Greenland's melting ice?
Breathless reporting last week of a new estimate of Greenland's melting ice.
It's higher than it was before:
"The changes on the Greenland ice sheet are happening fast, and we are definitely losing more ice mass than we had anticipated," says study co-author Isabella Velicogna of the University of California-Irvine.
Could be scary? USA Today has its cake and eats it:
``If the entire Greenland ice sheet melted, which is not predicted, scientists estimate that global sea levels would rise about 20 feet, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.''
Is there a single journalist out there who bothered to ask the obvious question: what percentage of its ice mass is Greenland losing each year, so how long have we got before the 20 feet engulf us all?
Not that I could see. So I looked it up.
The new study says Greenland lost 385 cubic miles between 2002 and 2009. Sounds a lot.
Greenland has 700,000 cubic miles of ice. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_ice_sheet)
So it's losing 1% per century, 0.01% per year. Funny that number never appeared in the news reports.
For Pete's sake, journalists, do your job.
Comments (14)
One of the most interesting side-stories to the collapse of global warming alarmism has been the parallel descent of the mainstream media.
Almost all of the MSM, whether in the UK, US or Australia, have for years been printing uncritical AGW nonsense, leaving it to the blogosphere to carry forward the light of reason.
The MSM has written its own richly-deserved suicide note.
It is amazing, isn't it. You'd think the first thing a journalist would want to do is get a sense of the proportion, by asking the question. Perhaps they did, and decided that the story is better without the perspective, which would be truly depressing.
Anyway, I'm glad I've found your blog, and look forward to reading it. And by the way (it's quite a while ago now) but many thanks for 'The Origins of Virtue'. I've read it several times and greatly enjoyed it each time.
Excellent comment. I don't know why the journalists can't or won't do the trivially simple research and arithmetic that would debunk the hysterical narrative of Warmageddon. Oh, wait, I do know why. The trouble with their sloth and bias is, it burns up the only asset they've got: credibility.
Working through the math one can deduce that to raise sea level one inch requires an ice cube 13 miles wide - roughly 2,200 cubic miles. Hence, 385 cubic miles raises sea level about 11/64 of an inch, or 4.5 millimeters.
This melt occurred over an eight-year period, so a century's melt at this pace would be 12.5 times as much. That amounts to just over two inches per century, or 5.5 centimeters.
At this rate, we'll need to have levees built along the coastline somewhere around the beginning of the next millenium.
Egad!
"Journalists, do your job." Are you kidding? They wouldn't know how to calculate percentages. Not part of the journalism school curriculum.
The numbers are even smaller for the Antarctic. With 30,000,000 cubic km of ice, and a claimed loss of about 150 cubic km per year measured using GRACE, this comes to a 'catastrophic' loss rate of 5 parts per million per year. Tiny shifts in gravitational anomalies other than ice loss could account for the entire change observed by the GRACE satellite. All we really know is that the changes are buried in natural variability- still.
A 2009 study by Velicogna, showed that between April 2002 and February 2009, the Greenland ice sheet shed roughly 1,605 cubic kilometers (385 cubic miles) of ice. The mass loss is equivalent to about 0.5 millimeters (0.02 inches) of global sea-level rise per year.
Trends and rate increases are what is significant
Righto on the calculation, except it's even less than .01% per year.
If that journalist had been born 20,000 years ago, the sea would have been 420 feet lower. (And, if he/she had lived to age 20,000 years, that first 20 feet rise wouldn't have been much.)
[...] USA Today reported that Greenland’s ice is melting and may cause sea levels to rise 20ft. Of course, the story isn’t all that awful if you look at, you know… pesky facts. [...]
At this rate, we will have to wait for 10,000 years before Greenland will be green again, as it was when the Vikings were growing grapes there.
Matt,
You spent part of your career in journalism. Is not asking the follow-up question or not doing the homework really anything new?
I used to think, in the '60s, that any story involving the slightest technical insight needed 10 day legs for the news-people to get the story close to the likely reality.
Great point. I've just been struggling to try to get to grips with the warming debate and science, and it is very hard to get sensible, well interpreted information (from either "side"). This is precisely how information should be presented.
I was reading a recent posting (14 April) on climateprogress.org entitled, "The complete guide to modern day climate change.
All the data you need to show that the world is warming" which has an alarming graphic showing a rapid ice loss in Greenland (of course, one knows it all depends on the scale really) with this text:
"Velicogna (2009) used measurements from the GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellite gravity mission to determine the ice mass-loss for the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets during the period between April 2002 and February 2009. During this time period the mass loss of the ice sheets were accelerating with time implying that the ice sheets contribution to sea level becomes larger with time. In Greenland (Fig. 7.6), the mass loss increased from 137 Gt/yr in 2002–2003 to 286 Gt/yr in 2007–2009. In Antarctica (Fig. 7.7) the mass loss increased from 104 Gt/yr in 2002–2006 to 246 Gt/yr in 2006–2009."
It could mean anything! Thanks again. Maybe you should write a book.
The science show on Australia national radio replied to me when I complained about bias (their subtitle: climate change doubters vs. climate change science). They said they will be having Matt on next week. I look forward to this, if true.
What amazes me the most is how little these alarmists acknowledge 100 years of future technology while they have complete faith in 100 years forward using computer models.
With researchers like Craig Venter already creating bacteria from a computer text file, in 100 years his great grandchildren will likely have custom generated microbes and plant hybrids that if need be will scrub the atmosphere of any excess c02. And they will also probably understand quite a bit more about what causes climate changes.
These people can't even look back 110 years and see a world without electricity, cars, or even indoor toilets. What little foresight these alarmists have.
What you all ignore is that humans and present day life on earth evolved during a period of relatively stable climate. Now we are responsible for changing the composition of the climate to a level that is beyond any past known levels. To believe that increasing CO2 will have no negative effects on what (to us)is a good climate is a fools paradise. We should be intent on stabilizing the atmosphere for optimal conditions not experimenting with how much we can change things before it implodes. Even minor changes have profound effects on organisms. Humans are not exempt from evolution, it is not an option. Investing in energy efficiency and real renewable energy and limiting human population is the future, of jobs and a robust economy. We need to stop acting like bacteria and use our supposed intellect to "engineer" for stability. You are all focusing on what you think are minutia with total ignorance of what this means to living organisms and ecosystem stability.