Sealing the Fate of Antarctica

The scare du jour on global warming is a massive inundation of our coast caused by rapid loss of ice from Antarctica. It's a core point in Al Gore's science fiction movie, and it continues to be thumped by doomsayers around the world, in the echo chamber of the alarmist media. It's also a bunch of hooey.

If you could take the boredom, you could have read hundreds of news stories on this since An Inconvenient Truth debuted on May 25. But you'll find very little mention of a paper that appeared a mere six weeks later, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, which should have stopped the whole show cold. The work is by Brenda Hall from the University of Maine and several co-authors.

First, Gore's science fiction. Due to the warming of the surrounding ocean, big ice-shelves begin to crack off and float away. Because that ice is floating, it doesn't raise sea level a bit. But then the ice cracks all the way back to where it is grounded on the ocean floor. That stuff isn't floating and the ocean rises dramatically, some twenty feet in a hundred years. Much of Manhattan, the movie suggests, is under water, along with just about every other coastal city.

Now, the truth. The notion that this is going to happen soon has just been fatally harpooned by giant Elephant Seals (Mirounga leonine). They generally hang out a long distance form Antarctica. Most of their breeding rookeries are a good 2,000 miles away on islands in the open ocean, where they feed. Most of the Antarctic coast is hemmed by huge ice shelves that prevent them from finding food.

But that wasn't always the case. According to Hall's paper, a large area of the Antarctic coast was ice-free...

The article link you provided does not address the substance of my comment. In terms of the next 100-200 years, the main concern of catastrophic climate change with respect to major sea level change is the melting of the Greenland ice sheet.

Did manmade phenomena cause the place to be named Greenland? There are multiple arguments with physical evidence supporting the arguments to believe that the warming that is occuring is just a natural phenomena, not anthropogenic. And while increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations sounds like a plausible reason for increased temperature, the historical record from geological investigations show that the increased carbon dioxide concentrations occred after periods of warmer temperature, not before. Do you need more links?

Vikings During the Medieval Warm Period

"n 960, Thorvald Asvaldsson of Jaederen in Norway killed a man. He was forced to leave the country so he moved to northern Iceland. He had a ten year old son named Eric, later to be called Eric Rohde, or Eric the Red. Eric too had a violent streak and in 982 he killed two men. Eric the Red was banished from Iceland for three years so he sailed west to find a land that Icelanders had discovered years before but knew little about. Eric searched the coast of this land and found the most hospitable area, a deep fiord on the southwestern coast. Warmer Atlantic currents met the island there and conditions were not much different than those in Iceland (trees and grasses.) He called this new land "Greenland" because he "believed more people would go thither if the country had a beautiful name," according to one of the Icelandic chronicles (Hermann, 1954) although Greenland, as a whole, could not be considered "green." Additionally, the land was not very good for farming.

There are multiple arguments with physical evidence supporting the arguments to believe that the warming that is occuring is just a natural phenomena, not anthropogenic.

Any of these arguments is flawed in some manner. What's your favorite?

And while increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations sounds like a plausible reason for increased temperature, the historical record from geological investigations show that the increased carbon dioxide concentrations occred after periods of warmer temperature, not before. Do you need more links?

I am totally and repetitively familiar with this flawed argument, and I've got all the links I need. Such as this one:

What does the lag of CO2 behind temperature in ice cores tell us about global warming?

CO2 lags, not leads

"A close examination of the CH4, CO2 and temperature fuctuations recorded in the Antarctic ice core records does in fact reveal that yes, the temperature moved first in what is, when viewed coarsely, a very tight correlation. But what it is not correct, is to say the temperature rose and then 800 years later the CO2 rose. These warming periods lasted for 5000 to 10000 years (the coolings lasted ~100kyrs) so for the majority of that time (~90%) temperature and CO2 rose together. This means that this wonderful archive of climatological evidence clearly allows for CO2 acting as a cause while also revealing it can be an effect."

"The current understanding of those cycles is that changes in orbital parameters (Milankovich and other cycles) caused greater amounts of summer sunlight in the northern hemisphere. This is a very small forcing. But it caused ice to retreat in the north which changed the albedo increasing the warmth in a feedback effect. Some ~800 years after this process started, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere began to rise and this also amplified the warming."

Next?

Any of these arguments is flawed in some manner.

That's your opinion.

What's your favorite?

Take your pick.

The truth about global warming - it's the Sun that's to blame

Global Warming on Pluto Puzzles Scientists

THE PHYSICAL EVIDENCE OF EARTH'S UNSTOPPABLE 1,500-YEAR CLIMATE CYCLE

In Ancient Fossils, Seeds of a New Debate on Warming

Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels for the last 500 million years

Evidence for decoupling of atmospheric CO2 and global climate during the Phanerozoic eon

Global Warming on Mars?

Evolution of the Sun's large-scale magnetic field since the Maunder minimum.

Science and Public Policy

As physicist Edward Teller reminded us: "Highly speculative theories of worldwide destruction—even of the end of life on Earth—used as a call for a particular kind of political action serve neither the good reputation of science nor dispassionate political thought."

The debate reminds me about the former medical truism that ulcers are mainly caused by stress and spicy foods. A recent winner of the Nobel for Medicine proved that the major cause, 80 - 90 perent, for gastrointestinal ulcers is Helicobacter Pylori. I'm sure I could have found more links to illustrate other variables we don't understand. Proponents of anthropogenic global warming would be wise to heed the advice of Dr. Teller, IMHO.

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