The Greenland ice sheets are melting much, much more quickly than anticipated

Ho Hum!  As usual no mention of subsurface vulcanism. And the ice loss is mostly along the West coast, exactly where the subsurface  volcanoes are

To give them their due, the galoots below did NOT attribute the ice loss to global warming, which is rather heroic of them

New data suggests the extent of ice sheet loss since 1985 has been underestimated by as much as 20 per cent, scientists wrote in a new paper published in Nature.

More freshwater ice in the Atlantic could affect ocean circulation, disrupt fish ecosystems and accelerate the melting process, contributing to rising sea levels.

How the ice loss was missed

The paper, Ubiquitous acceleration in Greenland Ice Sheet calving from 1985 to 2022, describes how scientists have failed to consider the full impact of ice calving – when large chunks of ice break off from the edge of a glacier.

“The surprise was just the ubiquity of the signal,” said lead author Chad Greene, a glaciologist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. With the exception of “one minuscule little glacier” that grew modestly, Greene said, “there’s just been retreat everywhere we’ve looked. It’s on every corner of the island.”

NASA satellites tracked a rapid decline in the mass of the ice sheet between 2001 and 2021, when it shed 280 billion tonnes of ice a year on average. That marked a significant acceleration compared with the preceding decades and is equivalent to 767 million tonnes of ice lost every day.

The above animation, which is based on data from NASA satellites, appears darker where ice mass was lost between 2002 and 2022. The barely perceptible blue patches represent growth in ice mass, while white means little to no change.

Most of the loss was along Greenland’s west coast, while central high-altitude areas were relatively unchanged. Lower elevation and coastal areas lost five metres worth of water over the 19-year period.

Impact on rising sea levels

Much of the newly discovered lost ice shelf was already underwater, so while the additional mass identified by the team will have affected ocean circulation and temperatures, it will not have contributed to rising sea levels directly.

However, this loss means more of Greenland’s mainland will be exposed to warming waters which, in turn, lead to melting and rising seas.

“What we’re seeing is that the clog in this bottleneck has been removed, and as a result, the glaciers all around Greenland have been able to speed up the melting process,” Greene said. “You take the ice out of the fjord and glaciers speed up and start contributing to sea level rise.”

Disrupting ocean cycles

Large blocks of freshwater ice floating away into the ocean are problematic as they could disrupt the Atlantic Meridian Overturning Circulation, a crucial ocean circulation pattern.

Ice cannot hold salt, so when seawater freezes in the Arctic, the salt sinks to the bottom making the water denser. The denser water then moves south with cold currents, and the warm water rises to the surface and flows north in response. This cycle warms Europe and distributes crucial nutrients for ocean life.

It is not known how the large chunks of ice floating off into the sea will affect this cycle, but they have not been included in climate models. In the long term, it will depend on where the billions of tonnes of freshwater end up – and that is not easy to predict.

https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/greenland-s-ice-sheet-is-shrinking-much-faster-than-we-thought-here-s-what-it-means-20240118-p5eya8.html

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Supreme Court Hears Fishermen’s Challenges to Costly Regulatory Authority of Feds

The U.S. Supreme Court took up two cases Wednesday regarding the regulatory authority of the federal government as fishermen argue that government agencies are exceeding their authority by imposing costly mandates.

In Loper Bright Enterprises vs. Raimondo and Relentless Inc. vs. Department of Commerce, fishermen are challenging administrative law, dubbed “Chevron deference,” that asserts that when a federal statute is ambiguous about specific regulations, courts should defer to the implementing agency’s interpretation of the law.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration implemented a rule in 2020 forcing fishing companies (such as Relentless Inc.) to pay for federal observers to monitor the fishermen at sea on their own fishing boats—even though Congress did not give the agency authority to do so.

The fishermen argue that the mandate violates the U.S. Constitution’s Article I, accusing the agencies of exceeding their statutory authority.

“Overregulation is imperiling the future of American fisheries and the maritime communities who depend on them,” Jerry Leeman, founder and CEO of the New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association, said in a statement. “Worse still, fishermen have long struggled to fight back, because Chevron deference skews the legal process in the government’s favor. We thank the fishermen plaintiffs in this case, who are truly relentless.”

Paying for the monitors is also expensive, costing more than $700 a day, according to the New Civil Liberties Alliance (the nonprofit organization representing Relentless Inc.), which might often exceed the fishermen’s daily profits for herring, the species the boats and the North Atlantic fishery involved are mostly focused on.

“It is time for the Supreme Court to fish or cut bait on the Chevron doctrine,” said Mark Chenoweth, president of the New Civil Liberties Alliance. “This deference charade has gone on long enough. Executive agencies cannot be allowed to serve as judges in their own cases any longer.” 

While Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have called for curtailing Chevron deference, Fox News reports, Chief Justice John Roberts’ and Justices Brett Kavanaugh’s and Amy Coney Barrett’s views on the matter remain to be seen. Justice Samuel Alito is seen as entertaining some skepticism of Chevron deference. The three liberal justices, by contrast, are thought to see no constitutional problem with it.

In a press release, the New Civil Liberties Alliance argued that “when a federal judge defers to an agency’s interpretation of law, doing so denies due process of law to the entity opposed to the government in that litigation.”

“Employing such a deference also abandons a judge’s Article III duty of judicial independence,” the release asserts. “The logic of Chevron deference cannot withstand this devastating dual critique.”

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/01/17/supreme-court-hears-fishermens-challenges-to-costly-regulatory-authority-of-feds/

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Are Hurricanes Really Getting Worse or Is That Really Just Climate Alarmists’ Hot Air?

Climate alarmists, including President Joe Biden, have consistently said that America could look forward to worsening hurricanes and extreme weather, thanks to climate change.

In fact, at COP28 in Dubai, there was talk about creating a fund to aid countries incurring damages from hurricanes due to climate change.   

Don’t take the bait. Such inane arguments do nothing but generate clamor for raising money to solve a nonexistent problem.

Just look at the data. For example, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data in Chart 1 depict the number of hurricanes hitting the U.S. mainland from 1851 through 2022.

Hurricanes are categorized according to severity by the Saffir-Simpson Category Index at levels ranging from 1 (least severe, exceeding 74 mph winds) to 5 (most severe, exceeding 157 mph winds).

As the chart illustrates, there has been significant variability in hurricanes since 1851, with no meaningful increase since preindustrial times. 

Since the start of the 20th century, America has seen an average of 17 hurricanes per decade, with slightly more than five hurricanes per decade exceeding Category 3 levels. That data also indicates that there were slightly more than two hurricanes at or exceeding Category 4 levels (exceeding 130 mph winds) per decade and thus relatively rare.

Myriad factors affect hurricanes, and the associated variation and unpredictability of such factors make it difficult to isolate trends. For example, oceanic temperature events such as El Nino and La Nina, as well longer-term cycles, such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), may contribute greatly to the incidence and severity of hurricanes in particular localities. 

When the Atlantic Ocean was cold in the 1960s to early 1990s (negative AMO), Atlantic storms were much less frequent and landfalls were mostly limited to the Gulf Coast. On the other hand, when the Atlantic swung into its multidecadal warm mode in the late 1990s, the activity in the Atlantic Ocean more than doubled on average, and some hurricanes made landfall further north, as we had seen in the prior warm period from 1938 to 1960.

A broader, global analysis can allow scientists to see beyond such seesaw effects. Fortunately, good satellite technology to enable comprehensive observation of global—including oceanic—behavior has been available for the past several decades. 

Chart 2 provides satellite-based data on global hurricane frequency from Colorado State University since 1980.

As it illustrates, over the past four decades, there has been no clear global long-term trend in either the number of total hurricanes (maximum sustained winds of 64 knots or greater) or major hurricanes (Category 3+).

During the 21st century, Isabel in 2003; Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne in 2004; and Dennis, Katrina, Rita, and Wilma in 2005 all made landfall. The year 2005 holds the record for five Category 4 and four Category 5 storms.

At the time, some speculated this would be the new norm for the Atlantic hurricane season due to climate change. The National Academies of Sciences in the United States and the Royal Society in the United Kingdom were just two among many scientific organizations issuing statements about human-caused warming. The devastating 2005 hurricane season hardly seemed coincidental. 

However, after the active 2005 season and before the landfall of two major storms on the U.S. in 2017, the U.S. went 4,324 days (just short of 12 years) without a major hurricane landfall, exceeding the prior record eight-year lull in the 1860s.

Obviously, no one ever wants to deal with hurricanes or extreme weather. The reality is, however, such events are inevitable, and we need to be able to adapt to them.

But instead of advocating for damage-mitigation funds for a nonexistent increase in hurricanes, lawmakers should seek to promote, and not stifle, economic growth to enable Americans to have higher incomes.

These types of positive efforts will be the best way to equip people to deal with these and other adverse events that may come their way.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/12/19/are-hurricanes-really-getting-worse-or-is-that-really-just-climate-alarmists-hot-air/

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Crooked Greenie scientist

The University of Western Australia scientist found by the Federal Court to have “lied” when preparing a report that helped block Santos’s $5bn Barossa gas project had earlier been compelled to make multiple corrections to another disputed piece of work.

But oil and gas giant Woodside Energy says it will not be carrying out any review of the work done by Mick O’Leary that found the undersea pipeline at Woodside’s contentious $US12bn Scarborough LNG project would have little to no impact on archaeological heritage values in the rock art-rich Burrup region.

The findings delivered this week by Federal Court Justice ­Natalie Charlesworth savaged Dr O’Leary’s research into the potential impact of Santos’s Barossa pipeline on underwater cultural heritage sites and sacred dreaming places of Tiwi Islanders.

In handing down her decision dismissing the Tiwi Islanders’ legal challenge to Barossa, Justice Charlesworth was scathing of Dr O’Leary’s conduct while carrying out cultural mapping.

“Dr O’Leary’s admission was freely volunteered, such that he did not lie to the court. But he did lie to the Tiwi Islanders, and I find that he did so because he wanted his ‘cultural mapping’ exercise to be used in a way that would stop the pipeline,” she said.

“It is conduct far flung from proper scientific method and falls short of an expert’s obligation to this court.”

The court’s findings cast new light on the stoush that has played out inside UWA in recent years, with Dr O’Leary’s colleagues having previously raised issues with some of his methods.

UWA researchers led by geo­archaeologist Ingrid Ward and her husband Piers Larcombe in 2022 wrote a paper that was highly critical of the findings made by Dr O’Leary and others in their ­research into Indigenous artefacts on Western Australia’s Burrup Peninsula.

Dr O’Leary and his colleagues fired back with a retort describing the critique as a “wet straw man”. The response dismissed “armchair critics ignorant of recent developments in the field” and said “their critique is detrimental to the ­development of this entire field of ­archaeology, as well as damaging to the rights and interests of coastal Indigenous communities through­out Australia”.

But Dr O’Leary also went on to publish in June 2023 a correction to his original report, making multiple revisions to his original text. Those corrections included addressing errors in three statistical analyses and “additional discussion of interpretations”.

That original report was prepared by a group called Deep History of Sea Country, a collection of academics from various Australian universities and which has won more than $2m in funding from the Australian Research Council since 2017.

The group’s project with the biggest ARC grant – worth just over $1.1m – began on July 1 last year, just a fortnight before the corrections to the original report were formally published.

Despite Dr O’Leary’s corrections, in December Dr Ward and Dr Larcombe’s paper was retracted. The journal Geoarchaelogy said the retraction was the result of “evidence confirming that the required university approvals were not sought prior to the research being conducted”.

Dr Larcombe, who had earlier questioned whether Dr O’Leary should maintain his position at UWA in the wake of the Federal Court’s findings, said he still stood by the scientific content of the criticism. The retraction, he said, was “not about the quality of the science” and that the process that led to retraction was still under review.

Woodside, meanwhile, confirmed that it would not be re-examining the work Dr O’Leary did for the company when it was assessing the cultural impact of its proposed Scarborough pipeline.

Dr O’Leary in 2021 helped design a research project to assess areas of archaeological prospectivity along the pipeline route within the proposed development area. Sea level changes since the last ice age mean some artefact-rich and heritage-rich areas of the Burrup Peninsula are now underwater, and Dr O’Leary’s research helped establish that the Scarborough pipeline plans would not damage potentially undiscovered rock art examples. The Scarborough project has attracted opposition from some Indigenous groups, with one of those – Save Our Songlines – last year securing a court injunction against Scarborough’s seismic testing program.

“Woodside does not intend to reassess an earlier scope of work undertaken by Dr O’Leary between 2020 – 2021, which was also subject to independent expert review. Dr O’Leary was one of several contributors to a suite of work relating to the identification of submerged cultural heritage, which also included close consultation with Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation,” a spokesman for the company said.

“Woodside considers Dr O’Leary’s contribution was within his area of expertise and exceeded baseline industry standards.”

The Federal Court’s findings have also sparked scrutiny of the potential conflicts that can arise when academics are commissioned to consult on projects.

Professor Peter Ridd, a physicist who was sacked from his role at James Cook University after he flagged concerns over some of the university’s climate change research, told The Weekend Australian that Santos should consider taking legal action against UWA in the wake of the court’s findings.

He said it would take such a legal challenge for universities to increase the intellectual rigour and scrutiny applied to consultancy work. “If Santos actually takes UWA to court, it will start to concentrate the minds of universities to actually do the job they’re supposed to do,” he said, adding: “UWA should carry a significant fraction of the responsibility for what happened.”

Santos declined to comment on whether it was considering any further legal options.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/earlier-red-flags-for-scientist-at-centre-of-barossa-debacle/news-story/1ced4f7236e30a96d2a52da5efec1ce2

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM ) 

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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