It's the melting ice caps 'ya know... From Rolf E. Westgard writing at Watts Up With That:
Al Gore, wrong again – Polar ice continues to thrive
In his 2007 Noble Prize acceptance speech, former Vice President Al Gore warned that the “Arctic ice could be gone in as little as seven years.” Last week, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution reported:
“The North and South Poles are not melting.” In that report, oceanographer Ted Maksym noted that polar ice “is much more stable than climate scientists once predicted and could even be much thicker than previously thought.”
That Woods Hole study was confirmed by today’s NOAA Arctic radar map which shows the Arctic Ice Cap at more than 4,000,000 square miles, larger than on any December 28 in the past five years. Reaching the North Pole requires either a dog sled or a nuclear sub; Al Gore’s cruise ship will stay in the tropics. At the South Pole, Antarctic ice coverage is at the highest extent since radar measurement began 35 years ago.
NOAA’s Arctic Report Card; Update for 2014 provides similar data for the Earth’s other big ice sheet, Greenland. Data from the GRACE satellite and other sources has shown an annual average Greenland ice loss of more than 300 billion tons until 2013. That loss has now dropped sharply by 98% to 6 billion annual tons since mid 2013. A loss of 300 billion tons adds about one millimeter to sea level rise.
All this frigid data parallels the 17 year pause in global land and sea surface temperatures as reported by NASA, NOAA, the UK Climate Research Unit, and the University of Alabama Huntsville Remote Sensing Systems program. That pause is occurring despite our annual release of more than 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide(CO2) from burning fossil fuels, especially coal. Half of that CO2 release stays in the atmosphere. But CO2 remains a trace gas, as the atmosphere weighs several quadrillion tons, and a quadrillion is a million times a billion.
The Greenland Ice Sheet melt numbers are especially interesting as they quote the big scary number (300 billion tons (not sure if English or S.I. measurement)) but nobody talks about how much ice is left after the melting.
UPDATE: It is past my bedtime but I am about halfway through looking at the numbers and it looks like the "scary ice melt" is less than 0.001 of the total Greenland Ice Mass.
A lot of data saved to a file and I will be working on this over the weekend (tomorrow and Thursday are busy).
Leave a comment