Posted on 02/17/2002 9:25:18 AM PST by Clara Lou
BOSTON – Melting glaciers could cause global sea level to rise between 7 and 11 inches in this century, more than twice what was previously predicted, scientists said Saturday.
That melting could combine with other factors to bring total sea level rise to between 1 and 2 feet.
The rise may sound small, but "you could lose 100 feet of prime real estate along shores," said Mark Meier, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado. In low-lying areas such as estuaries, a 1-foot rise in sea level could push the shoreline 1,000 feet inland, Dr. Meier reported in Boston at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which assesses the scientific consensus on the effects of global warming, had underestimated factors such as how rapidly some big Alaskan glaciers are melting, he said.
Another group of climate experts, discussing whether the El Niño climate phenomenon would return this winter, said that new observations of the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean suggest conditions are ripe for an El Niño to begin there.
"The preconditions are all set for an El Niño to unfold," said Stephen Zebiak, a climate forecaster at the International Research Institute for Climate Prediction in Palisades, N.Y.
But he said no computer models predict an El Niño like that which wreaked havoc worldwide in the winter of 1997-98.
Oceanographers will be scrutinizing the Pacific this spring to see whether more warm water rises to its surface, which could trigger a full-fledged El Niño. Within the next three to six months, scientists should have a much better idea whether an El Niño might occur and how severe it might be.
At this time in early 1997, when the last El Niño appeared, the eastern Pacific was already far warmer and signaling a stronger El Niño event than it is this year, said climate expert Antonio Busalacchi of the University of Maryland.
Some researchers have proposed that global warming might have caused El Niño to appear more frequently in the last few decades.
An El Niño's chief effect on humanity is to change rainfall patterns, causing flooding in some parts of the world and drought in others.
Not in dispute is the fact that warmer global temperatures are causing glaciers to melt at the fastest rate in 5,000 years, Dr. Meier said.
He and his colleagues have chronicled the loss of glaciers and ice caps outside Greenland and Antarctica. Over the last 40 years, melting of this ice has contributed to an observed sea level rise. And the contribution of glaciers is increasing, Dr. Meier said.
Dr. Meier acknowledged that his study is "data-poor," because glacier records aren't kept the same way worldwide. But his results fit into a larger, scientifically accepted picture of the world's ice wasting away at an ever-faster rate.
New data show that the big Alaskan and Canadian glaciers are melting more rapidly than thought. In some cases, they are thinning by 2 to 3 feet every year, Dr. Meier said. The glaciers' enormous sizes had obscured how much ice was being lost.
In addition, Dr. Meier's team found that small glaciers around Antarctica and Greenland appear on the verge of melting. And glaciers appear to be more sensitive to changes in temperature and snowfall than previously believed.
The international climate panel's report had proposed that melting glaciers would contribute 2 to 4 inches to sea-level rise during this century – a long way from Dr. Meier's 7 to 11 inches.
No facts but the conclusion fits the theory. Ok. Whatever.
Editor
Dallas Morning News
Dallas, TX
Dear Editor,
In today's Alexandra Witze article entitled "Experts: Glacier melting, sea rise underestimated", it would seem that Ms. Witze did a poor job of expert selection. Her statement "That melting could combine with other factors to bring total sea level rise to between 1 and 2 feet" is unsupported by facts.
In a recent study by a University of Illinois (Chicago) team, as reported in Nature, data was collected and analyzed from all weather stations in Antarctica. They concluded that, rather than warming, the average temperature in Antarctica had fallen by 0.7 C per decade. These results shoot holes in theories about claiming global warming, since the impact is supposedly magnified at the poles. The study further concluded that estimates of future rises in sea level may not be accurate.
Probably the very best evidence that the seas aren't rising (in spite of hysterical claims to the contrary) is contained in the work of Thomas Lempriere, who on July 1st, 1841, after much research, carved several notches on a cliff face partially covered by the sea, at a place in southern Australia called Isle of the Dead. Lempriere's permanent mark proves that the tides haven't risen in over 160 years.
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For FReepers interested in Lempriere's work, please see:
This link told me everything I will ever need to know about global warming.
Worldwide Mountain Glaciers are estimated at 680,000 sq. Kms. about 260,000 sq. miles. If all the Glaciers melted and the ice caps melted the sea level will fall.
i live about 6 miles inland from the pacific at 300 feet.
we'd like an ocean view, too.
Earth happens... get over it.
Guess he missed the study that shows Antarctica cooling and the glacier getting thicker.
i live about 6 miles inland from the pacific at 300 feet.
we'd like an ocean view, too.
LOL! We could rid ourselves of and nearly every globosocialist enclave on the planet! New York, Boston, DC, much of San Francisco, SANTA CRUZ, Sacramento...
Wow! What a DEAL!!!
Just a couple of weeks ago, the best study to date (and published in Science magazine) on ice thickness so far, shows that it is getting thicker. But lets ignore the best facts.
Scientific findings run counter to theory of global warming San Diego Union Tribune | 1/25/2002 | Joseph Perkins
Posted on 1/25/02 8:38 AM Pacific by dalereed
Scientific findings run counter to theory of global warming
Joseph Perkins
SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE
January 25, 2002
Oh dear. What will the doomsayers say now? How will they explain away yet two more scientific studies that clearly contradict the global warming orthodoxy?
For much of the past 14 years, since the United Nations created its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we've been warned that human activity is overheating the planet.
And nowhere is that supposed to be more evident than in Antarctica, the proverbial bellwether for planetary climate change.
Indeed, in recent years there have been any number of scary reports claiming that the White Continent is warming up and shedding its ice shelves at a startling rate. Which has led to the most ominous forecasts by environmental advocacy groups such as the National Resources Defense Council. Glaciers and polar ice packs will melt," it direly predicts, in its global warming "fact sheet." "Sea levels will rise, flooding coastal areas. Heat waves will be more frequent and more intense. Droughts and wildfires will occur more often. Andspecies will be pushed to extinction." So how do the climatory Cassandras on the environmental left explain the new study, appearing in the current edition of the journal Nature, that shows a net cooling, rather than warming, on the Antarctic continent between 1966 and 2000?
What particularly amazes is that the cooling trend has actually gotten more pronounced since the mid-1980s. Air temperatures recorded continuously over a 14-year period ending in 1999 declined by 0.7 degrees in Antarctica's polar desert valleys.
The study's lead author, limnologist Peter T. Doran of the University of Illinois at Chicago, was almost apologetic about the results produced by his team of scientists.
"This is an unexpected twist," he said, tacitly acknowledging that his data is inconsistent with global warming theory.
It's the same thing with the study, published in a recent issue of the journal Science, which concludes that the giant West Antarctic Ice Sheet is actually getting thicker, rather than melting.
Authored by Ian Joughin, a geologist with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology and Slawek Tulaczyk, a professor of earth sciences at the University of California Santa Cruz, the study found that the ice sheet is gaining 26.8 billions tons of ice a year.
Much like Doran, Joughin sounded almost regretful about his scientific findings, recognizing that it contradicts the global warming orthdoxy.
"It could be this part of the ice sheet is not necessarily sensitive to global warming," he said.
There is a curious thing going on in the scientific community. Scientists who produce research that does not comport with accepted wisdom on global warming – like Doran and Joughin – feel compelled to disavow their findings. Or, at least, to suggest that their results are aberrational.
Indeed, a few years back, the Climate Prediction Center, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, released a study that found the continental United States has actually gotten cooler, rather than warmer, over the past third of a century.
Yet, the scientists who produced the center's study went to great lengths to assure that their findings did not undermine prevailing notions about global warming.
Then there was the study by scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla.
They took Antarctic ice core samples from the last three glacial cycles (the transitional periods between ice age and planetary warming) to ascertain the relation between rises in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and increases in planetary temperature.
Based on global warming theory, there should first have been a rise in carbon dioxide levels followed by a rise in temperature levels. But, in fact the opposite actually occurred.
Yet, the Scripps scientists insisted that their results were not inconsistent with global warming theory.
It seems clear that much of the scientific community is in denial about global warming. That scientists are so empathetic to the IPCC, the NRDC and other global warming doomsayers that even those scientists who produce research that contradict the global warming orthodoxy are unwilling to admit as much.
Perkins can be reached via e-mail at joseph.perkins@uniontrib.com.
Hey, I'm just glad I'm not the only one who does it.
Thanks for the post as well.
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