Why NASA thinks the ice is melting......

[shutterman]

A team led by Son Nghiem of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., studied trends in Arctic perennial ice cover by combining data from NASA's Quick Scatterometer (QuikScat) satellite with a computing model based on observations of sea ice drift from the International Arctic Buoy Programme. QuikScat can identify and map different classes of sea ice, including older, thicker perennial ice and younger, thinner seasonal ice.

[...]

Nghiem said the rapid decline in winter perennial ice the past two years was caused by unusual winds. "Unusual atmospheric conditions set up wind patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and then sped its flow out of the Arctic," he said. When that sea ice reached lower latitudes, it rapidly melted in the warmer waters.

"The winds causing this trend in ice reduction were set up by an unusual pattern of atmospheric pressure that began at the beginning of this century," Nghiem said.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

What about the ice melting in Antartica

The Southern Hemisphere sea ice area narrowly surpassed the previous historic maximum of 16.03 million sq. km to 16.17 million sq. km. The observed sea ice record in the Southern Hemisphere (1979-present) is not as long as the Northern Hemisphere. (meaning it has not been tracked as long as the North Pole) Prior to the satellite era, direct observations of the Southern Hemisphere sea ice edge were sporadic.

Historic Maximum?

Please help me understand?

thanks,
Wes

[SmartWombat]

Less ice in the Arctic, more in the Antarctic.
Like my hair, bald spot on top, beard beneath

[shutterman]

Too funny!

[masdog]

LOL...

Just some proof that we really don't understand whats happening.

[Frog]

I see proofs and unproofs all the time.
But when I see scientists studying the loss of ice in Greenland and the film evidence, I believe it. Especially when its scientists that have nothing to gain.
Arctic sea ice isn't the problem....its already in the sea and won't cause much rise but the Greenland ice is disappearing rapidly.
I haven't seen anything claiming Antarctic ice is increasing...can you give the source?

[shutterman]

I
I haven't seen anything claiming Antarctic ice is increasing...can you give the source?

You can google it or research this guy John Christy - below is something from Brit Hume.

I haven't looked at the Wall Street article b/c I won't pay to read the news!

"John Christy is the director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. He and thousands of others on the U.N. panel share half the Nobel Prize also awarded to Al Gore. But he says he cringes when he hears 100-year weather forecasts when it is incredibly difficult to accurately predict the weather five days from now.

He writes in The Wall Street Journal, "Mother Nature simply operates at a level of complexity that is, at this point, beyond the mastery of mere mortals (such as scientists) and the tools available to us."

He points out that a recent CNN report on climate change made much of the shrinking Arctic sea ice cover, but did not mention that winter sea ice around Antarctica set a record maximum last month."


Thanks,
Wes

[Greg McCary]

Greenhouse effect or not, we need to quit trashing the earth we live on.

[Frog]

Very true, Greg. The stuff they ask us to do to stop global warming is the same stuff we should be doing anyway.

[mwfanelli2]

A few excerpts captured from Google...

Christy as an active member of Cooler Heads Coalition which has published some of Christy's books (as appears on his own web site)::

"Formed in 1997, the Coalition and its website were revised in April 2004. It is currently hosted and financed by Consumer Alert, member and organizer of the National Consumer Coalition. The Coalition publishes the bi-weekly "Cooler Heads Newsletter" in conjunction with the Competitve Enterprise Institute. Current members are: 60 Plus Association, The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (junkscience.com), Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, Americans for Tax Reform, Association of Concerned Taxpayers, Atlas Economic Research Foundation, Capital Research Center, Citizens Against Government Waste, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Consumer Alert, Defenders of Property Rights, Foundation for American Liberty, Frontiers of Freedom, Fund for a New Generation, The Heartland Institute, National Center for Policy Analysis, National Center for Public Policy Research, Political Economy Research Center, Public Interest Institute, Small Business Survival Committee, United Seniors Association, and Women for Tax Reform."

Note that all of these corporate sponsors are right wing and a couple of ultra-right wing political groups. Most are fronts for big oil. Go ahead, look it up.

"Christy is generally considered a contrarian on some issues related to global warming, although he helped draft and signed the American Geophysical Union statement on climate change. In an interview with National Public Radio about the new AGU statement, he said: It is scientifically inconceivable that after changing forests into cities, turning millions of acres into irrigated farmland, putting massive quantities of soot and dust into the air, and putting extra greenhouse gases into the air, that the natural course of climate has not changed in some way."

"More recently, in a publication in the series Washington Roundtable on Science and Public Policy he said:

"I showed some evidence that humans are causing warming in the surface measurements that we have but it is not the greenhouse relation.

"Christy has also said that while he supports the AGU declaration, and is convinced that human activities are a cause of the global warming that has been measured, he is "still a strong critic of scientists who make catastrophic predictions of huge increases in global temperatures and tremendous rises in sea levels."

"While he now acknowledges that global warming is real and the human contribution is significant, Christy has been a long-time skeptic who previously argued that satellite climate data do not show a trend toward global warming, and even show cooling in some areas. His findings have been widely disputed. Christy now asserts that global warming will have beneficial effects on the planet and that increased CO2 emissions from human activities are a net positive."

The fact of the matter is that Christy has spent more time with the politics of the issue, not the science. For a guy such as Gore, that's to be expected. But for someone with a PhD in Atmospheric Science, it is not expected.

If Christy can come up with theories that predict things that can be experimented with or observed, as required by the scientific method, great! Maybe he will be proven correct. But a quick web glance at his abstracts on the subject, admittedly short, showed mostly hand-waving and politics, nothing that could be tested.

[shutterman]

If Christy can come up with theories that predict things that can be experimented with or observed, as required by the scientific method, great! Maybe he will be proven correct. But a quick web glance at his abstracts on the subject, admittedly short, showed mostly hand-waving and politics, nothing that could be tested.

Nothing except the fact the ice is growing in Antartica, the hurricane forecast are wrong and NASA has another explanation of the artic ice melting.

my point is all of the overhyping of Global Warming can do more damage then helping when some of the dire predictions (remember the Gore movie's cover art) don't come true or are expained in a different way.

People are left with a big "So What/Who cares?" sort of feeling instead of a "Call to Action" sort of feeling.

That's all.

Thanks,
Wes

[alienator]

Nothing except the fact the ice is growing in Antartica, the hurricane forecast are wrong and NASA has another explanation of the artic ice melting.

These things aren't indications that the various theories re: global warming are false. In any experiment done to date, the results have never exactly fit the theory at every single sample point. That isn't possible. There are always data points that fall off the curve. The things you cited may be some of those points. The only way to tell is to look at the trend of the data.

Another point is that when sampling (or measuring or recording data), you have to choose the right frequency with which to sample data. By choosing only one point, i.e. the hurricane forecast this year and ice growth in the Antarctic the past year, you are choosing a sample frequency that is infinitely small, which doesn't work. Again, you have to look at a series of points. Done correctly, the data shows that Antarctic ice cover is decreasing.

The biggest thing impacting the data, though, is noise. Noise is the uncertainty in the measurement, and it can come from many different sources. You're familiar with noise: listen to an AM station, and you'll hear the noise in the background or sometimes even washing out the signal you want. One nice thing about noise, in general, is that the more measurements you take, the more the noise goes down. This means that you can average out the noise, in general. If you looked at climate data for 10 years, it'd likely be difficult to discern any trend at all. However, if you looked at climate data for 1000 years, you'd likely see a trend, and one reason for that would be you would have reduced the noise by roughly a factor of 10. Yeah, it's complicated, but the take home idea is that the more measurements you take, the better your model gets.

my point is all of the overhyping of Global Warming can do more damage then helping when some of the dire predictions (remember the Gore movie's cover art) don't come true or are expained in a different way.

The scientists aren't the ones over-hyping things, but for what it's worth, it is somethig that needs to be hyped. Our climate is a large system and an underdamped system, meaning that it will take a very long time for preventative measures to have any effect at all. As the system is disturbed more and more--by inaction--the tirme for the system to return to an ideal state will take longer and longer. Eventually, however, we may disturb the system so much that it cannot return to the ideal state.

People are left with a big "So What/Who cares?" sort of feeling instead of a "Call to Action" sort of feeling.

Part of the reason for people feeling this way is the poor scientific and math educations that the public, in general, receives. It's very poor. Properly educated in science people would realize that Earth's climate is something that responds very, very slowly to some input. How poorly people are educated is plainly evident in the emergence of Intelligent Design, some "theory" that fails on every point of Scientific Method.

I'm not bothered in the least by the fewer number of hurricanes we had this than the predicted number. There are way too many variables to precisely predict exact weather phenomena over the course of several months, let alone days or weeks. It'll be sometime before computers able to do the necessary calcuations will even exist, and then it will take even longer to factor all the variables into the models. And even then, the models still won't be exact.

[mwfanelli2]

Something else to think about...

George Bush's climate group, US Climate Change Science Program (not what you would call rabid global warming fans!), released data today that indicates:

Carbon being released from man-made sources: 2.05 Billion tons/year

Carbon being absorbed by the natural environment: 0.56 Billion tons/year

There is a net 1.49 billion tons of carbon being released into the air each year. Sort of puts a damper on the whole "lush rich forests will use it up" argument!

In today's USA Today, page 3A.

[SmartWombat]

lush rich forests will use it up

That's already been disproved in the lab.
More CO2 gas does not encourage a plant to fix more of it into carbon.
You need more plants to do that.

Like the ideas of using plants as CO2 scrubbers on space missions.
The ground experiments show a rather large area (that's surface leaf area) required per person just for the breathed CO2.

[alienator]

FWIW, last week I sat through a presentation put on by a South Korean group re: their work with space based sensors, and they showed a plot of three different global warming models. Data from the past, run through the models, matched well for all three cases. With data from all three models extrapolated to 50-100 years in the future (I think those were the numbers.), the models varied slightly. The South Koreans, though, said this difference is the result of one parameter and not having instrumentation to accurately capture and reduce that data parameter. With that parameter removed, the projections match.

There was nothing ambiguous about their data at all.