Junk science gets through peer review as standard practice in climate science. The only requirement is that it sounds scary and is useful for raising funding.
over the past several years scientists have been able to use data from the twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites to begin to get better estimates of just how fast we’re losing polar ice. (Changes in the mass of polar ice can actually affect the Earth’s gravitational field, and the GRACE satellites can detect those changes and use it to help calculate ice loss.) Recent studies using GRACE data estimated that Greenland was losing around 230 billion metric tons of ice a year, while West Antarctica was losing around 132 billion metric tons a year. Together that would account for 0.2 in. of sea level rise a year—which might seem like a small figure, but it’s far higher than the 0.07 in. that seas rose annually in the 1960s.)
These geniuses didn’t know the most basic fundamentals of the topic they were writing about.
Those are scary numbers, but a new study published in the September issue of Nature Geoscience suggests that the true melt rate might be much slower than that. A joint team of American and Dutch scientists took another look at the GRACE data and found that Greenland and West Antarctica may be melting just half as fast the earlier studies estimated. As researcher Bert Vermeersen, a professor at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, told the AFP, the earlier estimates failed to account for glacial isostatic adjustment—the rebounding of the Earth’s crust after the end of the last Ice Age
Climate Change: New Study Halves the Rate of Ice Cap Melt | TIME.com
GRACE measures mass balance (MB). Global warming theory doesn’t explain changes in MB. Global warming would effect surface mass balance (SMB). That is, is snow and ice cover on the surface melting or increasing? There have been no detectable changes in SMB in Antarctica according to the studies I have read.
When someone invokes GRACE as “proof” of global warming theory, it only demonstrates that they don’t understand the topic.
0.2 inches a year?
That equals 20 inches a century, yet in total sea level is rising at no more than about 10 inches a century, even believing the satellites.
7 inches per century, over a 150 year period, and not accelerating
“Honey, does this dress make my butt look big?”
“No, Dear. Changes in the mass of polar ice have affected the Earth’s gravitational field.”
How changes in the mass of polar ice affect you, and why you should care.
The Illustration on the Time article is fraudulent. No way water would fall on a diagonal like that. Water falls straight down. And water doesn’t fall off the top of ice sheets, the ice calves. The only meltwater in Greenland is from down low where the volcanic activity is. It’s a completely fraudulent pic that pretends to be a photograph. Disgusting!
“No way water would fall on a diagonal like that. Water falls straight down”.
The photo is from this collection:
http://www.placestoseeinyourlifetime.com/ice-canyon-in-greenland-872/
I expect the water is travelling at speed, so it would project outwards at first. The photo does look odd though, considering that the stream should be curved, under those conditions.
It must be a stream of stiff water.
From the journal ‘The Cryosphere’ 2013
‘Antarctic ice-mass balance 2003 to 2012 : regional reanalysis of GRACE satellite gravimetry measurements with improved estimate of glacial-isostatic adjustment based on GPS uplift rates’
“We present regional-scale mass balances for 25 drainage basins of the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS) from satellite observations of the Gravity and Climate Experiment (GRACE) for time period January 2003 to September 2012. Satellite gravimetry estimates of the AIS mass balance are strongly influenced by mass movement in the Earth interior caused by ice advance and retreat during the last glacial cycle. Here, we develop an improved glacial-isostatic adjustment (GIA) estimate for Antarctica using newly available GPS uplift rates, allowing us to more accurately separate GIA-induced trends in the GRACE gravity fields from those caused by current imbalances of the AIS. Our revised GIA estimate is considerably lower than previous predictions, yielding an estimate of apparent mass change of 53 +/- 18Gt yr(-1). Therefore, our AIS mass balance of -114 +/- 23 Gt yr(-1) is less negative than previous GRACE estimates.”
Using the know conversion factor of 1Gt of ice melt = 2.78 microns of sea level rise, -114Gt of annual melt is .317mm/year or 31.7/100yrs or 1.248 inches per 100 years of sea level rise at current melt rate.
Sea level rise from thermal expansion was downgraded by the IPCC from 1.6mm/year in 2007AR4 to 1.1mm/year in 2013AR5.
All these downward revisions have led president “my math skills end at 7th grade” Obama, winner of the coveted 4 Pinocchio liar of the year award from WAPO, and considered the smartest man in the world (by people with math skills below 7th grade), to warn and frighten members of the climate hysteria cult that things are worse now than what scientists thought 5 or 10 tears ago.
It was a nice scare while it lasted. Mo money, MO Money, MO MONEY!
.2 inches is 5.08 mm. How did they get that?
I’m not a scientist, but you don’t need to be one to read measurements and add/subtract/multiply, etc. Do these people honestly think that ordinary schmoes don’t factcheck them?
Both http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/conversion-factors-for-ice-and-water-mass-and-volume/ and http://sealevel.info/conversion_factors.html say that it takes 361or 361.8 Gts (billion metric tons) to raise the ocean 1 mm.
TIME says:
That’s 230 + 132 billion metric tons a year = 362 billion metric tons.
That’s one effing millimeter of sea-level rise.
Someone prove me wrong.
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P.S. can one of the more scientific among you look at the links above and tell me which one is correct? They have two different numbers for the ocean mass. I can’t write subscripts here, so look at the links.
I mean superscripts.
I notice that the alarmists don’t mention that the Antarctic ice sheet overall has a net gain of of 49gt/yr
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=20120013495
and the cherry on top of that is that the lead author is none other than the Jay Zwally of “the arctic will be ice free by 2013” fame so He’s firmly planted in the alarmist camp , some kudos due to Zwally , unlike certain climastrologists He published the data anyway in spite of it being contrary to the current popular alarmist beliefs . He tries on the old “growing/shrinking is consistent with model predictions” disclaimer at the end of the abstract but I suspect that He just couldn’t help Himself