How is the ice melting if it is not getting warmer?

engineerdude · December 12, 2009

Hi all,

I did a previous post a few days back about a news story I say on T.V. concerning how Peruvian glaciers are disappearing due to climate change. I'd like to expand on that post further, and invite comment from you folks who still support people-caused "climate change".

Specifically, my question is this: why does everyone (the media mostly) think the polar ice caps are declining?

1. First off, it is not very warm in Greenland right now, and it hasn't been warm in a while. There exists a good temperature station on Greenland itself, with a nearly-complete records going back to 1895. This station is called Angmagssalik, and it's located at 65.6 N 37.6 W. A link to the temperature data is below.

This station shows that, overall, it was generally much warmer in Greenland in the 1930's to the 1950's than now, often more than 1 degree C higher.

Link to the temperature data: Data @ NASA GISS: Surface Temperature Analysis - Station Data

2. Satellites show that the North Polar ice caps are just fine. In recent times there was much less ice than now. For instance, in 1974, there was a maximum of 14.08 million square kilometers of ice. The maximum this year was 14.42 million square kilometers of ice. Also, the minimum ice extent has increased every year for the past 5 years, and the min ice is now about where it was in 1990.

So what's the friggin emergency?

Link to the ice data is here: National/Naval Ice Center

I have used non-biased sources for this data. No UEA, no oil companies, just NASA NOAA stuff.

Seriously people, tell me what I am missing here. If it is not very warm up north, and the ice cap is not actually decreasing, what the heck are people worried about?

-Brian

BrianG · December 12, 2009

I've flown over Greenland several times in the last twenty years, and I haven't noticed any melting. Greenland from a passenger plane, looks full of snow and ice, all but the steepest south facing slopes are white The landscape is mostly white, with a few patches of grey stone. It looks so cold, the sea around it is mostly frozen. It's not a scientific survey, but at least it's direct observation.

I ask folks flying back to the western U.S. from Germany to check it out on the great arc on the right side of the plane. Get a window seat, if you are flying to Europe from Texas or California.

DFINITLYDISTRUBD · December 12, 2009

It's the "cause effect" people like to get worked up about "causes" because it makes the cause important and vicariously then makes every little thing they do to further their cause important which in a very roundabout way makes their worthless existence meaningful....personally I recommend getting a pet but others need to feel that they are in the spotlight and backing a cause everyone is obcessed with whether right or wrong is a way to ease this need's hunger pangs for them I recommend Idol tryouts or possibly a career as a serial killer.:thumbs_up

Plus in general people are just dumb.....really really dumb....largely due to ADHD drugs and the really short attention span of the nintendo generation and their offspring. Tell the average Joe that we've been involved in war in the middle east for more than four decades and they'll look at you like your insane...Hell most people think there were two Iraq wars...As a nation we were surprised by two different "unprovoked" attacks on our homeland which had nothing to do with the fact that we were already shooting at these people....in the case of the towers it was people we've been shooting at and bombing for better than 40 years! unprovoked my ***!

Well anyways global warming is the latest distraction from how badly we are f***ing ourselves with the aid of our fearless leaders. Try not to let it worry you too much. Because much like in the sixties, seventies and the early eighties we'll soon be panicking about global cooling yet again:)

DFINITLYDISTRUBD · December 12, 2009

Of course even when it is below freezing air temperature ice and snow can still melt if it is sunny because the sun heat it up or the earth beneath up enough to melt...also certain polutants lower the melting temperature of ice which cause it to melt at colder temperatures (which is why some places salt the walks and roads....because the salt makes the ice require colder temperatures to stay ice.)

Essay · December 12, 2009

I've flown over Greenland several times in the last twenty years, and I haven't noticed any melting. Greenland from a passenger plane, looks full of snow and ice, all but the steepest south facing slopes are white The landscape is mostly white, with a few patches of grey stone. It looks so cold, the sea around it is mostly frozen. It's not a scientific survey, but at least it's direct observation.

I've seen lots of pictures my Dad took of Greenland back in the mid-1950's, and things looked a lot colder -less melting, more white and reflective, less translucent, some small emerald and azure/blue pools, no large pools of light blue or light green water, no running meltwater, etc. So there.... "It's not a scientific survey, but at least it's direct observation."

Catch it while you can.

~ :thumbs_up

p.s. ...wonder if you can comment on any specifics mentioned in the topic....

freeztar · December 13, 2009

This reminds me of a common fallacy amongst some people when it comes to climatology.

"How is global warming happening when we've had the coldest winter in 20 years in Chicago this year?"

(or something similar)

The fallacy comes from extrapolation. Because it is colder in Chicago, it is colder everywhere.

It's important to remember that global climate is a *global* measurement, often averaged across thousands of observations, to see a *global* trend. One weather monitoring station does not tell the whole picture.

The above is true without even looking at the data. :turtle:

engineerdude · December 13, 2009

This reminds me of a common fallacy amongst some people when it comes to climatology.

"How is global warming happening when we've had the coldest winter in 20 years in Chicago this year?"

(or something similar)

The fallacy comes from extrapolation. Because it is colder in Chicago, it is colder everywhere.

It's important to remember that global climate is a *global* measurement, often averaged across thousands of observations, to see a *global* trend. One weather monitoring station does not tell the whole picture.

The above is true without even looking at the data.

*Global* temperatures are mostly *bullshit*; before the 1970's there was no way to actually obtain global data, and even the satellites require extrapolations and estimations. Extrapolations and estimations of data are open to political and personal biases. The recent email scandal at UEA are a good example of people attempting to move *Global* temperature reconstructions toward a specific political goal.

People make comments like "Greenland is getting dangerously warm". That is a comment that can be easily proven or debunked, we have excellent current and historical data. There are no adjustments or extrapolations needed - we can just look at the darn thermometer readings. The hard, temperature station data will not lie, and no one can introduce biases into it. And there is no warming problem in Greenland.

Weather is, of course very localized and variable - one day, week, or season at one location does not have much global significance. But if you say it's too warm in Greenland, we can easily look and see if it is, in fact, too warm there. Are there no pro-global warming people who can provide an answer to this?

lemit · December 13, 2009

I remember hearing many years ago that an early sign that a tipping point had been reached in human-influenced climate change--and this is the reason I often avoid the term Global Warming--would be an increase in changeability in climate, not necessarily a constant rise in temperature. There would possibly be more storms and more extremes of temperature in both directions. This would be caused by heat transfer from the melting polar caps and possibly a disruption in the oceanic conveyor belt. Did I hear and remember that correctly?

Thanks.

--lemit

Boerseun · December 13, 2009

The ice on top of Kilimanjaro is melting. There's almost nothing left. The Global Warming crowd is attributing it directly to human-caused global warming. Yet, it's bloody cold up there. It's still far, far below zero. So how can the ice melt?

Easy. Humans are cutting down trees around the base of the mountain, and because there's much fewer trees now than, say, thirty years ago, the air that gets to the top of the mountain is very much drier than it was, and the ice basically sublimates away. This has nothing to do with global warming, because if it is -50C or -30C, ice will only melt above 0. It has everything to do with deforestation though, and is thus attributable to human actions.

That is just a quick example of a case widely touted by the pro-GW lobby to be caused by GW, where the truth is much simpler and much more localized. The anti-GW lobby will then jump at it and say "You see? It's all lies!" without coming to the party with any scientific evidence and/or explanation as to how the global average temperature follows the atmospheric carbon load graph. There is an undeniable correlation between temperature and carbon load. And the atmospheric carbon load is climbing on a daily basis. The ten hottest years of the last 150 years were in the last fourteen years. The highest carbon load in our atmosphere was in the last fourteen years, over the same period. And don't even try to now poison the well by casting doubt on the atmospheric measurements, because there are no doubts - glacier core drilling results speak volumes.

Satellite photos of the North Pole icecap might show the same volume of ice (which I doubt), but they will not show how thin the ice have become. And eyeballing Greenland through a jet window and basing your approach to global warming on that is about as dumb and subjective as you can be. You need physical data to work from.

Recently declassified US navy data about the state of the icecap (regularly measured by their nuclear subs, because they can only breach the ice to launch missiles where the ice is less than three feet thick) show a continuous thinning of the icecap over the last couple of decades. The ice is disappearing, no matter what your eyeballs are telling you at 35,000 feet over Greenland.

Please believe what you want. But base your arguments on something more than what you think and what you see, and take a look at the instruments for a change. The instruments don't lie - they don't have beach properties and stock portfolios with investments in dirty industry or oil or any vested interests that might make them want to fudge the data or cast doubt on the results.

You of course will get instances like "climategate", which casts doubt on a few scientists scientific integrity whereby they may want to fake data or results in order to get sponsorships from pro-GW sponsors, but that is a completely local occurrence and speaks about the individuals involved, not about GW as a whole. GW is the logical conclusion of injecting a proven greenhouse gas into the atmosphere unchecked for many, many years, using carbon that has been out of the cycle for millions of years. Burn a forest down - it won't do anything to global warming because you're injecting carbon into the atmosphere which is currently part of the cycle. Burn oil, carbon that's been trapped underground millions of years ago (effectively being removed from the active cycle) and you start looking for trouble. Do this by the millions of barrels every day, all over the world, for years and years, and if you can't see the issue created by this, then you should really run into a wall really, really fast.

lemit · December 13, 2009

If we are going to do anecdotal science here, I suppose we could talk about how nice it is to be able to use the Northwest Passage, with all that pesky ice gone.

But I hope we're going to do something better. I've been searching for some particular Greenland ice measurements I thought were particularly revelatory. I haven't found them, but I have found these:

High-Resolution Greenland Ice Core Data Show Abrupt Climate Change Happens in Few Years -- Steffensen et al. 321 (5889): 680 -- Science

Arctic Sea Ice Shrinking, Greenland Ice Sheet Melting, According To Study

PARCA Data - Overview

Vanishing Ice (DAAC Study) : Feature Articles

SVS Animation 587 - Greenland: East Coast Zoom-out without Ice Data

I hope they're interesting. Some of them have nice pictures. I'll keep looking for the particular data that had impressed me.

--lemit

Essay · December 13, 2009

The ice on top of Kilimanjaro is melting. There's almost nothing left. The Global Warming crowd is attributing it directly to human-caused global warming. Yet, it's bloody cold up there. It's still far, far below zero. So how can the ice melt?

Easy. Humans are cutting down trees around the base of the mountain, and because there's much fewer trees now than, say, thirty years ago, the air that gets to the top of the mountain is very much drier than it was, and the ice basically sublimates away. This has nothing to do with global warming, because if it is -50C or -30C, ice will only melt above 0. It has everything to do with deforestation though, and is thus attributable to human actions.

I think I agree with your deforestation argument, but every degree that it rises closer to freezing/melting, 0 degrees C, the easier ice will sublimate.

===

Note:

Ice has a vapor pressure and can sublimate away at temperatures well below freezing, +32 F degrees, especially with very cold, dry, fast-moving air moving over the ice. --see below:

I used to run the bookdryer at our library. It's a modified supermarket freezer -basically- with lots of extra fans, insulation, thermocouple thermometers, and timers (and flashing lights & alarms).

I enjoyed taking time out from my routine tasks to sit and monitor the defrost cycle - especially the temperatures for various parts of the unit.

During the defrost cycle there is a heating element that runs along the evaporator coils -melting off the ice/frost that has built up on these coils during the book-drying process. They are usually at about -45 to -50 F degrees (50 below 0 F, so thats about 80 degrees below freezing), which is why any "humidity" from the books gets trapped as ice as the air circulates from the books (at about +25 F degrees; that's 5-10 degrees below freezing, to keep mold from growing) up to the evaporator coils which are about 75 F degrees cooler.

So... the heating element (if there is no ice) will heat the evap. coils up to over 100 degrees within about 10 minutes -and you can watch the temperature of the coils rise from -50 to +112 F degrees on a digital readout.

Sometimes not all the ice gets melted during a defrost cycle -because I try to keep the max. defrost temp. at about 85 or 90 F degrees- so an eight minute defrost cycle is automatically set- and for various reasons the thing can get out of wack (like during one vacation I took) or once the heating element needed replacing, etc....

So.... a lot of ice can build up on the evap. coils sometimes -despite the automatic defrost cycle twice a day...

...and I'd have to babysit the unit and manually run the heating element while monitoring the temperature.

"Gotta go run a manual defrost, boss; see you later...." was one of my favorite phrases....

I enjoyed watching the temperature of those ice-bound coils, as the heating element struggled to melt ice that had long ago formed out of partially-melted (twice a day) frost that was (on net) building up, as the books continued to dry. The ice looks kinda like the ice of those big hail balls you see cut in half -with different translucencies in each ring.

===

So... the interesting part (finally) is, as the heating element struggles to melt all the ice, the temperature moves slowly up from -50 to about +30/32... and then plateaus at about 32 F degrees.

It plateaus at 32 F for a long time while the ice melts. Sometimes it starts to rise (even up to the 40's), but then the ice shifts with a clunk, and the temp. falls back to 32 F degrees... because it's measuring the fresh meltwater. Finally when all the ice is melted and the last few chunks have fallen off, the temperature on the coils starts shooting up towards 70 or 80 before you can get up and turn off the heating element.

Those heating elements are constantly on (and could heat up the coils really quickly), and so they are putting out a lot of energy (heat); but the temperature plateaus at 32 F, as the ice melts, despite the relentless input of heat.

===

Does it strike anyone as odd that: as the global ice melting has accelerated over the past 7-8 years, the global temperature increase has decelerated?