Sadly, George Will will not be writing something truthful like the material below. Instead, we should expect that he is feverishly working on a column jumping on the denialosphere bandwagon shouting about “ClimateGate” to add his Will-ful deceit to SwiftHack.
While news reporting focuses on misreading of stolen emails, the reality is that climate chaos moves on. This guest post by rktect points to yet another melting core to the skeptic deluge of disinformation and yet another disturbing example of how the IPCC is overly conservative.
When Eastern Antarctica’s ice finishes melting completely it will flood the Eastern United States as far Inland as the Appalachian trail.
Despite the claims of Global Warming Deniers to the contrary, that the data is being manipulated, many of us 
have long accepted the IPCC reports as accurately reflecting the consensus of scientists as to where we are at with Global Warming and Climate Change. One reason Obama may be going to Copenhagen is that the preliminary reports now being peer reviewed for the IPCC’s fifth report due out in 2014 indicate scientists are increasingly using terms like “suprising acceleration” to describe the relation of actual observed data relative to the projected scenarios adopted by the IPCC.
On Nov. 16 this iceberg from East Antarctica reached Macquarie Island, 930 miles southeast of Tasmania, Australia.
Some of us have worried that to get consensus IPCC Reports were as watered down as Congressional legislation. As A. Siegal and others are constantly informing us artic sea ice is thining, a northwest passage is now becoming a reality, the Greenland ice sheets are melting.
We can see that the more recent the data the more alarming the images and the recent flood of icebergs from East Antarctica which most of us thought was stable into the South Atlantic threatening shipping off the coasts of Tasmania, Australia and New Zealand is a case in point.
Tipping points are non-linear phenomena, which means that they can reach a point at which rapid catastrophic change occurs. It is inherently difficult to determine the time at which non-linear collapse will occur, even in cases where such rapid change is certain.
The mechanism that seems to be most important for disintegration of the great ice sheets that cover Antarctica and Greenland begins with ocean warming. Ocean warming leads to melting of ice shelves, which are tongues of ice that stretch out into the ocean. The ice shelves buttress the ice sheets, so when ice shelves disappear, the more mobile parts of the ice sheet, the ice streams, can surge into the ocean. Thus, removal of the ice shelves is somewhat akin to taking the cork out of a bottle — it allows the material behind to flow rapidly.
Even as the reports of scientists grow more alarming, due to the efforts of Coal producers to pitch clean coal and Oil producers like British Petroleum, Conoco Phillips, Chevron, Shell, Exxon Mobil and their lobbiests within the GOP to headline the claims of Global Warming and Climate Change deniers like Inhoffe and others still stuck on the science of the 1990’s, fewer people maintain the level of concern today that was common when the first IPCC Reports came out.
On the one hand you have the science and on the other Fox News headlines
Media Silent on Global Warming Scandal
and its editorials question if
Scientists In on Global Warming Sham
Not suprisingly the Christian Science Monitor reports more skepticism about claims of global warming are being driven by the GOP.
The increase in climate skepticism is driven largely by a shift within the GOP. Since its peak 3 1/2 years ago, belief that climate change is happening is down sharply among Republicans — 76 to 54 percent — and independents — 86 to 71 percent. It dipped more modestly among Democrats, from 92 to 86 percent. A majority of respondents still support legislation to cap emissions and trade pollution allowances, by 53 to 42 percent.
Among Democrats, 86 percent believe the world has been getting warmer (down 6 percentage points from 2006). Among Independents, believers number 71 percent (15 percentage points less than three years ago). A scant majority of Republicans also believe: 54 percent (22 percentage points less than in 2006).
Perhaps the reason for the all out effort to deny Climate Change is real is that scientists are now learning that their initial claims were overly conservative and optomistic.
As recently as 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admitted in its fourth major climate-assessment report that there simply wasn’t enough data to make a useful projection. But since then, satellite observations have shown that the ice in both Greenland and West Antarctica is sliding into the sea faster than anyone expected.
To that we can now add the ice in East Antarctica which has long been thought to have been stable for the last 13.6 million years. Research here going back to 1978 was primarily based on geology and drilled cores but recent satellite reconaissance has shown East Antarctica losing mass.
Data suggests that East Antarctica is losing mass
Satellite data stunner: Our data suggest that EAST Antarctica is losing mass…. Antarctica may soon be contributing significantly more to global sea-level rise.
November 23, 2009
East Antarctica is melting too
The world’s largest ice sheet has started to melt along its coastal fringes, raising fears that global sea levels will rise faster than scientists expected.
The East Antarctic ice sheet, which makes up three-quarters of the continent’s 14,000 sq km, is losing around 57bn tonnes of ice a year into surrounding waters, according to a satellite survey of the region.
Scientists had thought the ice sheet was reasonably stable, but measurements taken from Nasa’s gravity recovery and climate experiment (Grace) show that it started to lose ice steadily from 2006.
The measurements suggest the polar continent could soon contribute more to global sea level rises than Greenland, which is shedding more than 250bn tonnes of ice a year, adding 0.7mm to annual sea level rises.
Satellite data from the whole of Antarctica show the region is now losing around 190bn tonnes of ice a year. Uncertainties in the measurements mean the true ice loss could be between 113bn and 267bn tonnes.
“If the current trend continues or gets worse, Antarctica could become the largest contributor to sea level rises in the world. It could start to lose more ice than Greenland within a few years,” said Jianli Chen, of the University of Texas at Austin.
1 response so far ↓
1 Does John Broder know that Media Matters exists? // Dec 2, 2009 at 12:37 pm
[…] levels, turn around the global pattern of glacial ice melt, reverse the speeding Greenland and Antarctic ice melting, get birds to stop moving their habitats toward the poles, stop acidification of the oceans, etc […]