Where’s the Ice?
June 30th, 2007 by Wyatt
One of the dead horses the global warming proponents continue to beat is the coming catastrophe caused by the melting ice sheets in the Arctic. I’ve mentioned two skeptics in “If It Ain’t Broke…” and “And another…” who challenge the argument by calling it too narrow.
They both point out that if you are going to argue about melting ice sheets affecting the global ocean levels, you need to take all of the ice in the world into account. Once you include the Antarctic ice, the future looks much less grim. There is far more ice in the Antarctic. So much that any change there would overwhelm any change in the Arctic.
Another report popped up recently (referenced in this article in The Scotsman) discussing research about the status of the East Antarctic ice sheet, which happens to be the largest ice sheet in the world. It said that this ice sheet is very stable and will remain cold enough to prevent any melting in the near future. The end of this article reinforced the skepticism of the folks mentioned above:
Glaciologist Wendy Lawson, head of geography at Canterbury University in Christchurch, New Zealand, who took no part in the study, said the new research supported previous modelling(sic), indicating the sheet was stable.
“There is no short-term risk as far as the overall magnitude of the East Antarctic ice sheet goes,” she said. “My take is that it is likely to grow in the next 100 years.”
Did you catch that? She thinks it’s likely to grow? Well, if the ice sheet is growing, that actually means it’s collecting water and lowering sea levels. When all of the ice in the world is taken into account, the images of collapsing glaciers and retreating ice caps don’t imply global disaster. It’s just not going to change the Earth that much because the net change in ice will be relatively small.
As usual, those who predict global environmental disaster do so by extrapolating skewed data. Look at all the data and don’t be fooled.
July 2nd, 2007 at 6:48 am
Good advice to look at all the data. While east Antarctica is cold, the Antarctic Peninsula has “experienced some of the fastest warming on Earth, nearly 3°C over the last half-century”. The hole in the ozone layer above the South Pole causes cooling in the stratosphere. This increases circular winds around the continent preventing warmer air from reaching eastern Antarctica and the Antarctic plateau. The flip side of this is west Antarctica and the peninsula warms at a greater rate.
While East Antartica is gaining ice due to increased precipitation, Antartica is overall losing ice. This is mostly due to melting in West Antarctica which recently featured the largest melting observed by satellites in the last 30 years. As well as melting, Antartic glaciers are accelerating further adding to sea level rise.