Researchers tie climate changes to accelerated melt at Antarctica, raise fears of quicker sea-level rise

I was going to leave this for comments by others more expert than I am but I can't help noting a few amusing bits. Like: "despite land temperatures for the continent remaining essentially unchanged". So any change is NOT due to warming apparently. I also note from another report that the "accelerated melt" certainly has a very light foot on the gas pedal. The melt in 2006 was said to add half a millimeter to the sea level. That translates to two inches over 100 years! Forgive me while I laugh! Al Gore will certainly be stuffing his fingers in his ears when he hears that!



Climatic changes appear to be destabilizing vast ice sheets of western Antarctica that had previously seemed relatively protected from global warming, researchers reported Sunday, raising the prospect of faster sea-level rise than current estimates.

While the overall loss is a tiny fraction of the miles-deep ice that covers much of Antarctica, scientists said the new finding is important because the continent holds about 90 percent of Earth's ice, and until now, large-scale ice loss there had been limited to the peninsula that juts out toward the tip of South America. In addition, researchers found that the rate of ice loss in the affected areas has accelerated over the past 10 years -- as it has on most glaciers and ice sheets around the world.

"Without doubt, Antarctica as a whole is now losing ice yearly, and each year it's losing more," said Eric Rignot, lead author of a paper published online in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The Antarctic ice sheet is shrinking despite land temperatures for the continent remaining essentially unchanged, except for the fast-warming peninsula. The cause, Rignot said, may be changes in the flow of the warmer water of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current that circles much of the continent. "Something must be changing the ocean to trigger such changes," said Rignot, a senior scientist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We believe it is related to global climate forcing."

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Australia: Rainfall could smash records

We were repeatedly told that the "drought" was a sign of global warming. So the floods must be a sign of global cooling, right? Or am I missing something?



BRISBANE has already exceeded its average January rainfall in the first two weeks of the month - as north Queensland continues to faces severe floods. Locals in Airlie Beach in the Whitsundays are bracing for yet more heavy rain today after the monsoon conditions wreaked havoc across the region yesterday. But in the southeast, the consistent rain has brought welcome relief from drought conditions with dam levels now above 25 per cent for the first time in month. Last night's rainfall gave a slight boost to the southeast's water supply with Somerset Dam receiving 18mm, North Pine 10mm and Wivenhoe 5mm. The combined storage today stands at 25.78 per cent.

Brisbane has already recorded 124mm of rain in January - outstripping the monthly average for the entirety of January of 120mm. And rain is forecast for the next six days until at least Monday of next week. With more heavy falls, Brisbane could be on track to pass the highest recent January total of 280mm in 1995. The city received 279mm in 2004.

In north Queensland, flood warnings remain in place for the Proserpine and Don rivers, which began rising with a storm on Sunday night. The bureau says the Don River at Bowen peaked at five metres around 3am today, causing moderate flooding. Further rises are likely today with heavy rain forecast, and widespread flash flooding is expected to continue in coastal areas south of Ayr to Mackay, particularly around Proserpine.

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Raining on the Drought Parade

Post below lifted from World Climate Report. See the original for links and graphics

One of the many pillars of fear regarding global warming is the claim that droughts will become more severe in the future, particularly in continental interiors. The story is very simple and is told over and over - temperatures rise, evaporation rates increase, and even with no change in rainfall, soil moisture levels decrease and droughts last longer and are more severe. Then, crops will fail, ecosystems will collapse, major cities will run out of water, diseases will spread - you know the story. There is always some drought occurring some place on the planet, so supporting evidence is easy to find.

We have written on this subject many times, and like everything else, there is a lot more complexity to the story. Changes in wind and/or clouds could impact future evaporation rates, global dimming could cause a decease in evaporation, plants could become more water use efficient thanks to higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and therefore extract less water from the soil, and on and on. One of the problems is that long term soil moisture data are rare to non-existent, but an article in a recent issue of the International Journal of Climatology brings us a story about soil moisture extending back 1,426 years!

The article is by a team of Chinese scientists from the University of San Diego and various institutions in China. The research was funded by NASA, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the K.C. Wang Education Foundation of Hong Kong, and University of San Diego. They begin the article noting "Anthropogenic climate changes since the Industrial Revolution have attracted much attention in recent years. One often debated question is whether the magnitude of the climate change has exceeded the range of natural variability of the climate system" (sounds like they read World Climate Report). They specifically turn their attention to soil moisture conditions in northwestern China and then reveal the plan to reconstruct soil moisture levels for over 1,400 years.

Yin et al. remind us that tree growth in that part of the world is sensitive to changes in soil moisture, and they identified Qilian junipers in their study area that are over 1,400 years old. They extracted 1050 increment cores from 493 trees (the trees are not harmed), and they carefully measured characteristics of each ring width (there is one ring per year). The tree ring widths are highly statistically significantly related to the soil moisture levels, and just like magic, they could reconstruct soil moisture levels a long way back in time. They further note "We developed tree-ring chronologies over 1400 years long, which included several important climatic events, such as the medieval warming, Little Ice Age, and the post-industrial period warming."

One of the tricks in dendroclimatology is to link ring widths to actual climate data in the modern period, establish statistical response functions, and then allow the widths to tell us about climate variations hundreds and even thousands of years ago. Yin et al. developed water balance variables for their study area for the period 1955 - 2002 (AE = actual evaporation; DEF = soil moisture deficit; RSM = relative soil moisture; FC = field capacity), and the figure below shows us something very interesting. In their own words regarding the 1955-2002 analyses, we learn that "There was an overall trend to a wetter condition during the study period as indicated by the increasing trends of AE and RSM." OK - where is this drought trend that we are expecting in this continental interior? Once again, the darn data are not consistent with the predictions we hear from the greenhouse crusade!

Now for the big findings - the figure below shows the reconstructed water balance data back to 566 AD. They note "prominent dry periods during 700-800 AD, 1100-1200 AD, 1425-1525 AD, and 1650-1750 AD, wet periods around 1225 AD, 1350 AD, and 1525-1650 AD, and a general trend toward a wetter condition during the most recent 300 years." They pour more salt on the greenhouse wound stating "The recent trend to a wetter condition conformed to the ice accumulation record during 1600-1980 based on the ice core taken from the Dunde Glacier (38ø06'N, 96ø24'E, 5325 m) northwest of the study region. The wetter trend was also corroborated by a recent study in northern Pakistan, in which a reconstructed precipitation record based on tree-ring data indicated that the 20th Century was the wettest period during the past millennium." Did you notice that little comment about ice accumulation at a nearby glacier - we are sure that is an interesting story as well? Yin et al. definitely are not making any friends with the greenhouse advocates and their findings definitely will not be featured in any self-respecting climate-change-hyping newspapers anytime soon.




The Green elite hate third-world prosperity



All hail The People's Car! This simple, rear-engine, four-seater, lightweight vehicle, officially unveiled at a car expo in New Delhi today, is known in India as the `one-lakh car' - because it retails at 100,000 Rupees, or what Indians refer to as one lakh. It costs half as much as the cheapest car currently available - the Maruti 800 - and little more than a high-end motorbike. Its development is part of the Indian government's `Automotive Mission Plan', where the aim is to make India the world's destination of choice for the design and production of cars and car parts. The government hopes to create a whopping 25million car-related jobs in India by 2016, and to achieve annual car sector sales of $145billion. With India's middle classes growing by the day, it is expected that an additional 30million households will be able to buy a car by 2010.

This could transform India. If the railways, a byproduct of British colonialism, served India well in the twentieth century, then the rise of a new car culture could change the face and feel of India in the twenty-first. Millions more people will have steady, relatively well-paid jobs on car production lines; miles and miles of new roads and motorways will be constructed to accommodate the new motorised middle classes; and the average Joe Patel will enjoy greater speed and liberty in his everyday life courtesy of the affordable car. The People's Car: one short drive for a man, one giant leap for mankind!

There's only one problem. The People's Car will kill us all. The rise of what some are calling `car addiction' and `gizmo obsession' in India will push the planet over the edge into a fiery inferno. What Sandeep Chauhan and others foolishly and selfishly think of as a wonderful opportunity to get their mitts on the steering wheel of a super-cheap four-wheeler is actually the latest instance of human destructiveness against the planet.

Or so environmental activists and green-tinted Western officials would have us believe. No good news story is complete these days without an hysterical, hectoring warning from the green lobby. And as one British newspaper points out, while the launch of The People's Car has been greeted with `zeal' by India's middle classes and aspirant working classes, it has been greeted with `worry' from the environmentalist lobby, which is disgusted by the `unbridled enthusiasm' of ordinary Indians for the super-cheap car, and which predicts `a plague of ever-cheaper cars and ever-swelling clouds of climate-changing fumes' (3). The People's Car will apparently have `drastic consequences for pollution' (4). Those dirty Indians.

Environmentalists' discomfort with The People's Car throws into stark relief one of their core convictions: that the developing world must not achieve the same standard of living or level of wealth as we in the West enjoy, because if it does the Earth will perish. Indeed, one of the main justifications put forward by Western activists today for lowering CO2 emissions in America and Europe is that it will provide a `lesson' to speedily developing nations in the South and the East, and educate them not to make the same eco-unfriendly `mistakes' as we in the West have made (5). One American writer says of China: `In its rush to recreate the industrial revolution that made the West rich. China has become the world's factory, but also its smokestack.' (6) As The People's Car was unveiled, one green criticised India's `mad rush' towards `lowering prices [and] achieving mass affordability in the car market' (7). Yeah - who do those Chinese and Indians think they are, `imitating' the West and trying to recreate our industrial revolutions and leaps forward in mass consumption? Don't they know there's a planetary emergency?

Throughout modern history, all sorts of bullshit arguments have been put forward to justify global inequality: `There just isn't enough stuff to go around', squealed some; `Africans and Indians haven't got the hang of this capitalism thing', moaned others.

Today, the main argument that is marshalled against the rise of China and India, and the desires of their people to enjoy a Western-style standard of living full of cars, comfort and CO2, is the environmentalist one: that is, the development of the South and the East might tip the planet into oblivion. Some Western activists try to doll up their campaigns against development in the developing world in the language of class. A recent study by Greenpeace and its helpers in India said that `rich' Indians are `adding to pollution far more than poor Indians'. Apparently `as much as 49 per cent of the household pollution a rich Indian generates is from gizmos and gadgets like mobiles, DVD players, laptops, etc' (8).

Yet these Indians are not rich by Western standards; indeed, as our non-car owning marketing executive Sandeep Chauhan shows, many of India's middle classes enjoy a standard of living that is, at best, similar to that enjoyed by sections of the working classes in Britain. However much green activists use the word `rich' and `middle class' as terms of abuse, there's no disguising the fact that these Westernised, white-led campaign groups are lecturing brown people for getting ideas above their station - or above their station wagon, in the case of The People's Car.

In some circles, it has become fashionable recently to slate the late Mother Teresa for her celebration of the `virtues' of poverty and her instruction to the peasants of Calcutta to embrace their destitution as a blessing from God. Yet that moral fraud didn't have a patch on today's environmentalists, who use updated PC lingo and the spectre of a future hellfire on Earth to insist that Indians don't enter into the `mad rush' to become wealthy, selfish car-drivers like we Westerners - and who don't even promise a glorious afterlife, as Teresa did, to those who agree to live like paupers for the benefit of the health of the planet. Yet today's eco-miserabilists cannot so easily crush the aspirations of the teeming billions in the developing world. As a used-car salesman in New Delhi said when The People's Car was launched today: `It's the same dream anywhere in the world. You want a good home, a good car and a beautiful wife.' (9)

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The dark age of low-energy bulbs

Mick Hume comments from Britain below -- saying that dullard politicians are telling us how to run our homes - in semi-darkness

Late in the pantomime season Ken Livingstone, the Miserabilist of London, is staging a new version of Aladdin. At B&Q stores this weekend Londoners can get "new bulbs for old" by swapping incandescent lightbulbs for free low-energy ones (only two each, the genie of the lightbulb being less slightly generous than the one in the lamp).

So far, so what. But what turned me off was the mayor calling this eco-stunt a "lightbulb amnesty". An amnesty is "a period during which offenders are exempt from punishment", as when police turn a blind eye to those handing in illegal weapons. A lightbulb amnesty implies that the merciful authorities will let us carbon offenders dump our tungsten timebombs and avoid the electric chair.

The economic and energy arguments about different bulbs are as dull and cold as the light thrown out by the current low-energy efforts. (Perhaps those greens who claim these are bright and warm just eat more carrots than me.) But call it a lightbulb amnesty and you can reduce the issue to a simple moral message about the power of evil.

It seems that the use of energy and production of carbon has become the standard by which all human activity is judged. Low is seen as good, higher bad, regardless of how it might illuminate our existence. What next? An auto amnesty to exchange the car for a family rickshaw? Or an infant amnesty where we can swap our carbon-guzzling kids for free-range chicks?

When an alternative scare story about mercury in low-energy bulbs arose (visions of the health and safety police swooping to change broken ones), Livingstone responded: "We shouldn't be too alarmist." How true. Of course, it is not at all alarmist for the mayor to tell us we must switch to bulbs that save a halfpenny an hour in order to "avoid catastrophic climate change".

So the genius of Thomas Edison is reinvented as a crime against the climate, while dullard politicians assume the power to tell us how to run our own homes. The lights are dimming, if not yet going off, over Europe. Welcome to the new dark age.

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