The Himalayas and Nearby Peaks Have Lost No Ice In Past 10 Years, Study Shows 409
DesScorp writes "A story from UK's Guardian reports on a study of ice levels from the Himalayas area, and finds that no significant melting has occurred, despite earlier predictions of losses of up to 50 billion tons of ice. 'The very unexpected result was the negligible mass loss from high mountain Asia, which is not significantly different from zero,' said Professor Jonathan Bamber, who also warns that 8 years simply isn't enough time to draw conclusions. 'It is awfully dangerous to take an eight-year record and predict even the next eight years, let alone the next century,' he said." Readers have sent in a few other stories today relating to melting (or persisting) ice around the globe; read on for more.
bonch writes "New research from the University of Colorado concludes that the polar ice caps are melting less than previously thought. Almost 230 billion tons of ice annually melt into the ocean, 30% less than past predictions. The new data comes from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellite, which provides more accurate estimates than previous methods." The earth being a complex thing, though, note that these observations don't mean an end to predictions of elevated sea level.
Finally, an anonymous reader writes with another ice story: "NASA's Terra satellite saw a huge crack in the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica and it is all set to give rise to an iceberg the size of Manhattan! The huge gash in the snow is 30 kilometers (or 19 miles) long and nearly 100 meters wide, and is widening every passing minute. This is expected to create an iceberg more than 900 square kilometer in area, as compared to the 785 square kilometer area of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island and Bronx combined, said NASA."
Maintaining a balanced position (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the lesson to take away is to strive for a rational, "healthily skeptical" position when presented with climate data. It's just such an unpredictable thing--literally, a complicated system the size of the entire world with a scale spanning molecules, continents, and beyond. The media doesn't help, either--it's drive for alarmism tends to overly simplify or exaggerate situations, and perhaps even the scientists involved get caught up in it.
For example, do you remember how polar bears drowning in the Arctic sea due to global warming were cited as a reason to classify them as an endangered species, and how they were used as a symbol of climate change in Al Gore's movie? The lead scientist was actually placed on administrative leave [humanevents.com], and several questions were raised about how the bears actually died and how the corpses were observed from 1,500 up in a helicopter rather than examined to actually determine their cause of death. Whether or not they were really drowning, there just wasn't enough data to come to the conclusion that was presented to the public with the level of certainty that was conveyed.
Unfortunately, if you're someone who agrees with doing the logical thing--reducing the negative environmental impact of humans as much as possible, within reasonable economic boundaries--the exaggerations and alarmism sweep you away into being on a "side", and you're shoved right in the middle of the mosh pit of tribal politics. If you question a conclusion or suggest a way of doing things, and you maintain a nuanced or balanced position, you get shit on by everybody, and nothing gets accomplished.
George Carlin did an insightful (and profanity-laden) bit on alarmism in modern society [youtube.com].
Skeptical != Scientific (Score:1, Insightful)
healthily skeptical
It's really very wrong to say skepticism is "healthy", and yet I see people say this almost daily. It's no more 'healthy' to be systematically 'skeptical' than it is to be systematically credulous. It's 'healthy' to follow the data and not make any assumptions before you analyze it.
Disbelieving things by default isn't really much better, from a scientific perspective, than believing everything you hear.
Extrapolating from 0.075% of all glaciers to 100% (Score:3, Insightful)
The science is settled? No. The science is shoddy.
Re:Skeptical != Scientific (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not so sure. I'd like to see some scientific data to back that up. In the mean time, I will remain skeptical by default.
(Only half joking here)
Controversy aside (Score:4, Insightful)
Controversy over AGW aside, this means nothing. The world can warm while some regions gain, lose, or maintain ice. It's GLOBAL climate change so what matters is the GLOBAL ice pack.
Re:Entirely normal during climate change. (Score:4, Insightful)
INtersting note (Score:3, Insightful)
'Normal' cycles would indicate that they should be increasing; the fact that they remain 0 is still a concern.
Skepticism (Score:5, Insightful)
>who also warns that 8 years simply isn't enough time to draw conclusions
Right, 8 years isn't long enough to draw conclusions when the 8 years of evidence doesn't point to the conclusion you want it to.
But if it points to the conclusion you want, then it's all the proof you need.
(Sorry... I think there are MANY forces at work that shape our climate, and people are pretty arrogant to think they understand all of them.)
As someone who thinks GW is real (Score:5, Insightful)
I am glad that seemingly hard facts are being presented.
While I still think the overwhelming evidence supports the hypothesis that 1) GW is occurring and 2) man is responsible, at least this is better than the ranting and raving that I've come to expect from skeptics.
Of course my thinking is sustained by much more complete data sets of a GLOBAL perspective provided by climatologists. There was a recent animation produced by NASA recently that showed a map of worldwide temperature readings for the past 150 years. (I submitted it to slashdot, for some reason it was rejected). If the skeptics can continue to produce data that shows the GW is not happening I'm open to changing my thinking. But again, from what I've been following in the literature, there hasn't been much supporting their point of view.
Look, I'm not ideologically opposed to fossil fuels per say; with the vastly increased amounts of natural gas in the U.S. I'm happy to use a fuel that doesn't directly fund people who hate us. However I'm also not one to overlook an inconvenient truth.
Re:Skeptical != Scientific (Score:2, Insightful)
Is it really wrong? So, one shouldn't question government? Or those that write laws. Or those that are trying to force their own views on people. Or be questioning of persons(or groups) ideological goals that could retrograde civilization? In order to follow data, you have to have data you can trust. If the person or people can't trust the data, they're going to be skeptical.
In turn, the more that people see the blackballing going on by the environmental movement, the more skeptical they become of it as well. This is further proofed by the coercion table, the more you want someone to do something by making them 'feel good' rather than 'forcing' the more likely they'll adopt it. Though as you can see the more heavy handed it's become over the years, the more people are lashing back, and support for any belief, of it has fallen sharply. And people believe it to be a form of taxable coercion.
Re:Skeptical != Scientific (Score:5, Insightful)
Number 2, I guess.
I was brainwashed into thinking that the scientific method leads to fallible results, which may be disproved by later tests.
I must be a rube for thinking that we should make decisions based on the best available theories of the time, with the acceptance that policies may need to change later.
How dumb of me to think that temperature changes might be a temporary thing, but it probably wouldn't hurt to cut pollution, anyway.
Re:Skeptical != Scientific (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree. We're far enough into the global warming thing for 100% of scientists to agree that global warming is occurring, and 98% of them to agree that it's somehow caused or contributed to by human activity (those are real statistics in an article I read on the problems of the media trying too hard to present both sides of an argument regardless of the percentages involved; I'm too lazy to provide a link, but hey, so's the grandparent). The "healthy skepticism" sounds like someone trying to sound reasonable while still obviously not wanting to believe that anything bad is really happening.
Re:Controversy aside (Score:3, Insightful)
But this is AMERICA, dammit, and we don't care about ice packs on the other side of the world. What about OUR ice? That's what we should be concerned about! Are we going to be able to ski in Colorado next year or not? Somebody answer! If the answer is yes then I am going to rip the catalytic converter off my SUV tomorrow to cash in the Palladium value.
(and yes, I was trying to be over-dramatically satirical).
Re:Skeptical != Scientific (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of the "climate reporting" is completely retarded. High and low pressures alternate, air is always flowing from high to low. Like now Eastern Europe has been very cold, well at Svalbard they've had record warmth because the high pressure has pushed low pressures with warm, moist air north. These lead to huge local year-to-year variations with mild and cold winters. And every mild season people go "ooh, must be global warming" and every cold season people go "ooh, global warming is a hoax" and the media isn't helping with their sensationalism. To say if it was really a global effect you need lots of data and would probably end up in a boring conclusion like "Average world temperature rose by 0.08C this year".
What's that, zero point zero something degrees you say? 8C in 100 years would actually be extremely much, but it sounds very little, very boring. So 99% of it is sensationalist hype from local extremes, because if you look at a huge mass of data and cherry pick results you'll always find some that are way outside the normal. That's at least what I consider healthy skepticism, in fact I'd apply it to most things found in mainstream media. Extrapolating from the fields where I know they butcher the truth, I don't expect the others to fare any better. I bet that for example doctors are tearing their hair out over the medical reporting, where almost any result is hyped like a major breakthrough or a cure being right around the corner to get readers.
Re:Skeptical != Scientific (Score:5, Insightful)
You couldn't be more incorrect. Being skeptical means to be not easily convinced. To not take things at face value and to demand solid evidence for extraordinary claims.
It does NOT mean "disbelieving things by default."
Re:Skeptical != Scientific (Score:3, Insightful)
[Citation]
Because I am pretty sure the numbers are no where close to your posting.
I'd wager about 84% support the earth is warming, 74% support man influenced warming, 67% warming due to man made CO2, and 14% that the earth is in fact cooling.
As you didn't provide a citation, neither will I.
Re:Maintaining a balanced position (Score:2, Insightful)
Facts? Or hear-say anecdotal evidence?
Re:Maintaining a balanced position (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree....
In my childhood, it was always sunny, seldom a rainy day, it was never too hot, never too cold.
Now, it's gets bloody cold, lots of snow, extremely humid, all in just 20 years time.
Maybe I shouldn't have moved from San Diego to the northeast. *ponder*
The 100% claim is essentially correct (Score:4, Insightful)
There is extremely solid evidence that the climate has been getting steadily warmer since the industrial revolution. http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/ [nasa.gov]. That holds true even when we take into account things such as cities radiating heat and reduce them from the gathered data. And that holds true even on years when sun activity is low. That's as established fact as anything in the science can be: You can still claim that the earth is flat and call yourself a scientist, if you want to. You won't get much attention in peer reviewed scientific journals, though.
Re:You're not convincing anyone (Score:4, Insightful)
You know, I think that if everyone who believes AGW is a serious danger got together and used their political donations to instead fund a private foundation to support technological research to make "green" advancements more cost effective, and then shop those to private business, there would be more than enough money get the job taken care of, and without the political BS.
Some people just don't like the government telling them what to do. And other people are pretty annoyed with being forced to do something that one billion Chinese can't be bothered with. And yes, I know that they are working on green energy too, but really, if people think that's really making up for the sheer ecological disaster that China is, they have never been to China.
Point is, those who are trying to get the government to stop AGW are just as obstinate and counterproductive in their own way as the people who simply ignore or deny AGW. Just get as many people on your side as possible, collect the money from them, and do the PR and product development yourselves.
Re:The 100% claim is essentially correct (Score:3, Insightful)
There is extremely solid evidence that the climate has been getting steadily warmer since the industrial revolution. http://climate.nasa.gov/ [nasa.gov]
The only two mentions of the industrial revolution on the page you linked to are specifically related to CO2 and ocean acidification, not temperature.
I am wondering what your problem is. Are you so addicted to exaggeration that you can't tell the truth without lying? Or maybe you are so careless in your comprehension that you really think that the page you linked to says something that it does not?
The most laughable part of this non-factual incident that you brought upon yourself is that you could have found a citation that supports something very close to what you claimed. I guess you wanted to make the industrial revolution claim, even though facts dont support it, because its so simple minded.
Lets not let the fact [wikipedia.org] that since the industrial revolution, that we had a period of 40 years of cooling, distract you from your sloppy worthless ways.
Re:Skeptical != Scientific (Score:5, Insightful)
I will remain skeptical by default.
Absolutely! It's a sad day when those of us who do accept the mainstream position on this topic feel we have to denounce skepticism (ie. the demand for proof as opposed to mere nay saying) itself, or cannot recognise reports such as these as good news.
Re:The 100% claim is essentially correct (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Skeptical != Scientific (Score:3, Insightful)
It stops being skepticism and gets into denialism when the denier starts quoting the same old discredited arguments over and over again.
Re:Skeptical != Scientific (Score:5, Insightful)
Skepticism, always relies on stopping for a moment to think about a story you have read to find gaps in logic.
Hmm, melting ice, obviously if the location has temperatures in the range of -10 degrees and the temperature goes up to -8 degrees you are not going to see a great difference in melting at that location. You might see some interesting changes in glacier fracture due to stresses on 'weaker' ice.
Next up the 2 degree change in temperatures will not necessarily reduce precipitation, in this case snow falls. In fact at this location it will likely increase snow if at lower levels that rise in temperature is exacerbated due to local climatic conditions substantively increasing the moister in the air prior to it's rise to higher altitudes and the resultant increased precipitation occurs.
So all that ever will count are global averages, local areas only count where critical impacts might occur. Say like a storm surges might start flooding down town New York upon a regular basis or record snow falls over the whole of winter make even with a rise in temperature make Vancouver uninhabitable.
The real truth is, how much will it cost to take preventative measures and not need them and how much will it cost to not take preventative measures and need them. Aside from of course the mass execution of all Fossil fuel propagandists, political puppets and their funders. The world will really not be in a forgiving mood, with truly unpredictable changes in human society arising from that catastrophe but those short hair crested rock throwing monkeys have always been vengeful.
Re:The 100% claim is essentially correct (Score:4, Insightful)
In any case, when the fate of the human race is at stake, Prevention Science is a better prescription than "healthy skepticism"
Not necessarily. "Do something!" is not the same thing as "do the right thing." We don't really yet understand what's actually going on, and it's a very complex system. If we don't understand it, we could easily screw it up even more by doing the wrong thing.
Re:The 100% claim is essentially correct (Score:5, Insightful)
There's also extremely solid evidence that the climate has been much warmer today with ten times the amount of CO2 in the air, and not only was life just grand then. Life flourished, and was even more diverse then, then it is today. . So, we're going to base all of our information on 150-200 years roughly. With 20-30 years of 'goodish' data, with 5-15 years of not bad data, with 5 years of okay data. That the earth is warming. Not forgetting that, it's been so much warmer when humans weren't even involved.
Beh.
But that was millions of years ago and every species alive at that time is now extinct. Sure, life will flourish if the Earth's temperature increases a few degrees and CO2 increases. But the Earth won't look the same and many of the species alive now will go extinct just like they always have when there have been big climate shifts.
And it will be damn inconvenient for humans who have built their cities by the oceans and in the lowlands to take advantage of trade and the best places for agriculture.
So evidence that the Earth is heating more slowly than we thought is good news. It means we have more time to get prepared for or possibly stave off the worst of the change.
Re:Skeptical != Scientific (Score:4, Insightful)
Your paper does not claim what you claim it claims (from the freaking abstract):
Here, we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that (i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the eld support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
the relative climate expertise and scientic prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.
I'm still on the first page! You should see how they determine "expertise" and "prominence", it's a laugh. Honestly, I've never seen rhetoric abused so much in a supposedly scientific paper.
I can read on, but this doesn't look like it's going to be a terribly credible paper.
Here's a real gem:
Between December 2008 and July 2009, we collected the number of climate-relevant publications for all 1,372 researchers from Google Scholar (search terms: “author:-lastname climate”), as well as the number of times cited for each researcher’s four top-cited articles in any eld (search term “climate” removed). [ ... ] using Google Scholar provides a more conservative estimate of expertise
To examine only researchers with demonstrated climate expertise, we imposed a 20 climate-publications minimum to be considered a climate researcher, bringing the list to 908 researchers (NCE = 817; NUE = 93). Our dataset is not comprehensive of the climate community and therefore does not infer absolute numbers or proportions of all CE versus all UE researchers.
What really stands out, however, are the numerous confounders that are NOT considered by the authors at all!
Sorry, this paper is total garbage.
Re:Fear Mongering (Score:5, Insightful)
Those who are yelling "Global Meltdown", like their "Millennium Bug" counterparts a decade or so ago, are nothing more than fear mongers
They engage in fear mongering for one very specific purpose, and that is, they benefit from public panics
The "Millennium Bug" fear mongers spreaded fears so wide that even ridiculous fear such as "Planes dropping from the sky" were uttered by many
The "Millennium Bug" was little more than a hiccup precisely because the publicity spurred decision-makers to invest huge amounts of effort into reviewing/fixing old systems so that they didn't have problems. Had it not been for the publicity, many of the systems probably would not have been fixed and then there would have been hell to pay (as in "How could you eggheads let this happen?")
It was a no-win situation for IT professionals (at least in terms of the general public's view of them; I hear it was a major win for consulting companies who could scrounge up COBOL programmers)
Re:The 100% claim is essentially correct (Score:3, Insightful)
You're right. To avoid doing the wrong thing, we should do nothing that may affect the climate. That means we shouldn't burn any fossil fuels because they certainly have an effect on the climate.
Re:The 100% claim is essentially correct (Score:4, Insightful)
We don't really yet understand what's actually going on, and it's a very complex system. If we don't understand it, we could easily screw it up even more by doing the wrong thing.
That means we shouldn't burn any fossil fuels because they certainly have an effect on the climate.
I agree. I'm strongly in favour of going all nuclear power.
Re:The 100% claim is essentially correct (Score:4, Insightful)
I sense a lack of imagination in you. Yes we'll have to change our lifestyle but that doesn't necessarily mean going back to pre-industrial living, just different than the current lifestyle.
Re:Fear Mongering (Score:4, Insightful)
Here, here!
There's a great blog and book called You're not so smart [youarenotsosmart.com], and it goes into deep discussion of how people think and behave. and for the most part we aren't open to new ideas, we just cherry pick facts to justify our philosophical positions. It actually takes a tremendous amount of intellectual rigor to look at the MANY sides of an idea to come away with some concise idea of where the reality of the situation lands. This by the way is complicated in this modern age by the fact your search engines are designed to help you find what you're looking for. So if you're looking for justification, not only will you find it, but you will soon be virtually unable to find anything else... the engine will be leaned in the direction you push it. Just as an aside, this is one more reason to look for all sides of a conversation, because you want to prevent your primary source of information from becoming so biased that it becomes just another feedback on your point of view.
In the area of global climate change. We have a lot of very interesting information. Greenland is experiencing TREMENDOUS melting events and there is a huge influx of fresh water into the arctic ocean. [reuters.com] The problems with polar bear and brown bears is well understood, including a recent event in which unusually warm coastal water prevents salmon runs in southern Alaska and resulted in serious die off of young brown bears. Glaciers through the Americas, Europe and Africa are disappearing. The loss of glaciers in North America is so pronounced that within 20 years the International Park name "Glacier" may have no glaciers to speak of. Ocean chemistry is changing, and measurable rises in CO2 have resulted in acidification threatening a wide variety of species that require carbonaceous shells (everything from coral to shell fish to crustaceans and their larva.) On the other side, chemical changes have caused a massive increase in ocean jellies (a well known survival response to perceived threat designed to ensure species survival in the face of potential calamity.) We're seeing dramatic shifts in the flowering and fruiting seasons of plant around the world. Shifts in animal migration. Statistical changes in weather patterns consistent with predicted models (increased numbers of floods and droughts and increases in precipitation and storm intensity.) Serious rise in droughts and wildfires in the Western US, Africa and Australia. These are all facts. Part of a larger picture and as some have already said, so complex that we don't understand it. However, we can begin to see patterns emerging. It would be profoundly foolish to ignore these signs, or wait until catastrophic environmental failure became clear and incontrovertible.
Wise money suggests there are a hundred good reasons for looking at ways to conserve energy, become more efficient, find renewable resources and create an energy economy that begins to move people and long term solutions off planet. Wise money suggests that rather than argue and justify a negligent past, it would serve us all best to invent a workable future and to that end, arguing against the impacts of fossil fuels and there growing scarcity would seem (at least to me) like a fools errand.