Ammianus wrote:More doom on the way:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/clim ... aster.html
Between 1992 and 2017, Antarctica shed three trillion tons of ice. This has led to an increase in sea levels of roughly three-tenths of an inch, which doesn’t seem like much. But 40 percent of that increase came from the last five years of the study period, from 2012 to 2017.
Antarctica is not the only contributor to sea level rise. Greenland lost an estimated 1 trillion tons of ice between 2011 and 2014. And as oceans warm, their waters expand and occupy more space, also raising sea levels. The melting ice and warming waters have all been primarily driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases.
The researchers concluded that the changes in East Antarctica were not nearly enough to make up for the rapid loss seen in West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula. Antarctica is, on balance, losing its ice sheets and raising the world’s sea levels
Dr. Shepherd and his team ran similar calculations five years ago, using 20 years of data, but were unable to say much except that Antarctica seemed to be losing mass at a steady rate. They discovered the acceleration in the rate of ice loss when they did the calculations again for this study, this time with an additional five years of data.
“Now when we look again, we can see actually that the signal is very different to what we’ve seen before,” Dr. Shepherd said. The rate of sea level rise due to Antarctic ice loss has tripled since 2012 alone, he said.
Advancements in Earth-observing satellites have enabled researchers to better understand the polar regions. Many researchers once thought the polar regions would add ice as the climate warmed, because warmer temperatures lead to more moisture in the atmosphere, which leads to more rain, and, they thought, more snow at the poles. Direct observation from satellites upended that view.
As SM pointed out, the NYT does not appear in any rush to move.
Numeracy counts in all amounts.
Nature - Zwally | Mass balance of the Antarctic Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2017
"Here we combine satellite observations of its changing volume, flow and gravitational attraction with modelling of its surface mass balance to show that it lost 2,720 ± 1,390 billion tonnes of ice between 1992 and 2017, which corresponds to an increase in mean sea level of 7.6 ± 3.9 millimetres (errors are one standard deviation)."
Climate science must be the only field wherein a 1 standard deviation result is reported. At two standard deviations, the result is consistent with 0mm.
Many scientific fields require a 5 sigma standard deviation, before a result is considered to be statistically significant i.e., real. At 5 sigma 7.6 ± 19.5mm, the reported result is consistent with anything.
The numbers quoted in gigatonnes sound large, but the Antarctic is larger, the claimed change corresponds to less than 0.011% of the total Antarctic ice mass.
May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.
