate data about the rate of advance/retreat of more than a few dozen glaciers in the entire world. That data cannot be statistically applied to the general population of glaciers due to localized temperature and altitude influences (read about tropical glacier influences) and the small population of data in relation to the large number of glaciers in the world. Much of the data that does exist is also interpolated from historical reports and old photo's since they simply had no technology capable of accurately measuring the slow retreat of such a large object.

The glaciers are simply another "talking point", another anecdote supporting MMGW. They have been estimated to have been generally retreating for the last 10,000 years, or the end of the last Pleistocene. (They grew during various periods of deep glaciation for the last 2 million years.)

[Lucky Shot]

Originally Posted by bkelly

I haven't heard about a new network of weather stations. What group is creating it?

Brian

I remember seeing something about it and was asking to get more information. I will post more information if I happen to see it again but was asking you as I figured you would have knowledge of it.

Lucky Shot

[Lucky Shot]

Originally Posted by bkelly

Okay, I just read it differently since Chicken Little reacted to a non-existent problem.

Don't get me wrong, this is clearly a political crisis.

No, it hasn't. The article you cite quotes Son Nghiem of NASA's JPL saying the rapid decline of perennial ice was caused by unusual winds. It does not say these winds are the soul cause.

This is the second time you've brought this argument up so I did a little more digging. The only numbers real estimates of ice volume I could find leaving arctic was the abstract of this article written by Ron Kwok of NASA's JPL, the same department as the Son Nghiem from your article. It says:

The 2005 summer (Jun–Sep) saw the highest Fram Strait ice export (>0.25 × 106 km2) compared to the 7-year mean of 0.14 × 106 km2. This directly explains ∼40% of the decrease in MY (multiyear) coverage of 0.6 × 106 km2 between Jan 2005 and Jan 2006. The cumulative effects of the recent warmer winters and summers, relative to the longer-term record since 1958, explain the balance.

So I'll accept that 40% of the ice loss is due to these winds (which really doesn't help the argument that global warming isn't happening but I'll leave that aside for now). These same scientists who say this wind caused the rapid decline in the arctic say 60% of the lost coverage was due to warming. What do you think?

I didn't claim that winds were the sole reason for the ice melt last year, it would be ignorant to dismiss the normal melt that would happen as part of Summer. The Abstract you linked discusses 2005 and 2006 while I thought we were discussing through 2007 which my article covers. Regardless, if 40% of the ice melt can be attributed to high winds kicking ice into the atlantic, that sounds fairly substantial. What we need to find out is what is typical of a normal melt season to get a baseline for comparison. Regardless, this only discusses ice pushed out of the arctic and not the other impacts that wind can have on ice.

When Ice is pushed into other pieces of ice, you have a greater likelihood of an ice jam equivalent. When ice rubs up against other chunks of ice, from winds, you tend to see weaker pieces break off into smaller pieces. Smaller pieces don't tend to last as long, and through churning tend to form even smaller pieces. On top of that, when ice is pushed against one another, you tend to see a logjam effect where more of the bergs may be exposed to air. If you watch seals, they sun themselves on icebergs as the air is warmer then the water. Greater exposure to air, means that the ice is likely to melt quicker.

40% of the melt was attributed to the winds pushing ice into the Atlantic, but when you think of the other impact that wind can have on shrinking the remaining ice, 40% seems small.

If you refer back to the Nasa article I linked it discusses that the ice has been melting since the 1970's which when crossreferenced with the Multivariate Enso Index indicates to me that there is probably a connection. When you have warmer water cycles in the Pacific via the PDO, you probably are going to have some of that warm water filter into the Arctic through the Bering Strait. I say that as it appears to me that the ice from last year melted from left to right based off this chart.


Having said all that though, there is a line of thinking that an immense pulse of warm water entered the Arctic from the Atlantic ocean and sits under the colder, less salty water on the surface and may be part of the reason for some of the melting.

http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF17/1754.html

Regardless, as the PDO shifts back towards cooler temperatures, I would expect to see the arctic rebound in ice.

No, it's not. According to the article's author the "thicker" quote was in reference to "some areas".

It doesn't indicate that other areas are thinner or thicker. Based on the way it's written, the higher side was 20-30cm thicker and generally thicker overall. If it was thinner, then the article didn't mention it, although I believe it's because the majority of spots they measured were thicker and some was as thick as 20-30cm thicker then last year. Inferring that it was thinner overall as you are doing in your "correction" is at best misleading as there wasn't an indication that the ice was the same or thinner.

No, I claimed that the models did not predict a shrinking Antarctica ice extent. The official prediction I stand by was in the IPCC's Third Assessment Report:

For the Antarctic continent, the models tend to predict more snow in winter and summer. Although temperatures are forecast to increase by 0.5°C, there will be little impact on melt because they will remain well below freezing, except in limited coastal localities.



Do you have any examples of things the climate models have gotten wrong?

Edit: By the way, I do agree that it is wrong to present these models as predictions. The problem is that's what people expect/understand.

bkelly

I don't blame you for hanging your hat on the just released IPCC predictions as there are no way to figure out if the predictions are worth their weight in spit. There are no results to measure against the predictions. The longer you forcast out a prediction, the more likely you are to get it wrong, and it's much more so when certain assumptions are entirely predicated off of a necessary chain of events for the assumption to come true. By the time we begin to have any results to begin to hold these predictions accountable, you'll have moved your hat to a new prediction.

Instead of it being like a craps roll in the casino, predicting the future with one event tied into the next is the equivalent of handing me your next 30 years worth of NCAA tournament brackets using the information you have right now. You can get the information necessary to start, from recruiting, to team histories, to NCAA Committee tendencies, to census information and start interpolating that into trends. But to show the difficulty of even predicting this years tournament, 3.2 million self proclaimed experts of gamblers, fans, experts, news reporters, and probably some players entered the ESPN NCAA tournament contest. ESPN typically offers a substantial monetary prize for those who can guess every game correctly. Of the 63 games, every participant became ineligible to win this reward after the first round. Of the 3.2 million, only 2 people correctly named all 16 teams in the sweet sixteen. If you had to come up with this years bracket, you could probably do ok. If you had to predict next years games, much less 30 years from now, my guess is that you would do extremely poorly. But if you made your predictions and constantly updated them and no one held you accountable for past predictions, then you have the same situation that we are looking at with the IPCC.

Specifically, looking at the models used to predict the antarctic and arctic oceans they noted that only some of the models deal with aerosols whereas some of the models they leaned on do not. Aren't Aerosols an important piece to the climate puzzle? Included in aerosols are gases/dust from volcano's, dust storms, forest fires, and grassland fires and this dust is key to cloud formation which has a dramatic impact on weather. Why would you rely on models that leave out key components to weather and climate and what else was left out?

Frankly, discussion of other climate models isn't worth continuing as it's clear that the models you stand by are from the IPCC. Anything else could be right or wrong but isn't worth discussing if no one here hangs their hat on it. We'll just have to wait 10-30 years until we start to get results that we can compare to the predictions, although by then we will most likely see people hanging their hat on the next generation of predictions and not this one.

Lucky Shot

[GlobalWarmin]

Black Carbon Pollution Emerges As Major Player In Global Warming
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0323210225.htm

If it isn't published in a science journal, it isn't science.

[bkelly]

Originally Posted by GhostintheShell

Glaciers are also one of the most unreliable sources of data available to us.

GhostintheShell, what are you trying to say here? Are you saying we don't have a lot of glacier data? Are you saying we can't make predictions with the data we have? Are you saying glaciers lie to us? What?

Originally Posted by GhostintheShell

There is very little accurate data about the rate of advance/retreat of more than a few dozen glaciers in the entire world. That data cannot be statistically applied to the general population of glaciers due to localized temperature and altitude influences (read about tropical glacier influences) and the small population of data in relation to the large number of glaciers in the world.

I don't agree but I hear what you're saying.

Originally Posted by GhostintheShell

The glaciers are simply another "talking point", another anecdote supporting MMGW. They have been estimated to have been generally retreating for the last 10,000 years, or the end of the last Pleistocene. (They grew during various periods of deep glaciation for the last 2 million years.)

Now wait just a cotton-picking minute! You just said, "...data about the rate of advance/retreat...cannot be statistically applied to the general population of glaciers..." and now you say, "...(glaciers) have been generally retreating for the last 10,000 years..."

So, which is it? Can we make statements about glaciers in general or not?

bkelly

[bkelly]

Originally Posted by Lucky Shot

I remember seeing something about it and was asking to get more information. I will post more information if I happen to see it again but was asking you as I figured you would have knowledge of it.

I'd be surprised if a group is working to create a new weather station network. The nodes just don't produce the data that a satellite can.

A neat new meteorological data collection system that's been put together by a group at my facility is the Constellation Observing System for Meteorology or COMET. This is a series of satellites that listen to the signals produced by the GPS satellite system. When one of the GPS nodes sets over the horizon, the time signal traveling to the COMET satellite has to travel through the Earth's atmosphere which modifies the signal somewhat. By analyzing these changes, very good numbers of temperature and moisture through the line-of-sight can be deduced.

This project was cheap and is giving us data in all sorts of spaces that had never been previously monitored.

bkelly

[GhostintheShell]

Originally Posted by bkelly

GhostintheShell, what are you trying to say here? Are you saying we don't have a lot of glacier data? Are you saying we can't make predictions with the data we have? Are you saying glaciers lie to us? What?



I don't agree but I hear what you're saying.



Now wait just a cotton-picking minute! You just said, "...data about the rate of advance/retreat...cannot be statistically applied to the general population of glaciers..." and now you say, "...(glaciers) have been generally retreating for the last 10,000 years..."

So, which is it? Can we make statements about glaciers in general or not?

bkelly

What I'm saying is that data on ~60 glaciers (each with its own unique set of influences) cannot be applied to a population estimated at over 200,000 glaciers globally (each with their own set of influences). Additionally the data we have on the few glaciers we have been recording is in some cases very accurate, but in other cases not so accurate. (Like 200,000sqkm of Canadian glaciers with little data).

We cannot make accurate predictions about glacial retreat or advance because we don't have enough data and not nearly enough accurate historical data. You can argue an increased rate of retreat due to MMGW....but you run into the same problem of lack of data.

You could "generally" accept that the last Pleistoscene peaked 18,000 years ago and ended 10,000 years ago and generally now that 2 million years of glaciation have ended the glaciers are "estimated" to be retreating. But that estimation however logical could be totally off base.

Another issue arises in the whole glacier argument....maybe I sound like a jerk but do I really care? Do I really care if a largely nomadic population has to move to find a new water source because their old one dried up or because the water has risen a few feet over the last 200 years? Isn't that what they have been doing up until now anyway? Isn't this the steamroller scene from Austin Powers? They do have quite some time to make decisions, no one is going to drown (or die of dehydration) because they failed to take action.

Is it a global catastrophe that a thai fishing village is being slowly flooded out of their current location and has to move 100 meters up the bank so that they will be just fine for another 200 years? Is it a catastrophe that a village in nepal has to be abandoned or moved once in 1000 years because the water source dried up? Hasn't this migration occurred almost everywhere else in the world throughout history? People move to new locations with adequate resources when their current resources run out.

I think we have to evaluate these catastrophe's for what they are sometimes...a temporary inconvenience not a global catastrophe of epic proportions.

[GlobalWarmin]

Originally Posted by GhostintheShell

Another issue arises in the whole glacier argument....maybe I sound like a jerk but do I really care? Do I really care if a largely nomadic population has to move to find a new water source because their old one dried up or because the water has risen a few feet over the last 200 years? Isn't that what they have been doing up until now anyway? Isn't this the steamroller scene from Austin Powers? They do have quite some time to make decisions, no one is going to drown (or die of dehydration) because they failed to take action.

The Ganga River will disappear if the glacier that feeds it melts. *see above* But, who cares about the Ganga?

I have an idea. Who cares about Canada? Lets, as Americans, decide to dump our toxic waste in Canada, because nothing that happens there matters in any way to the rest of the planet. We won't have to worry about any catastrophic environmental or economic impacts, because it only affects those worthless Canadians!

[xTYBALTx]

You mean the Ganges?

[sordavie]

It gets spelled either way.

[GhostintheShell]

It'd be nice of you to keep your toxic waste in your own country if you could continue to do that in the future that would be great.

For the record I didn't say that anyone was "worthless". Those were your words.

What I did question was if a lot of the "GW evidence" that you post links to are truly a "global catastrophe" or something that can and will easily be avoided by the people that are affected most by them.

Do you really think that posting a link about the Gangotri / Ganges issue supports the theory of MMGW? The primary cause of the retreat of the Gangotri is believed to be due to nearby deforestation causing reduced snowfall.

Actually its a perfect example of how anecdotal evidence fails us.

Based on your flawed "input", we would assume that the best course of action would be to reduce MMGW immediately at a cost of several trillion dollars per year to the global economy. For which we would see little or no improvement to the Gangotri glacier's retreat, or many other of your issues for that matter. The most effective thing to do in this case may be to simply plant some trees in the surrounding area to hold some of the moisture.

[GlobalWarmin]

Insects Take A Bigger Bite Out Of Plants In A Higher Carbon Dioxide World
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0324173612.htm

[GlobalWarmin]

Originally Posted by GhostintheShell

Actually its a perfect example of how anecdotal evidence fails us.

No, this is a another perfect example of how you can't comprehend what you read very well. It was never said or remotely implied that the fact that one of the world's most important rivers is produced by a glacier is evidence of global warming.

[bkelly]

Originally Posted by Lucky Shot

Don't get me wrong, this is clearly a political crisis.

Then I return to my statement that you're pushing a specific conclusion. Labeling the other side as "Chicken Little stories" with the full message in mind is emotionally selling your side.

Originally Posted by Lucky Shot

I didn't claim that winds were the sole reason for the ice melt last year, it would be ignorant to dismiss the normal melt that would happen as part of Summer. The Abstract you linked discusses 2005 and 2006 while I thought we were discussing through 2007 which my article covers. Regardless, if 40% of the ice melt can be attributed to high winds kicking ice into the atlantic, that sounds fairly substantial. What we need to find out is what is typical of a normal melt season to get a baseline for comparison. Regardless, this only discusses ice pushed out of the arctic and not the other impacts that wind can have on ice.

LuckyShot, you're dancing around the debate. In this last paragraph you stated:

1) The wind doesn't explain all the polar melting we've seen
2) The numbers I provided only covered half the years in question
3) What melting the wind has caused is significant
4) We need numbers on seasonal melt to understand wind melting
5) The wind caused indirect melting that my numbers don't take into account

While any of these may be true they are complex notions requiring some tough searching yet I don't believe any of them are your actual position in this discussion. If I show any one of the above points to be wrong or irrelevant, you'll quickly abandon it but maintain your side of the argument because you don't really care if wind actually causes indirect melting or not. You only present these ideas because they support your actual position which I believe to be:

The melting of the arctic ice is not evidence for global warming and can be explained by natural variability and an unusual arctic wind.

I'm willing to debate this idea with you if you like but I won't let you jump from argument to argument before some agreement is reached. That only clouds and confuses the issues and we have an abundance of that in global warming discussions already.

Interested or are you confident in position?

Originally Posted by Lucky Shot

It doesn't indicate that other areas are thinner or thicker. Based on the way it's written, the higher side was 20-30cm thicker and generally thicker overall. If it was thinner, then the article didn't mention it, although I believe it's because the majority of spots they measured were thicker and some was as thick as 20-30cm thicker then last year. Inferring that it was thinner overall as you are doing in your "correction" is at best misleading as there wasn't an indication that the ice was the same or thinner.

You're inferring way too much from this article. Nowhere does it talk about "20-30cm thicker", "generally thicker overall" or "the majority of spots they measured were thicker".

I am not saying your article shows the ice was thinner. I do not believe one can pull scientific data from a story in the mass media. As far as I know the ice in the Davis Strait and Beaufort Sea may be thicker than last year, but this article doesn't say.

Originally Posted by Lucky Shot

Frankly, discussion of other climate models isn't worth continuing as it's clear that the models you stand by are from the IPCC.

I didn't say I stood by the IPCC's models. I said I stood by their forecast for Antarctica made in the TAR.

And we haven't been discussing climate models. I brought up the IPCC's Antarctica prediction was to counter your implication that a growing Antarctica was contrary to what was predicted with global warming. It isn't and now you're again dancing around the subject by jumping to a different argument.

But I do think some of your points about models are interesting so I'll respond to them in a different post. If you want to talk more about models, you can respond there.

bkelly