NASA Finally Agrees that Antarctic Ice has Long been Increasing

A NASA paper published in the Journal of Glaciology found that Antarctic ice has long been increasing in agreement with many other studies, but in disagreement with the UN IPCC report of 2013.  Its main conclusions are:

• The Antarctic ice sheet had net gains in ice of 112 billion tons per year from 1992 to 2001.
• Antarctic ice from 2003 to 2008 had a net gain of 82 billion tons per year.
• Extra snowfall in East Antarctica began about 10,000 years ago as the Earth warmed after the last Ice Age and this snowfall thickened the East Antarctic and the interior regions of the West Antarctic by 1.7 cm/year.  This accumulation over vast expanses more than offsets the melting of ice on the West Antarctic peninsula which gets so much publicity.
• The increased ice in Antarctica is now acting to reduce sea levels by 0.23 mm/year.

One of the more interesting observations on this data is that the global warming due to the end of the last Ice Age caused more snowfall in Antarctica, which serves to counterbalance the rise in sea level due to the thermal expansion of water in a warmer world.  This is one of many ways in which the Earth moderates climate changes.

The findings of this study were the result of more accurate measurements of the small thickening of the ice in most of Antarctica from satellite measurements, with the exception of the ice core investigations by others that indicated the increase in snowfall beginning 10,000 years ago.  It would not be surprising if the application of these satellite analysis methods to Greenland were to find that previous claims of large ice losses there were also wrong.  It is easy to observe large glaciers calving into the ocean while missing the slow increases of ice thickness over much larger areas.

The Obama Civilian National Security Force as Powerful as the Military

In a speech of incredibly blatant power-lust, candidate Obama on 2 July 2008 called for the creation of a civilian national security force as powerful as the military.  There are reports that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is buying up to 2 billion rounds of ammunition.  DHS says they will buy perhaps 750 million rounds for a five year period.  Some speculate this is an attempt of the Obama gang to make ammunition expensive and of very limited supply for civilians.  It is part of the attempt to limit the citizenry to 7 rounds apiece, perhaps.

Well, it sure is a curious matter.  Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz discovered the DHS has more than 260 million rounds in stock.  DHS bought more than 103 million rounds in 2012 and used 116 million rounds.  Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is the primary weapons use part of DHS.  They had 15 shooting incidents in 2012 and fired fewer than 100 rounds.  DHS has a total of 70,000 agents, so the average number of rounds fired in training was apparently 1,657 rounds an agent.  In comparison, an Army officer fires an average of only 350 rounds a year.  Perhaps Obama was very serious that he wants his civilian national security force to be even better trained than the Army and more powerful.

This has a special meaning to me.  In 1970, I was drafted and the Army trained me as a light arms infantryman and sent me to Vietnam to fight the North Vietnamese Army.  My entire training consisted of about 4 trips to a firing range where I was given an M16 whose sights were always very badly aligned for me.  I was never allowed to fire more than about 10 rounds and about half of those were commonly used to align the sights.  Several times the first round hit 3 or 4 feet away from the target.  My last 3 or 4 rounds were pretty well aimed and the Army was satisfied with my shooting ability.  I was not.  I thought I was seriously under-trained.  But Obama's DHS agents are clearly not suffering from under training at the firing range.  He is really serious about his civilian army.

Even the Social Security Administration is arming up.  Its 295 agents investigate Social Security fraud and apparently those fraudsters are mighty dangerous.  They bought 174,000 hollow point rounds to deal with the threat.  This is 590 rounds apiece.  Each of them will fire enough rounds to train about 15 of us late Vietnam era light arms infantrymen.  I do not believe they have been involved in as many shoot-outs as the ICE agents are, so they must be well-trained.  Though one does not normally use expensive hollow point rounds for training.

This is a very curious affair.  The Obama regime has a real penchant for curious affairs which the press rarely has any interest in learning more about.  Given the totalitarian socialists he and his friends so much admire, a rational person sure has to wonder and worry about what is going on.

Mountaineer Anecdotes in the UN IPCC AR4 Report of 2007

How many times have those of us who think the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hypothesis based on man's emissions of CO2 is wrong been told that the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007, based on 2,500 or more of the best climate scientists and peer-reviewed journal articles, could not be wrong?  Of course, there were not 2,500 scientists involved and we are now discovering that many of the citations of authority are to publications of little authority and sometimes are actually cited for a viewpoint at odds with the viewpoint of the published article.  See my earlier posts about citations on Himalayan glaciers, natural disasters, Amazon rainforest damage, fish welfare, glacier retreat, mud flows, and more issues referencing World Wildlife Fund reports, and Greenpeace reports on coral reef damage and alternative power issues.

Still another instance has turned up.  In this case, the ultimate authority on all things pertaining to man-made global warming cites a popular climbing magazine and an unpublished master's thesis by a student who interviewed mountain guides in the Alps as the authoritative references for a decrease in mountain snow cover.  The Telegraph of the UK discusses this here.  Of course, good science starts with good observations of reality and there is some reason to believe mountaineers would be a good anecdotal source for a possible research project on mountain snow cover.  In recent times, many of them have probably been sucked into the environmentalist and global warming camp and may be inclined to help them along with their stories.  Many may have little knowledge of the snow cover of several decades ago, so they may not have a long time-frame viewpoint.  But, others may be familiar with old tales and old maps made by previous generations of mountaineers.  They are worth listening to.  But if no scientist has checked this issue out and published on the matter, what are these references doing in the "authoritative" IPCC report treated as ordinary scientific citations?

The UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007 was touted as the state of scientific knowledge of man's effects upon global climate.  The report appeared to say that there were scientifically determined net reductions in mountain snow and ice in the Andes, Alps, and in Africa.  It is now clear that no such science backs its claim.

Clearly, the United Nations is a political entity, not a scientific entity.  It has an agenda which is based on the politics of hundreds of nation states, most of which care at most marginally or not at all for the rights of the individual.  Many of them must deny truth and suppress understanding for their leaders to remain in power.  Supporting ignorance and providing misinformation is the name of their game.  Even in the United States, we see a lot of that coming from our political leaders.  They use the public school system to spread and inculcate propaganda and they use the sound bite to try to mislead the American People.  They give a bill a nice-sounding name which hides the real intent and the real outcomes of the legislation.  They pretend to care about the People when all they care about is getting more campaign donations from special interests and getting re-elected.  Politicians and country leaders are the last people to turn to for good science.

All-Time Low in Summer Antarctic Satellite Snow Melt Index

The summer of October 2008 through January 2009 saw an all-time record low Antarctic snow melt according to satellite microwave observations from 1980 to 2009.  The all-time high snowmelt was the summer of October 1992 to January 1993.  The snowmelt record was just published by Marco Tedesco and Andrew Monaghan in Geophysical Research Letters.  The history is plotted below:

The pattern would be that this will be given little attention in the newspapers and televised media, where the upper melt rates in the periodic changes are given much more attention than the lower melt rates are given.

Rising Oceans Due to Rising CO2

The usual viewpoint is that any observed rise in the ocean level is due to a combination of water expansion as the temperature increases and a usually smaller component due to some melting of polar ice caps and glaciers. Back on 28 March 2008 in a note called "Ocean Cooling with Expansion", I discussed the fact that the Argo buoy system had found the ocean temperature to be near constant, but perhaps dropping very slightly, over a four year period and yet sea level had risen by 0.5 inch. This was a mystery.

In the last paragraph of that note, I wondered how much of that rise might be due to an increased concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, which has been rising steadily for the last 150 years. Some of this rise was because as the oceans warm, as they generally have following the end of the Little Ice Age, dissolved CO2 in the oceans is released. This will cause some contraction of the ocean and a fall in level, which is counteracted by any melting of polar ice and glaciers due to the same general warming occurring since the end of the Little Ice Age. But with no general warming of the oceans over the four year period, the main reason for the ongoing rise in CO2 in the atmosphere was presumably man burning fossil and organic fuels. So, with the ocean not warming and increased CO2 in the atmosphere, the oceans ought to absorb more CO2 and expand because of the absorption of the CO2. But how large an effect might this be, I wondered?

Well, Tom V. Segalstad at www.CO2web.info has done an interesting kitchen experiment. He put enough Ca(OH)2 in water to make the pH=8, which is the pH of the oceans. He then put a glass over a candle floating on the water and as the flame burned the water level remained constant. This shows that the burning process using oxygen from the air inside the glass and over the water and candle, was not producing a low pressure volume or vacuum and sucking more water in under the glass rim at the bottom of the container holding the water. Then, after the candle burned out because it had used the limited supply of oxygen in the air and had given off CO2 in the combustion process, the water level began to rise and rise dramatically. The CO2 was reacting with the Ca++ ions to form CaCO3 and the water expanded as the calcium carbonate content went up. In the real oceans, there are also many Na+ and K+ ions in addition to Ca++ ions, which form NaHCO3 and KHCO3 bicarbonates. So, it is very reasonable that the oceans expand also as the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere goes up with the removal of the CO2 to form bicarbonates and carbonates in the oceans. This process should be rather rapid, making the assertion by the IPCC that CO2 added to the atmosphere by man lasts 50 to 200 years look absurd, according to Tom Segalstad. It seems reasonable to me that he is right.

There are quite a few interesting things on Tom Segalstad's website. He has an information page with all sorts of key facts I have been looking for on such things as the thermal energy in the atmosphere compared to that in the oceans. As I was sure was the case, the ocean thermal energy is huge compared to the puny energy of the atmosphere, being about 2000 times larger. He also notes that the latent heat of melting of all of the ice on earth is an energy about 10 times greater than all of the energy in the earth's entire atmosphere. This ice mass is a huge buffer against warming.

Ocean Cooling with Expansion?

While visiting Robert Bidinotto's Blog, I found a note he had written on an account called The Mystery of Global Warming's Missing Heat by Richard Harris of NPR. This article discusses the Argo buoy system finding that the oceans are not only not warming, but they are if anything cooling slightly. But, Harris goes on to note that in the last 4 years in which these measurements were made, the oceans also rose about 0.5 inches. It is said there that this is a lot. In general, the Global Warming alarmists have been cranking up the fear that there will be very great sea level increases due to man emitting more CO2 into the atmosphere. Certainly 0.5 inch is not a lot, except that those of this alarmist mindset have a tendency to project change at the rate measured over short times far into the future if it is consistent with catastrophe. Ofttimes, they will even assume positive feedbacks that amplify the rate of change in the future.

Wikipedia has an article called Sea Level Rise. There is a plot on the first page showing the rise in sea level since the last Glacial Maximum about 21,000 years ago. There has been a rise of sea level of about 125 meters since then. However, for the last 7,000 years, there has been little change in sea level, but there is a slightly positive slope to the data since then. Since about 1910, there has been a roughly linear increase in sea level of about 20 cm or a bit less than 8 inches, according to the first graph in the article, titled Recent Sea Level Rise. If you examine the fluctuations in that curve, you will see that in the mid-1980s to the early 1990s there is a sudden dip in sea level followed by a rapid increase. These changes were at least 3 cm, or about 1.2 inches. Still, the overall averaged curve before and after that time is approximately linear. With this perspective, a 0.5 inch change in 4 years is not a reason to throw industry and the automobile upon the scrapheap. They would love to tie humans down to propelling grind stones by walking in circles hour after hour and put horses back on our roads.

The NPR article mentions ice melting in Antarctica and Greenland as a possible reason for the sea level increase in the last 4 years, since there has been no thermal expansion of the ocean water due to increased temperature in that time. However, with most of Antarctica experiencing an increase in ice cap thickness, while only the western peninsula is losing ice, it is not clear that the Antarctica effect is very large or even a positive one. Greenland also has areas of receding glaciers and others with ice thickness increases. There has been recent growth of ice in western Greenland and in the interior regions, while there has been loss of ice near the sea on the eastern side. What is the net effect on the sea level?

There are other factors that affect sea level:

• Sediment washed into the seas
• Changes in the salinity of ocean water
• Changes in the amount of dissolved gases such as oxygen and carbon dioxide.
• Earth rotational variations or Chandler wobble
• El Nino/southern oscillation
• Tectonic plate movements
• Volcanic creation of new land masses in the ocean
• Earthquakes dropping land into the sea or opening new chasms undersea
• Atmospheric humidity
• Changes in water in lakes, rivers, soil, and minerals on land
  

These factors are not commonly going to be constant over any 4 year period of time. The Wikipedia article also notes that the TOPEX and JASON satellites making sea level measurements since 1992 have determined a 2.9 +- 0.4 mm sea level rise since 1992. This is an error of about 14% and the error over any four-year period is probably substantially larger. So, there is likely to be significant error in the 0.5 inch measurement.

It would be very interesting if a contributor to the sea level rise proved to be an increase in the amount of carbon dioxide dissolved in the oceans. Since the CO2 in the atmosphere has increased in the last 4 years and the ocean temperature has not, the equilibrium in the exchange of CO2 molecules between the oceans and the atmosphere will be shifted due to the present higher concentration in the atmosphere. This means that the oceans will dissolve more carbon dioxide and that will increase the volume of the ocean waters. I do not know the size of this effect and whether it is a substantial part of a 0.5 inch rise in sea level, however. It would be interesting to learn something about the magnitude of this effect.

The Cooling Oceans and Unwarmed Atmosphere

When I brought up FireFox to check my e-mail this afternoon, I was greeted with a Yahoo video on the collapse of a part of the Wilkens Ice Shelf on the Western Peninsula of Antarctica of an ice area the size of Manhattan. It was said that at least one scientist said this is further proof of Global Warming. Well, there has long been a focus on this peninsular region of Antarctica due to loss of ice and, indeed, this part of Antarctica has lost ice for years. However, this area is a very small part of Antarctica and the vast majority of Antarctica has been increasing its ice mass for many years!

A couple of interesting commentaries have just surfaced which I would direct your attention to. In the first, Lorne Gunter wrote in the National Post in Canada, about the ocean temperature readings made in great proliferation by 3,000 Argo buoys since they were first deployed in 2003. They drift in the oceans at a depth of 2,000 meters and then about every 10 days they spend 6 hours rising to the surface, taking temperature data in each layer of the sea, and they broadcast their data to satellites, before sinking back to a 2000 meter depth. What have these ocean monitors found since 2003? There has been a slight cooling of the average ocean temperature! Given that CO2 levels in the atmosphere have continued to rise, this is a bit of a problem for the Man-is-wrecking-the-Earth-with-greenhouse-gases crowd. Apparently, 80 to 90% of the global warming due to CO2 is supposed to be warming of the oceans, which are then supposed to heat the atmosphere. This article also notes that NASA has 8 weather satellites that take 300,000 temperature readings every day all over the earth, compared to a mere 7,000 measurements by Earth ground stations, [too often located near population centers.] The satellites over 30 years have found only a 0.14 degree Centigrade per decade temperature increase on average.

Christopher Pearson wrote an interview with Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne, Australia published in The Australian. Marohasy notes that referenced to 1998, the earths average temperature has since fallen and if you take 2002 as your reference point, the temperature has been about constant since then. Then she notes that the NASA Aqua satellite launched in 2002 has provided data on temperature, cloud cover, and water vapor which contradicts a key assumption of the global warming computer models. The models have all thought that increasing CO2 would produce warming, which would produce more water vapor, [and since 95% of all greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is water vapor,] this would lead to accelerated heating of the atmosphere. WRONG! The Aqua satellite data shows that the increase in water vapor leads to a counteracting cooling. Thus, in engineering terms, the assumed positive feedback is really a negative feedback. [This reduction of the CO2 greenhouse effect is presumably due to increased cloud cover with increased water vapor and the reflection of considerable radiation of the sun back into space by the clouds.]

[These brackets indicate my additional comments relative to the information in these articles.]

Thanks to Robert Tracinski who pointed these two articles out in his TIA Daily.

It will be fascinating to watch the process of many of the careless, and often immoral, scientists backing away from their errors and this emotional declaration that man is ruining the earth by using fuels that create CO2. The response of the politicians will be even more interesting and more important. They have so many plans to ride roughshod over the rights of the individual in the name of saving the planet and thereby some elite portion of the animal kingdom, which will largely not include the human part. Should cooling continue, we will hear that we must prepare for the coming Ice Age and that this will require fascist socialist control of all human activity by an international government! Scaremongers are very resourceful and they will not hesitate to convince the People to give up their rights as the only way to prevent one crisis or another. The fascist have long used the fears induced by crises, often made up, to mobilize the people in one common effort, while minimizing their tendency to use reason. This technique has been taught in fascist and socialist circles for more than 100 years and used by Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Mussolini, Lenin, FDR, Hitler, Kennedy (The Missile Gap, etc.), LBJ, and Clinton (Its the economy, stupid!, even as the economy was improving already from a much smaller dip than I Feel Your Pain Clinton made it out to be.)