Greenland Ice Sheet Melts At Record Rate In 2010 654
RedEaredSlider writes "A study using satellite and ground-based data is showing the Greenland ice sheets are setting a record for the areas exposed to melting and the rate at which they are doing so. NASA says 2010 was a record warm year, and temperatures in the Arctic were a good 3 degrees C over normal."
Re:The meaning of random (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry English is my 3rd language.
Re:The meaning of random (Score:5, Informative)
You seem to have trouble understanding the word "expect".
Not really. If you roll a 6 sided die 6 times, you don't "expect" to see each side exactly once, but over 600 rolls, you'd expect approximately 100 of each side.
The parent is questioning whether 30 years is long enough for climate trends to be perceptible.
(I'm not a AGW denier myself -- I don't know enough about it to think I know better than the vast majority of climate scientists)
Re:The meaning of random (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, less snow to shovel will totally offset the slight inconveniences like having to find room for all the population of Florida and other coastal places:
Stats from wikipedia:
- Highest point Britton Hill[4] 345 ft (105 m)
- Mean 98 ft (30 m)
- Lowest point Atlantic Ocean[4] 0 ft (0 m)
Population Ranked 4th in the US
- Total (2010) 18,801,310[3]
The exercise of doing this for the rest of of the coast is left to the reader.
Re:Big Deal (Score:4, Informative)
The null hypothesis (Score:5, Informative)
What absolute rubbish from yet another climate scientist who fails to understand random numbers. Random numbers does not mean "evenly distributed" numbers - especially over such a small sample size. It could be the same number every year for 5 years in a row and still be random, just like you can throw "6" several times in a row with dice and it does not mean that the dice are loaded.
Of course it's possible -- that's called "the null hypothesis." The rather more interesting question is, "how likely is it?"
If I roll "6" ten times straight, the dice might not be loaded. After all, the odds of doing so (allowing the first time free, since it had to be something) are one in a mere 6^9 -- one in ten million. One in ten million events happen all the time (especially on Star Trek) and if you're a betting man by all means put your money on them and I'll match you on the other side.
Re:The meaning of random (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The meaning of random (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, but when about half the record years in the last 30 years are in the 15 most recent years, to conclude to the presence of an underlying trend is hardly an extraordinary claim. That does not tell us what caused the trend, and for all we know, it might be a normal, natural fluctuation that will reverse itself soon. Also, the record years do seem to be evenly distributed in the past 15 years, so I'm a tad puzzled. But come on, 30 data points are enough to see *some* trends, and here we can see a clear jump.
Re:Great waste of my time.... (Score:4, Informative)
Read the article more carefully:
Melting ice in Greenland is contributing to sea level rise.
Sea level has risen 1.8mm over the last century.
If all the ice on Greenland melted sea level would rise 7m.
Nothing is stated about how long all the ice on Greenland would take to melt if it continued at the present rate.
Re:The meaning of random (Score:5, Informative)
The bigger mistake by GP is to not understand the word "distributed" in statistics. It doesn't mean "how far apart" like in common usage. If you deny climate change, you believe there is equal probability for each year to be picked as an outlier year, a uniform distribution (or as he says it, evenly distributed).
Given the values one can calculate a confidence level that it is NOT evenly distributed. Presumably that's what the researcher did, I've never known journalists to publish confidence levels.
Re:Melt Rate (Score:3, Informative)
Have you noticed that climate change conferences are always populated with research funded by billionaires
Have you ever been to a scientific conference, know anything about science funding, or even met a scientist?
The big two conferences in climate science (and geosciences in general) are the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting and the European Geosciences Union General Assembly. The research is mostly government funded: in the U.S., the big funding agencies are the National Science Foundation, NASA, Department of Energy, U.S. Geological Survey, etc.
How the heck does [a carbon tax] solve the problem of climate change?
It makes the price of fossil fuels account for their environmental costs, correcting the market distortion due to this negative externality. The higher price of fossil energy makes alternative energy and energy efficiency more economically attractive, reducing consumption of fossil fuels.
I would like to see a conference populated with all of the names on that black list
There isn't any blacklist of scientists. But climate deniers did make up their own "scientific" conference. It's the Heartland Institute International Conference of Climate Change. You can find plenty of nonsense there if that's what you're looking for.
Why is that, billionaires attend these conferences
Billionaires don't attend scientific conferences. A few attend political conferences, such as Copenhagen, but the vast majority of attendees are not billionaires.
Why would I trust the findings of anyone associated with these people?
Scientific research has nothing to do with billionaires or their behavior.
Re:The meaning of random (Score:5, Informative)
A very good point. For example, just because a mountain that has been around for millions of years disappears doesn't mean that we caused it. Mountaintop removal mining means, however, that these days it's more likely than not.
It seems to me that anthropogenic climate change deniers always start with "you can't prove climate is changing" then when you do, they fall back on "you can't prove that humans are causing it" and finally on "it'll be a good thing anyway with the better weather up North, etc.". Then they reset back to the first position any time new evidence comes out. It seems to me to be mostly hiding their heads in the sand and denying the possibility that humans could affect the environment in any way, all of human history to the contrary. Frankly, there's no way all of the things we're releasing into the atmosphere the soil and the water can't have an effect. Potentially even more alarming than the climate change is the ongoing acidification of the oceans. We are definitely having an effect with all the pollution we're spewing out. The environment may have massive reserves, but it's not operating on a scale that much greater than us and we can overwhelm those reserves. The evidence is overwhelming. The environment, and probably even the human race will survive, of course, but in the same way it always does: with massive die-offs and then recovery afterwards. That is not desirable from point of view of the human race or individual humans.
Re:The meaning of random (Score:5, Informative)
That worked really awesomely in New Orleans.
And of course it's an entirely free proposition, that's dirt cheap, doesn't require reengineering ports, closing beaches with the resulting loss of tourism or anything like that. The US fortunately has a smoothly running system as shown by the exemplary mantenance records of the New Orleans levees.
Yes, indeed [wikimedia.org]. Things went very smoothly [wikipedia.org].
It's very funny that you use the very thing I'd use to explain why it'd be a monumental mess to try to argue everything would be fine.
Re:The null hypothesis (Score:3, Informative)
You really don't understand statistics at all do you? You are exactly right that, after rolling a 6, the chance of getting a 6 on the next roll is 1 in 6, and on the next it's 1 in 6, and then 1 in 6 on the next and so on. We really do understand that. What you don't seem to grasp is that still means that the odds of getting 6 6 times in a row are 1 in 46656. The odds are the same for any particular sequence. The odds of getting 5 six times in a row are the same. The odds of getting 1,2,3,4,5,6 are the same. The odds of getting 5,4,5,3,6,1 are the same, etc. Any sequence is equally likely.
I think the bottom line is pretty clear here. You don't understand statistics, but you're criticizing someone for making an essentially correct statement about statistics.
Re:The meaning of random (Score:4, Informative)
I completely agree with you. If we did not have climate models, guessing that an increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere correlates with rising temperature would be just a guess and would not show causation. It's a good thing we've had a climate model for over 100 years [wikipedia.org] that tells up to expect rising temperatures as the concentration of carbon dioxide increases.
Re:Melt Rate (Score:4, Informative)
The volcano that affected European air travel is in Iceland, not Greenland.
Re:The meaning of random (Score:4, Informative)
Let me state quite clearly: it is not a question of taste or opinion what constitutes a too short period for drawing conclusions, it is a question of statistical significance and the level of acceptable certainty. The shortest time interval for statistically significant warming at p < 0.05 is about 15 years. The precise shortest time period depends on the given years of course. We're seeing statistically significant warming since 1996 for example.
The graph you linked is a local temperature measurement, it isn't the global average. For a much better overview please click here [wikimedia.org]. Consider the fact though, that even though we had higher temperatures a couple of million years ago, we haven't had a civilization back then.
It might get even colder locally for you, if for example an oceanic current starts moving away from it's current path by a couple of hundred miles. By the way, the recent cold spell was the consequence of artic cold air being pushed down to Northern America and Europe while the Arctic warmed to unusually high temperatures. This might in fact happen a lot more often in the future.
This site suggests melting ice (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/SeaIce.HTM [uwgb.edu]
Why Doesn't Anyone Mention the Record Growth of Sea Ice Around Antarctica?
Typical of the commentaries on sea ice is this by Harold Ambler, published, of all places, in the Huffington Post, on January 3, 2009:
P.S. One of the last, desperate canards proposed by climate alarmists is that of the polar ice caps. Look at the "terrible," "unprecedented" melting in the Arctic in the summer of 2007...
So, to answer Ambler's final question:
Why, I ask, has Mr. Gore not chosen to mention the record growth of sea ice around Antarctica? If the record melting in the Arctic is significant, then the record sea ice growth around Antarctica is, too, I say. If one is insignificant, then the other one is, too.
The answer is simple. The Arctic decrease is statistically significant, and the Antarctic increase is not. This is Stats 101. Ambler is flat out wrong. Not all trends are equally statistically significant.
What the last two (2) maps don't indicate is if warmer ocean temperatures increase precipitation inland.
http://www.sciencebits.com/CO2orSolar [sciencebits.com]
I suggest if anyone wants to dig into this check Sciencebits. More specifically look here:
http://www.sciencebits.com/CosmicRaysClimate [sciencebits.com]
http://www.sciencebits.com/CosmicRaysClimate#ShavivVeizer [sciencebits.com]
Since we are still waiting for a very anemic solar cycle#24 to build up sunspots, I think perhaps we should wait till past 2015 because it seems the great solar science experiment in the sky is already underway.
http://solarcycle24.com/sunspots.htm [solarcycle24.com]
http://sc25.com/ [sc25.com]
Re:Silly Slutty (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The meaning of random (Score:5, Informative)
We measured the CO2 increase over the past century and we can calculate based on simple physics that adding a given amount of CO2 into the atmosphere increases global temperatures by a given amount. There is no conceivable way that pumping CO2 into the atmosphere wouldn't have a warming effect on global temperature, that's a physical impossibility.
Solar activity varied something like 0.1% in the past 50 years. Here is a graph [wikipedia.org] where CO2, solar activity and temperature are all on a same graph. The CO2 correlation is a lot stronger.
Re:Good for anthropoligists (Score:5, Informative)
We'll get access to more viking camps that are buried by ice and snow
The viking camps are near the coast, and they haven't been buried by ice and snow.
Here's a famous settlement. Note how it's still green.
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=61.152222,-45.515&spn=0.1,0.1&t=h&q=61.152222,-45.515 [google.com]
Re:The meaning of random (Score:4, Informative)
The odds of throwing 6 twice in a row in an honest dice are 1 in 36. The odds of throwing it thrice in a row are 1 in 216. The series continues 1 in 1296, 1 in 7776, 1 in 46 656, 1 in 279 936 and 1 in 1 679 616. At some point the reasonable conclusion chances from "mere coincidence" to "loaded dice"; and as this example shows, sometimes mere 8 data points are sufficient to establish this.
"Increasing amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere trap heat, which causes ice to melt" is a plausible explanation. No explanation is repeatable, unless you happen to have a spare Earth somewhere.
As opposed to oil industry spin of "greenhouse effect isn't real, we didn't cause it, you can't prove anything"?
Re:The meaning of random (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The meaning of exponential (Score:2, Informative)
All well and good, but what about land? Is there enough of it that's suitable for building new houses? That's presuming that the people who vacate the flooded cities are going to live somewhere, but perhaps you have other plans for them.
Yes, there is enough for building houses. Next.
Hansen is a known political hack who has made a thirty year career out of global warming alarmism.
Ad hominem.
It's relevant to the discussion. His entire career depends on pro-AGW propaganda production and hysteria generation. So it isn't an ad hominem.
The fact that it may eventually peter out due to constraints at some future time (like lots of other processes from fork bombs to rabbit populations) has nothing to do with what it's doing now. He never claimed it would be exponential for ever and you know it. What a ridiculous strawman.
He never should have claimed it was exponential in the first place. To repeat myself, the primary feature of this model is that because of the exponential assumption all the change happens in the tail end of the model's time frame. That's pretty damned convenient for scientific challenges to his work. Henson will be long dead before error in this particular work can be discovered.
Re:The meaning of random (Score:2, Informative)
You're missing the point of my post. Without a model, all we have is correlation. Because we have a model that existed before the effects it predicted, we have causation. If you don't understand, please give a reasonable model under which the number of pirates influences the global temperature.
As for climate being a chaotic system, you're confusing weather with climate. Climate is very predictable. It hardly changes. You can look in an almanac to see the temperature distribution for each month in your area. Even when climate changes, it can change in a very predictable way. If you perturb a mobile that demonstrates chaotic motion, you cannot predict the exact position of the mobile at any given moment (just as you cannot predict the weather on any particular day), but you can predict the total energy in the system very accurately (just as you can predict a change to the climate when the balance of how much radiation the Earth absorbs vs. how much it emits changes). A chaotic system can exhibit properties that are not chaotic.
There is no "assumption" that carbon dioxide is a significant greenhouse gas. In fact, changing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere makes just a tiny change to balance of power Earth receives from the sun vs. how much power Earth radiates into space. The Earth receives about 1000 watts per square meter from sunlight and radiates almost exactly the same amount into space. The increase in carbon dioxide over the past 100 years changes that amount by only 1-2 watts per square meter [wikipedia.org]. That small change causes warming, which in turn causes the air to be more humid, which causes yet more warming because water vapor is also a greenhouse gas. This is just one positive feedback [science20.com] that causes more warming that one would predict from simply looking at the effect of more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
The bottom line is that we have good models that accurately predict the warming due to an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and we have observed the predicted warming. That demonstrates that the models are accurate predictors, so that we can use them to predict future climate change.
Re:Big Deal (Score:4, Informative)
I'm afraid he pulled one over on you with some very clever word-play.
Greenland isn't melting.
This is a fact. Greenland is an island made of dirt and rock sitting on top of bedrock. Of course it isn't melting.
The ice sheet is ablating.
Also a fact. Glacial ablation is any form of erosion, including melting.
Just because its average temp during the summer is 3C above "normal" (whatever that is) does not mean that the average temp is not 20-30C below freezing.
Also true. If the average temperature of Greenland's ice sheet were not far below freezing it would not be ice.
DiamondGeezer, you are a master of the ambiguous on par with Professor Robert Thornton and his Lexicon of Inconspicuously Ambiguous References (LIAR). [ohiohills.com]
Re:The meaning of random (Score:4, Informative)
"just because we see a changing in a cycle doesn't mean we are causing it."
That's true.
But when you have a comprehensive mechanistic physical explanatory theory based on 50-100 years of lab-verified quantum mechanics, radiative transfer, backed up by decades of global observational evidence
AND
there are no other feasible explanations for the mystical "natural cycle" which somehow happens to replicate the features of greenhouse-induced global warming, and simultaneously supplant the known and exceptionally well proven basic physics, and there are no feasible even experimental programs to find this Mystical Natural Cycle But Definitely Not At All Any Fossil Fuel theory of planetary physics
what should you go with as "Most Likely To Be Actually True"?
Global warming is not a statistical correlation---it is physics.