An Example of "Global Warming" Scare Tactics

Let’s start out with our example, this time from your basic Associated Press story:

New satellite information shows that ice sheets in Greenland and western Antarctica continue to shrink faster than scientists thought and in some places are already in runaway melt mode.

British scientists for the first time calculated changes in the height of the vulnerable but massive ice sheets and found them especially worse at their edges. That’s where warmer water eats away from below. In some parts of Antarctica, ice sheets have been losing 30 feet a year in thickness since 2003, according to a paper published online Thursday in the journal Nature.

Some of those areas are about a mile thick, so they’ve still got plenty of ice to burn through. But the drop in thickness is speeding up. In parts of Antarctica, the yearly rate of thinning from 2003 to 2007 is 50 percent higher than it was from 1995 to 2003.

These new measurements, based on 50 million laser readings from a NASA satellite, confirm what some of the more pessimistic scientists thought: The melting along the crucial edges of the two major ice sheets is accelerating and is in a self-feeding loop. The more the ice melts, the more water surrounds and eats away at the remaining ice.

Hmm… sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it?  Sounds like in only a short amount of time there will be no ice left there.  Now time for the link to man:

The study doesn’t answer the crucial question of how much this worsening melt will add to projections of sea level rise from man-made global warming. Some scientists have previously estimated that steady melting of the two ice sheets will add about 3 feet, maybe more, to sea levels by the end of the century. But the ice sheets are so big it would probably take hundreds of years for them to completely disappear.

Now let’s take a look at some facts:

Greenland is losing about 250 million tons of ice each year (267 +/- 38 Gton/yr to be exact), and has a total ice mass of 2.3 x 10^15 tons. Thus, the fraction of ice Greenland is losing each year is 1 x 10^(-7), or 100 billionths of its total mass. Note that this number is the *net* loss – it includes both the losses from calving icebergs and surface melt, and the gains from snowfall on the interior.Antarctica is doing something in the range of losing 0.2 billionths of its mass to gaining 4 billionths of its mass each year. Again, these estimates are Antarctica’s net mass balance – losses from calving and gains from snowfall.

Antarctica is less clear because we have fewer measurements about the snowfall accumulation on the interior. Many different projections of the mass balance have come up with different values – the study I will use found that the mass balance is -5 to +85 million tons of ice per year. The total mass of Antarctica is 2.2 x 10^16 tons, so

Interesting!  So Antacrtica is losing 0.2 billionths of its mass (example from the AP story) but gaining 4 billionths of its mass.  I’m not math major but it sure looks to me that if you gain more ice or snow than you lose ice or snow there’s not a problem!  Here’s a link to where this information came from.

Here’s a graphic from where the ice is melting:

Antarctica as a whole is actually getting colder and the ice is getting thicker.  And Professor Mojib Latif of Germany’s Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, one of the leading Global Warmers around, has said:

Latif has been looking into the influence of cyclical changes to ocean currents and temperatures in the Atlantic, a feature known as the North American Oscillation. When he factored these natural fluctuations into his global climate model, Professor Latif found the results brought the allegedly endless rise in global temperatures to a screeching halt.

Latif conceded the planet has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are likely entering “one or even two decades during which temperatures cool.” Latif still believes in a warming trend and thinks it will resume. But he at least acknowledges the empirical evidence of cooling, that there are factors at work here other than your SUV, and that doom will not occur the day after tomorrow.

None of the alarmists and their supercomputer climate models ever predicted even a 30-year respite in their apocalyptic scenarios. Neither did they predict the sun, that thermonuclear furnace in the sky that has more influence on earth’s climate than any number of Ford Explorers, would suddenly go quiet for an indefinite period.

And the cause is, of course, the sun.  Tough to believe something as hot as the sun could influence temperature on earth, isn’t it?

Just another example of the Global Scaring that Liberals like to push so they can try and change our lifestyles (even as they trot around on private jets, etc…).

———Just Politics..? Correction———

Please excuse the error I made above regarding the amount of ice loss/gain.  I misread the quote to say that Antarctica was losing 0.2 billionths of its mass on the coast but gaining 4 billionths in the interior.  This is not how the data should be interpreted.

Without having the time today to plug in the corrected data I will simply amend this article by stating that the facts indicate nobody knows what the loss/gain to truly be, which still makes the Associated Press article misleading to say the least.

Please check back to read the revised article on this subject next week.