"The rate of ice loss has risen by 57 % since the 1990s – from 0.8 to 1.2 trillion tonnes per year."
The Washington Post reported on this paper here, noting the accelerating and noting uncertainties.
How did Oregon climate deniers Chuck Wiese and Lars Larson decide to report this news on the radio? By lying about it.
Is The World On The Verge Of Losing All Our Ice?Lars speaks with meteorologist and climate expert, Chuck Wiese about a recent Washington Post article claiming that the Earth is losing 1.2 trillion tons of ice yearly, and we’re on the verge of losing all of it.
Nowhere in the Washington Post article does it say we're on the verge of losing all the planet's ice. Everyone intelligent person knows that's not true, but Larson and Wiese lie about it anyway.
While WaPo does present such a rhetorical question going into a next section
The question now becomes: Just how fast will climate change lead to the melting of the biggest and thickest ice, the ice atop Greenland and Antarctica?
it never seriously questions or claims that all ice will vanish, and no scientist ever implies it, and they never come close to trying to answer it, let alone implying that we're "on the verge of losing all of it." Claiming so is false. Because the very idea is absurd, it's utterly irrelevant to the story -- unless you're a denier and that's the only piece of lint you can manufacture.
Wiese makes the ridiculous calculation
From Chuck Weise: Global ice volume from Greenland, Arctic and Antarctica = 3.428850 x 10^7 Km^3 x .83 Gt/Km^3 = 2.8459455 x 10^16 tons of global ice. So at the rate of 1.2 trillion tons of ice loss per year, how long would it take to melt all the ice on earth? Answer: 2.8459455 x 10^16 tons / 1.2 x 10^12 tons per year = 23,716.3 years to melt all the earth ice at this rate. As you can see, the whole story is idiotic as are most “climate change” stories because within this time period, we will go thru another Milankovitch planetary cycle which will trigger another ice age. That is less than 10,000 years away.
which is ridiculous for three reasons:
- six significant figures on the answer! Uh, no -- two at most.
- it's a linear calculation that doesn't take the acceleration of ice loss into account (which still wouldn't put us on the "verge" of losing all the world's ice, but would make a large difference in the result), and
- the next ice age isn't "less than 10,000 years away." In fact, according to Ganopolski et al, Nature 2016 the start of a new ice age "was narrowly missed before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution," and that "even in the absence of human perturbations no substantial build-up of ice sheets would occur within the next several thousand years and that the current interglacial would probably last for another 50,000 years." They further conclude
“…moderate anthropogenic cumulative CO2 emissions of 1,000 to 1,500 gigatonnes of carbon will postpone the next glacial inception by at least 100,000 years.” -- Nature letter, Jan 2016, doi:10.1038/nature16494
We've already emitted about 475 GtC (gigatonnes of carbon) by my reckoning, and are emitting around 11 GtC/yr, including land use changes. So we may yet emit enough to delay the next plunge into a glacial period by another 50,000 years or so. (And future Earthlings, if there are any left, may decide they like it that way. Or they may be very smart and decide they prefer a natural Earth. Or they may be already have moved on large generation ships to a near Earth-like planet.)
Who knows, but the science doesn't say the next ice age will start in 10,000 years.
So the Oregon deniers didn't just lie about the reporting on the scientific finding, they botched up their denial of it too. It seems being a climate denier is getting to be harder and harder anymore. Next thing you know they're going to form a union to try to retain some relevancy.
6 comments:
From other calculations I remember that to raise sea level by 1mm you need to add 360 cubic kilometres or 360 billion tonnes of ice melt.
28 trillion tonnes over 23 years would increase sea level by 3.38 mm/year.
That is consistent with the observed sea level rise of 78mm or 3.39mm/year over the same period, but does not allow for thermal expansion.
Either that 28 trillion tonnes is an overestimate or we are underestimating sea level rise.
The WaPo article is frightening , yet uninformative. Very few readers will do the calculation that Entropic man did. The reader has no way to judge the significance of 1.2 trillion tons of ice.
Cheers
Just a quick calculation -- Wiki says
"Between 1993 and 2018, thermal expansion of the oceans contributed 42% to sea level rise"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise
so ice melt is 58%. Using EM's number of 3.38 mm/yr, that would bring the total SLR up to 5.83 mm/yr which is higher than what I see, which is now about 4.4 mm/yr or so.
BUT, SLR is accelerating, so the linear rate is constantly changing. Fitting a quadratic equation to Aviso's SL data (1993-2020.5), I get an acceleration of 0.068 mm/yr2 and a first derivative (SLR) of 4.36 mm/yr.
ftp://ftp.aviso.altimetry.fr/pub/oceano/AVISO/indicators/msl/MSL_Serie_MERGED_Global_AVISO_GIA_Adjust_Filter2m.txt
5 yrs ago, the 1st derivative was 3.38 mm/yr.
10 yrs ago, 2.89 mm/yr.
This varies greatly by location of course. In an extreme case, Charleston, SC, I calculate that SLR is 1 inch every 34 months.
"Either that 28 trillion tonnes is an overestimate or we are underestimating sea level rise."
The third option is that both may be roughly correct.
Of that 28 trillion, 7.6 trillion is Arctic sea and 0.9 trillion from the Southern ocean. Neither contributes to sea level rise. And then there is another 6.5 trillion from ice shelves at the Antarctic Peninsula, which also doesn't contribute. That leaves 6.1 trillion from mountain glaciers, 3.8 trillion from Greenland ice sheet and 2.5 trillion from Antarctic ice sheet for 12.4 trillion. Or about 1.5 mm/year of sea level rise due to melting ice. Sounds about right.
Great points, thanks Joe.
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