cryosphere
illconsidered | October 18, 2010Okay, so this one is a bit of a tear-jerker and I usually like to avoid mixing sentimentality with environmentalism, but it is very informative and interesting if sad. It is greenman3610's Climate Crock of the Week from about three weeks ago and as usual well worth watching.
I tend to be skeptical about anthropomorphizing our fellow earthlings, but I'll be damned if that wasn't a very affectionate mama walrus hugging her baby! If walruses weren't so ugly they just might top polar bears in terms of public concern...
illconsidered | September 30, 2010Most of us interested in climate science understand the uniqueness and importance of deep ice cores. It is truly a remarkable record of many aspects of past climate including dust, methane, sea level proxies and carbon dioxide.
The video below (a YouTubed TED Talk)is a very fascinating look at what it takes to retrieve one.
(warning, the last 3 or four minutes are a Rolex commercial)
Cheers to Thingsbreak for posting it where I could see it!
illconsidered | June 23, 2010No too long ago the usual suspects were all a-twitter about arctic sea ice, which was tracking very close to the long term average.
This was in late March, and though you would think a weather man would understand what weather is, this temporary upwards tic prompted the remarkable vapidity of this lead: "We've all seen that Arctic Sea ice area and extent has expanded and is back to normal".
Well, that was then, and this is now:
Now, not only have we left the long term average behind, the current seasonal extent has dipped below one standard deviation less than normal and is even well…
illconsidered | April 27, 2010I found this from a comment on a Skeptical Science article (worth a read in its own right) and thought readers here might be impressed.
It is from a TED talk by James Balog who has been creating fascinating and awe inspiring time-lapse videos of calving glaciers. The whole talk is about 20 minutes and worth listening to, if you must you can jump ahead to around the 9th minute when the set-up ends and the visuals begin:
Of course, the whole thing could have been cooked up by Phil Jones and CRU, with help from the NASA moon-landing fakers...
illconsidered | March 5, 2010From up north, we have some more troubling news. Actually very troubling. Catastophic release of methane hydrates is a prime suspect in a few events dramatic enough to show in the earth's geological records, coarse and obscured as that record may be. (Our actions today will be featured prominently in that record for anyone looking back a million years from now.) It has been a worry for many years that humanity is running the risk of triggering such a release again, which would truly pile disaster on top of calamity.
New research coming out in Science today indicates that this most dire of…
illconsidered | February 12, 2010The good thing for those interested in reality, is that arguments about short tem trends only last for...um short terms. The bad thing for the denialism movement's argument recycling machine is that they can't rely on copy/paste, or at least shouldn't!
Check out Things Break for a rather amusing example of this. Morano recylces a moronic argument about how sea levels are falling, which was true on the uninformative timescale of 2006 to mid 2009. But he amusingly links to current data[PDF] which shows that temporary lull is over and 2006 has been surpassed.
Also in that article is the…
illconsidered | July 25, 2009This is the headline on a press release from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado at Boulder. They are one of the goto sources for data about sea ice, either arctic or antarctic.
The final extent of arctic sea ice melting this year, as in any other single year, is a product of (large) local weather effects superimposed on (smaller) climate trends. That makes the final minimum extent very hard to predict, which has made it a bit of a horse race for the various scientific agencies that try to understand and model sea ice dynamics.
Not so hard to predict…
illconsidered | June 21, 2009Remember back in May and early June when the denialists were gleefully proclaiming arctic sea ice had recovered to the 1979-2000 average, and by induction global warming must be over?
Well, gee, I wonder where they are now, now that arctic sea ice this month is near the June 2007 mark. 2007 was of course an historic low, and a dramatic one at that.
This month's numbers reveal nothing about climate change, of course. It does however reveal something about climate denial.
illconsidered | May 18, 2009A recent comment, here, questions the AGW prediction of polar amplification. He cites a paper by Polyakov et al that he claims shows temperatures in the arctic were warmer than they are now earlier in the 20th century.
[Update: paper is here[PDF]]
I don't have access to the paper or time to research it well, does anyone else have any comments? My initial impression is that it is about ocean temperatures in one region of the north Atlantic, and I do not trust the numbers he quotes which came from CO2 Science, a site that habitually misrepresents the papers it highlights. But that is hardly…
illconsidered | April 15, 2009Two common assertions: melting sea ice has no effect on global sea level, and alarmists will grasp at every straw in trying to scare us all.
It turns out that they are both wrong.
Robert Grumbine has the details on why melting sea ice does in fact raise sea levels. In a nutshell, what is frozen and what it floats in are not the same. Fresh water is less dense than sea water.
Now the effect is small, but if the scientists who are aware of this are truly just out to scare us out of our research funding, shouldn't they be scrambling to correct this common misconception?
Just wondering...
illconsidered | January 8, 2009A video story from ABC news here tells how Glacier National Park has gone from somewhere between 120 and 150 glaciers 100 years ago to a couple of dozen today. Yikes! And a scientist they interview who has spent years monitoring them has gone from predicting they will be completely gone by 2050 to they will be completely gone by 2020.
It's an interesting video with some compelling before/after shots of some of the glaciers.
Then again, maybe it's just a side effect of NASA's fudging the temperature record....
illconsidered | September 24, 2008Well, the good news is a recent finding of 740,000 year old permafrost in the Canadian arctic. What this suggests is that the permafrost may be more resilient than previously thought. If this ice is 740Kyr old, then it did not melt during the last three inter-glacial cycles. The peak warmth of at least the Eemian, 120Kyr ago, was a couple of degrees warmer than now, and some serious effort might keep temperatures from rising above that high marker.
The reason this is good news is because of the large (huge) quantities of methane stored in clathrates in this permafrost. If released, this…
illconsidered | September 19, 2008 This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic.Objection:
Sea ice at the north pole recovered a whopping 9.4% from 2007 to 2008 despite the doom and gloom predictions of the alarmists. Yet another wheel falls off the global warming bandwagon.
Answer:
It is true that the minimum summer ice extent in the arctic ocean in 2008 was 9.4% higher than the minimun in 2007. But calling this a recovery is simply not justifiable, not even by a long shot. Firstly, at 4.52 million square kilometers, this…
illconsidered | September 16, 2008Despite the familiarity of this headline, it actually only became news today (and is still a little uncertain).
The National Snow and Ice Data Centre is today anouncing the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has reached its minimum extent for this year.
Some notable facts from the article:
this is the second-lowest minimum extent since at least 1979, when satellite observations became available
the area is now 2.24 million km^2 below the 1979-2000 average summer minimum
this year did not set a new record, (congratulations Stoat!) stopping at 9.4% more than the record-setting 2007 minimum
this…
illconsidered | May 25, 2006This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic.
Objection:
Sure, sea ice is shrinking in the Arctic, but it is growing in the Antarctic. Sounds like natural fluctuations that balance out in the end.
Answer:
Overall, it is true that sea ice extent in the Antarctic is increasing. Around the peninsula, where there is a lot of warming, the ice is retreating. This is the area of the recent and dramatic Larsen B and Ross ice shelf break ups. But the rest of the continent has not shown any clear warming…
illconsidered | February 25, 2006This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic.
Objection:
The Antarctic Ice sheets are actually growing, which would not be happening if Global Warming were real.
Answer:
There are two distinct problems with this argument. First, any argument that tries to use a regional phenomenon to disprove a global trend is simply dead in the water. Anthropogenic global warming theory does not predict uniform warming throughout the globe. We need to assess the balance of the evidence. In the case of this…
illconsidered | January 25, 2006This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic.
Objection:
A few glaciers receding today is not proof of Global Warming, glaciers have grown and receded differently in many times and places.
Answer:
Firstly, it is more than "a few glaciers" that are receding, it is a pervasive, sustained and accelerating global trend. The National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) maintains a chart of global glacier mass balance, and for as far back as their data allows us to look, all but a few years have shown…