THE ANTARCTIC IS THE KEY TO SEA-LEVEL RISE

I am hoping that my recent practice of putting up parts of actual scientific papers rather than journalistic summaries of them is not making life too difficult for those who read this blog. Actual scientific papers are in general far more sober and cautious than the accounts of them that one reads in the press. Even if readers don't understand the full argument of a given paper, the overall conclusion of the paper is generally pretty clear. Today I am putting up summaries or abstracts (an abstract is the paper's own summary of itself) from three papers. The abstract immediately below shows that melting of the antarctic ice-cap was the key to the end of the last ice age, so what the antarctic is doing is what we should be looking at if we are worried about any global warming effects. So it is more than a little interesting that the summaries of the next two papers show that the antarctic is COOLING overall!

Ice Sheet and Solid Earth Influences on Far-Field Sea-Level Histories

By: Sophie E. Bassett [1], Glenn A. Milne [2], Jerry X. Mitrovica [2], Peter U. Clark [3]. 1 Department of Earth Sciences, University of Durham, Durham DH1 3LE, UK. 2 Department of Physics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A7, Canada. 3 Department of Geosciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR 97331, USA.

Abstract

Previous predictions of sea-level change subsequent to the last glacial maximum show significant, systematic discrepancies between observations at Tahiti, Huon Peninsula, and Sunda Shelf during Lateglacial time (14,000 to 9000 calibrated years before the present). We demonstrate that a model of glacial isostatic adjustment characterized by both a high-viscosity lower mantle (4 x 1022 Pa s) and a large contribution from the Antarctic ice sheet to meltwater pulse IA (15-meters eustatic equivalent) resolves these discrepancies. This result supports arguments that an early and rapid Antarctic deglaciation contributed to a sequence of climatic events that ended the most recent glacial period of the current ice age.

Doi (permanent) address for the above paper here




THE EAST ANTARCTIC ICE SHEET HAS ACCUMULATED MASS OVER THE PAST DECADE

(From CO2 Science Magazine, 15 June 2005)

In an important new paper, Davis et al. (2005) analyze the elevation change (dH) of over 8.5 million km2 of the grounded Antarctic ice sheet interior (~70% of the total ice-sheet area) using ~347 million dH measurements derived from ERS-1 and ERS-2 ice-mode satellite radar altimeter data (with coverage extending to 81.6oS) for the period 1992 to 2003, after which they compare the observed elevation changes of ~1500 1o x 2o (latitude x longitude) regions, 22 major drainage basins, Berkner Island, West and East Antarctica, and the entire region of coverage (ROC) to estimates of concomitant snowfall derived from meteorological models.

The primary result of this exercise revealed, in the words of the five scientists who conducted the work, that "the vast majority of regions in East Antarctica are thickening, especially in the interior, while regions in West Antarctica exhibit both strong thickening and thinning trends." At the basin scale, as they continue, "dH/dt values range from 0 to +6 cm/year for East Antarctica, while there is substantial spatial variability in West Antarctica with dH/dt values ranging from -10 to +19 cm/year." Overall, they report that the East Antarctic ice sheet interior within the ROC is thickening at a rate of 1.8 - 0.3 cm/year, while that of the West Antarctic ice sheet interior is thinning at a rate of 0.9 - 0.3 cm/year. For the entire ROC, the 5:1 ratio of East to West Antarctic area coverage "causes slight thickening overall at the rate of 1.4 - 0.3 cm/year."

[...] There are many implications of these various observations that remain to be determined. At this point in time, however, we can safely conclude that the climate-alarmist claim of dramatic global flooding of earth's coastal areas in response to the melting of polar ice due to global warming has been thoroughly discredited, for during the period of time that they claim the planet experienced the warmest temperatures of the past two millennia, Antarctica experienced a net buildup of ice that actually removed water from earth's seas.





ANTARCTIC TEMPERATURE TRENDS

CO2 Science Magazine, 15 June 2005

[...] Over the latter part of the 20th century, i.e., the period of time that climate alarmists claim was host to the most dramatic global warming of the past two millennia, fully 80% of the Antarctic coastal stations with sufficiently long temperature records reveal either (1) an intensification of cooling or (2) a reduced rate of warming; while four coastal sites and one interior site actually shifted from warming to cooling. And this has occurred in one of the planet's two high-latitude polar regions where CO2-induced global warming is predicted to be most strongly expressed. Clearly, there is a serious disconnect between reality and the virtual world of climate alarmists.

Reference:
Turner, J., Colwell, S.R., Marshall, G.J., Lachlan-Cope, T.A., Carleton, A.M., Jones, P.D., Lagun, V., Reid, P.A. and Iagovkina, S. 2004. "The SCAR READER project: towards a high-quality database of mean Antarctic meteorological observations". Journal of Climate 17: 2890-2898.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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