5/27/2014
Greenie Watch
And we've got 200 years before anything much happens anyway
"I have a problem with the widespread implication (in the popular press) that the West Antarctic collapse can be attributed to anthropogenic climate change," said Mike Wolovik, a graduate researcher at Lamont-Doherty who studies ice sheet dynamics. "The marine ice sheet instability is an inherent part of ice sheet dynamics that doesn't require any human forcing to operate. When the papers say that collapse is underway, and likely to last for several hundred years, that's a reasonable and plausible conclusion."
But, he said, the link between CO2 levels and the loss of ice in West Antarctica "is pretty tenuous." The upwelling of warmer waters that melt the ice has been tied to stronger westerly winds around Antarctica, which have been linked to a stronger air pressure difference between the polar latitudes and the mid-latitudes, which have in turn been linked to global warming.
"I'm not an atmospheric scientist, so I can't evaluate the strength of all of those linkages," Wolovik said. "However, it's a lot of linkages." And that leaves a lot of room for uncertainty about what's actually causing the collapse of the glaciers, he said.
Researchers have been discussing the theory of how marine ice sheets become unstable for many years, said Stan Jacobs, an oceanographer at Lamont-Doherty who has studied ocean currents and their impact on ice shelves for several decades.
"Some of us are a bit wary of indications that substantial new ground has been broken" by the two new papers, Jacobs said. While ocean temperatures seem to be the main cause of the West Antarctic ice retreat, there's a lot of variability in how heat is transported around the ocean in the region, and it's unclear what's driving that, he said. And, he's skeptical that modeling the system at this point can accurately predict the timing of the ice's retreat.
But, he added, "this is one more message indicating that a substantial sea level rise from continued melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could occur in the foreseeable future.
Cochran agreed: The papers' message is "that … over the next couple hundred years, there's going to be a significant rise in sea level, and at this point we can't stop it."
SOURCE
Greenie Watch
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| The CRU graph. Note that it is calibrated in tenths of a degree Celsius and that even that tiny amount of warming started long before the late 20th century. The horizontal line is totally arbitrary, just a visual trick. The whole graph would be a horizontal line if it were calibrated in whole degrees -- thus showing ZERO warming |
And we've got 200 years before anything much happens anyway
"I have a problem with the widespread implication (in the popular press) that the West Antarctic collapse can be attributed to anthropogenic climate change," said Mike Wolovik, a graduate researcher at Lamont-Doherty who studies ice sheet dynamics. "The marine ice sheet instability is an inherent part of ice sheet dynamics that doesn't require any human forcing to operate. When the papers say that collapse is underway, and likely to last for several hundred years, that's a reasonable and plausible conclusion."
But, he said, the link between CO2 levels and the loss of ice in West Antarctica "is pretty tenuous." The upwelling of warmer waters that melt the ice has been tied to stronger westerly winds around Antarctica, which have been linked to a stronger air pressure difference between the polar latitudes and the mid-latitudes, which have in turn been linked to global warming.
"I'm not an atmospheric scientist, so I can't evaluate the strength of all of those linkages," Wolovik said. "However, it's a lot of linkages." And that leaves a lot of room for uncertainty about what's actually causing the collapse of the glaciers, he said.
Researchers have been discussing the theory of how marine ice sheets become unstable for many years, said Stan Jacobs, an oceanographer at Lamont-Doherty who has studied ocean currents and their impact on ice shelves for several decades.
"Some of us are a bit wary of indications that substantial new ground has been broken" by the two new papers, Jacobs said. While ocean temperatures seem to be the main cause of the West Antarctic ice retreat, there's a lot of variability in how heat is transported around the ocean in the region, and it's unclear what's driving that, he said. And, he's skeptical that modeling the system at this point can accurately predict the timing of the ice's retreat.
But, he added, "this is one more message indicating that a substantial sea level rise from continued melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could occur in the foreseeable future.
Cochran agreed: The papers' message is "that … over the next couple hundred years, there's going to be a significant rise in sea level, and at this point we can't stop it."
SOURCE
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