The study presents evidence, based on 40 years of observations, that six big glaciers in the Amundsen Sea “have passed the point of no return,” Rignot said on a Monday conference call with reporters.
The glaciers contain enough ice to raise global sea level by 4 feet (1.2 meters) and are melting faster than most scientists had expected, which will require adjusting estimates of sea-level rise, said Rignot, who is also a glaciologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
At their current rates of melting, he said, these glaciers would disappear in about two centuries, though “it could proceed faster or slower.”
West Antarctica Glaciers Collapsing, Adding to Sea-Level Rise
40 years / 200 years * 4 feet = 10 inches.
Math is an undesirable skill for being a climate scientist.
“Math is an undesirable skill for being a climate scientist.”
And it is an unobtainable skill for a climate “scientist” looks like.
It seems any scientific skill is undesirable for climate alarmists.
And you wonder why we don’t go to the moon anymore?
Different set of scientists, thankfully. Those who send probes to Mars etc and keep the ISS running actually know what they’re doing.
… and we did that with a bunch of real scientists and engineers that used paper, pencils, books full of hand calculated tables and slide rules.
Look how far computers have brought us…
That’s funny and I’m not a math guy.
All that water decided it wanted a tropical holiday and is currently enjoying the sun, off the Philippines.
Oh sure, it could be ten inches if you spread it over the world’s oceans — but what if all that new water goes straight to the big hump out in the Pacific just east of Indonesia?! Ships would have to travel hundreds of miles just to go around the massive pile of ocean!
🙂
PS Tony! I just wanted to throw out a THANK YOU for all the great work you are doing. You are making a difference in the world!
Are you saying that,at the given rate, it would have meant that the ocean WOULD HAVE risen an ADDITIONAL 10 inches due to this melt over the last 40 years?
He is saying it has been melting at 4 feet per two centuries, which is about 10 inches per 40 years.
Even if true, we would have to be a pathetic species to not be able to adapt to an inch every four years.
They aren’t getting any more accurate in their wild prediction than they were 50 years ago.
http://dge.stanford.edu/labs/caldeiralab/Caldeira%20downloads/PSAC,%201965,%20Restoring%20the%20Quality%20of%20Our%20Environment.pdf
In this national report from 1965, they absolutely nailed their CO2 predictions for the year 2000. If anything, they slightly UNDERestimated what CO2 levels would be. But they completely whiffed on their temperature and sea level predictions.
From page 121: “We may compute from his data that with a 25 percent increase in atmospheric CO2, the average temperature near the earth’s surface could increase between 0.6C and 4C (1.1F to 7F), depending on the behavior of the atmospheric water vapor content.”
Of course, the alarmists of the time picked up on the 7 degrees of warming, as they always do.
Their next prediction was “Melting of the Antarctic ice cap.” If there were a 10% increase in the miridional atmospheric circulation, and all the excess heat was used to melt the ice cap, that would take 4,000 years. But as they always do, they “arrive at a smaller melting time by supposing a change in the earth-wide radiative balance”. They choose a 2% increase, due to CO2. If half of this energy was concentrated in the antarctic, the entire ice cap would melt in 400 years. Notice there are no “error bars” in this prediction, like the above wide temperature estimates.
Under “Rise of sea level” they state that sea levels would rise by 400 feet, and calculate that if full melting takes 1,000 years (2.5x longer than their earlier prediction), sea levels would rise by about 4 feet every 10 years, 40 feet per century.
There are plenty of other alarmist predictions, but it seems to me that the only difference between these old numbers and the new crop of numbers is that enough time has already passed for us to KNOW that the old predictions were completely wrong. I expect that 50 years from now our kids and grandkids will look back at the “Global Warming” era in horror and fascination at how stupid people were, and how badly science was hijacked by a cabal of ideologues.
Education beyond intelligence leads to immense stupidity
Even Andrew Rivkin of the NYT’s Dot Earth expressed frustration with that report back in May, and dialed it back. The National Geographic was hyper-ventilating.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/12/keep-in-mind-scientific-and-societal-meanings-of-collapse-when-reading-antarctic-ice-news/
Why do people forget that it takes ~95 cubic miles of ice to raise the ocean sea level by 1 mm.
http://sealevel.info/conversion_factors.html
Surely the obvious question to any “time and management” consultant must be-
“glaciologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory” ??????
Well, yeah, Rosco! You see, since their projects tend to develop at glacial speeds, a glaciologist is the only professional with the necessary skills (and temperament) to chart the progress of those projects.
Anyway, can it be any worse than some of the positions they have in the main branch of NASA … that would be the one with the primary mission to help improve the self-esteem of the Muslim peoples.
My Dear Aunt Sally would not be pleased.
You know what the funny thing about these alarmist claims are? Their overt and blatant mentions of how stupid they are. It’s like they don’t realize that saying it’s melting “faster than expected”, that it’s “worse than expected” means they are stupid and are continuously wrong. Not once can they get an accurate picture of how bad it’s going to be even by their own guidelines.
I live on the sound side of the ocean in NC and in the last 20 years…give or take an inch due to the naked eye…I have not seen any change in sea level…
Dr. Rignot holds a Ph.D in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, Master’s degrees in aerospace engineering and electrical engineering from the University of Southern California, a Master’s degree in astronomy from the University of Paris VI Pierre et Marie Curie in France, and a Bachelor’s degree in engineering from Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in Paris, France.
Doesn’t look like he’s even a climate scientist. Looks like he’s an electrical engineer. He should know all about very long time constants then.
What benchmark was used to determine “10 inch sea level rise in 40 years” and what has been happening to that benchmark?
Take the surface level of Utah’s Great Salt Lake:
http://ut.water.usgs.gov/greatsaltlake/elevations/gslcorrection.html
The USGS is still getting its act together on the measured rise of the Great Salt Lake. If we keep using different measuring sticks, we don’t have valid measurements.
So, did the level of an inland sea rise with the remaining seas that blanket 3/4ths of Earth’s surface?