The world's getting hotter?

[Rodney Mills]

Today from My way news.

The big melt: Antarctica's retreating ice may re-shape Earth

Feb 27, 9:14 AM (ET)

By LUIS ANDRES HENAO and SETH BORENSTEIN


CAPE LEGOUPIL, Antarctica (AP) — From the ground in this extreme northern part of Antarctica, spectacularly white and blinding ice seems to extend forever. What can't be seen is the battle raging underfoot to re-shape Earth.

Water is eating away at the Antarctic ice, melting it where it hits the oceans. As the ice sheets slowly thaw, water pours into the sea — 130 billion tons of ice (118 billion metric tons) per year for the past decade, according to NASA satellite calculations. That's the weight of more than 356,000 Empire State Buildings, enough ice melt to fill more than 1.3 million Olympic swimming pools. And the melting is accelerating.

In the worst case scenario, Antarctica's melt could push sea levels up 10 feet (3 meters) worldwide in a century or two, recurving heavily populated coastlines.

Parts of Antarctica are melting so rapidly it has become "ground zero of global climate change without a doubt," said Harvard geophysicist Jerry Mitrovica.


(AP) In this Jan. 25, 2015 photo, a scientist walks on the shore of the Hurd Peninsula,...
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Here on the Antarctic peninsula, where the continent is warming the fastest because the land sticks out in the warmer ocean, 49 billion tons of ice (nearly 45 billion metric tons) are lost each year, according to NASA. The water warms from below, causing the ice to retreat on to land, and then the warmer air takes over. Temperatures rose 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) in the last half century, much faster than Earth's average, said Ricardo Jana, a glaciologist for the Chilean Antarctic Institute.

As chinstrap penguins waddled behind him, Peter Convey of the British Antarctic Survey reflected on changes he could see on Robert Island, a small-scale example and perhaps early warning signal of what's happening to the peninsula and rest of the continent as a whole.

"I was last here 10 years ago," Convey said during a rare sunny day on the island, with temperatures just above freezing. "And if you compare what I saw back then to now, the basic difference due to warming is that the permanent patches of snow and ice are smaller. They're still there behind me, but they're smaller than they were."

Robert Island hits all the senses: the stomach-turning smell of penguin poop; soft moss that invites the rare visitor to lie down, as if on a water bed; brown mud, akin to stepping in gooey chocolate. Patches of the moss, which alternates from fluorescent green to rust red, have grown large enough to be football fields. Though 97 percent of the Antarctic Peninsula is still covered with ice, entire valleys are now free of it, ice is thinner elsewhere and glaciers have retreated, Convey said.

Dressed in a big red parka and sky blue hat, plant biologist Angelica Casanova has to take her gloves off to collect samples, leaving her hands bluish purple from the cold. Casanova says she can't help but notice the changes since she began coming to the island in 1995. Increasingly, plants are taking root in the earth and stone deposited by retreating glaciers, she says.


(AP) In this Jan. 22, 2015 photo, a zodiac carrying a team of international scientists...
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"It's interesting because the vegetation in some way responds positively. It grows more," she said, a few steps from a sleeping Weddell seal. "What is regrettable is that all the scientific information that we're seeing says there's been a lot of glacier retreat and that worries us."

Just last month, scientists noticed in satellite images that a giant crack in an ice shelf on the peninsula called Larsen C had grown by about 12 miles (20 kilometers) in 2014. Ominously, the split broke through a type of ice band that usually stops such cracks. If it keeps going, it could cause the breaking off of a giant iceberg somewhere between the size of Rhode Island and Delaware, about 1,700 to 2,500 square miles (4,600 to 6,400 square kilometers), said British Antarctic Survey scientist Paul Holland. And there's a small chance it could cause the entire Scotland-sized Larsen C ice shelf to collapse like its sister shelf, Larsen B, did in a dramatic way in 2002.

A few years back, scientists figured Antarctica as a whole was in balance, neither gaining nor losing ice. Experts worried more about Greenland; it was easier to get to and more noticeable, but once they got a better look at the bottom of the world, the focus of their fears shifted. Now scientists in two different studies use the words "irreversible" and "unstoppable" to talk about the melting in West Antarctica. Ice is gaining in East Antarctica, where the air and water are cooler, but not nearly as much as it is melting to the west.

"Before Antarctica was much of a wild card," said University of Washington ice scientist Ian Joughin. "Now I would say it's less of a wild card and more scary than we thought before."

Over at NASA, ice scientist Eric Rignot said the melting "is going way faster than anyone had thought. It's kind of a red flag."


(AP) In this Jan. 22, 2015 photo, Gentoo penguins stand on rocks near the Chilean station...
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What's happening is simple physics. Warm water eats away at the ice from underneath. Then more ice is exposed to the water, and it too melts. Finally, the ice above the water collapses into the water and melts.

Climate change has shifted the wind pattern around the continent, pushing warmer water farther north against and below the western ice sheet and the peninsula. The warm, more northerly water replaces the cooler water that had been there. It's only a couple degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the water that used to be there, but that makes a huge difference in melting, scientists said.

The world's fate hangs on the question of how fast the ice melts.

At its current rate, the rise of the world's oceans from Antarctica's ice melt would be barely noticeable, about one-third of a millimeter a year. The oceans are that vast.

But if all the West Antarctic ice sheet that's connected to water melts unstoppably, as several experts predict, there will not be time to prepare. Scientists estimate it will take anywhere from 200 to 1,000 years to melt enough ice to raise seas by 10 feet, maybe only 100 years in a worst case scenario. If that plays out, developed coastal cities such as New York and Guangzhou could face up to $1 trillion a year in flood damage within a few decades and countless other population centers will be vulnerable.

"Changing the climate of the Earth or thinning glaciers is fine as long as you don't do it too fast. And right now we are doing it as fast as we can. It's not good," said Rignot, of NASA. "We have to stop it; or we have to slow it down as best as we can. "

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Associated Press writer Luis Andres Henao reported this story from various locations in Antarctica and Seth Borenstein reported from Washington.


100 feet raise in water sounds like along time in the future, but it would have been 8 plus feet in my life time.

Cheers Rodney

[happy daze john in oz]

Figures here show the warmest year on record, but remember global weather records as we now know them only began in 1948, show that last year it was the hottest by 0.002 degrees C.o

[Ivan Cloherty]

We're doomed Mr Mannering, doomed, I tell ye, we're doomed. Man will learn to adapt.

[Rodney Mills]

For your information, todays up-date on the Antarctic loss of ice.

Sources: Scripps Inst. of Oceanography. University of Calif., San Diego, CA. Earth & Space research, Oregon, USA. Reuters. My Way News Service.

Cheers, Rodney



Volume loss from Antarctic ice shelves is accelerating


The floating ice shelves surrounding the Antarctic Ice Sheet restrain the grounded ice-sheet flow. Thinning of an ice shelf reduces this effect, leading to an increase in ice discharge to the ocean. Using eighteen years of continuous satellite radar altimeter observations we have computed decadal-scale changes in ice-shelf thickness around the Antarctic continent. Overall, average ice-shelf volume change accelerated from negligible loss at 25 ± 64 km3 per year for 1994-2003 to rapid loss of 310 ± 74 km3 per year for 2003-2012. West Antarctic losses increased by 70% in the last decade, and earlier volume gain by East Antarctic ice shelves ceased. In the Amundsen and Bellingshausen regions, some ice shelves have lost up to 18% of their thickness in less than two decades.



Mariano Caravaca /Reuters/Landov


The Antarctic is far away, freezing and buried under a patchwork of ice sheets and glaciers. But a warming climate is altering that mosaic in unpredictable ways — research published Thursday shows that the pace of change in parts of the Antarctic is accelerating.


Ice Shelf Collapse

In 2002, the Antarctic's Larsen B ice shelf collapsed in just three weeks. It was the size of Rhode Island

Many of the ice sheets that blanket Antarctica run right down to the land's edge and then out into the ocean, where they form floating ice "shelves." Some of those shelves have been shrinking lately. Now, a team of scientists has discovered that shelves in the West Antarctic are shrinking a lot faster than they realized. The research appears in this week's issue of the journal Science.

"We are starting to lose more ice at a faster rate; we're accelerating," says Helen Fricker, a climate scientist at University of California, San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography. In fact, she says the rate of shrinking has increased by 70 percent over the past decade.

That estimate is based on satellite measurements of the ice taken over an 18-year-period. Briefer snapshots of the ice had missed the overall trend, says Fricker's co-investigator, Fernando Paolo, partly because the same sheet may shift and grow, back and forth, from year to year. "We were able to look at a much larger time span — 18 years — and through [those] 18 years, we were able to track the evolution of those changes," says Paolo, a graduate student studying glaciology at Scripps.

Is this acceleration important? Yes, because the enormous mass of ice sitting on the Antarctic bedrock — "grounded ice" — is to a large extent held back from the ocean by those shrinking ice shelves. "They're stopping that grounded ice flowing off the continent into the oceans, just by being there," says Fricker. "So it's like a restraining force."

But what happens if the shelves thin down to the point of collapse? It's a question that keeps climate scientists awake at night. Huge ice sheets on land could flow into the ocean. And when ice that used to cover land is added to the sea (as opposed to sea ice that melts), will make the ocean's overall level rise.

You can think of it this way, says Fricker: "If you're sitting at the bar with a gin and tonic and you've got it full and the bar person decides they want to put an extra ice cube in, it's going to spill your drink" over the top of the glass.

The grounded ice in the west Antarctic alone could raise sea levels around the world by more than 9 feet — if all of it melted, which scientists say is not a likely scenario any time soon. How much does melt depends not only on how much climate change warms the Earth, but also on local conditions around Antarctica.

Polar climate scientist Richard Alley at Penn State University says scientists don't know if there is a threshold for how much melting these ice shelves can bear before they collapse.

"It's toppling the domino," Alley says. "You don't push quite hard enough and nothing happens. You push a little harder and it falls over."


Humans' Role In Antarctic Ice Melt Is Unclear

What's causing the shrinking?

"It looks like some combination of slightly warmer water," Alley says, "but more so it is winds changing in ways that bring warmer water to the ice sheet." The warmer water, he says, undercuts the floating ice shelves from below.

No one thinks an Antarctic Armageddon is imminent. But things can happen quickly. In 2002, after years of thinning, an Antarctic shelf called Larsen B did collapse in just three weeks. It was the size of Rhode Island.

[Captain Kong]

The oceans of the world cover 361,000,000,000,000 square metres SO if sea levels rise by 3 metres that is 1,083,000,000,000,000 cubic metres of water.
That is a lot of water to come from ice.

I hope I have done my maths right. Not into metric,
Cheers
Brian

[happy daze john in oz]

Interesting facts there, but last year a NZ expedition said the ice on one side of the pole is thicker and wider then ever recorded, so who do you believe. When water freezes it expands s wen it melts it should take up less space not more. But we have one of 'them' here in Oz who claims that I the ice shelf melts the sea round Oz will rise by three meters, but according to him only around Oz????????????????

[Captain Kong]

When I was in the Antarctic in 2009, I was talking to a man from BAS, British Antarctic Survey, he told me the Antarctic was getting colder and more Ice freezing.
When an Iceberg melts there is no more water increase,
You can try this at Home, Get a large jar with a block of ice in it like a `berg` and mark the water level, then when the `berg` has melted the same amount of water on the level you marked is still the same.
So I don't know where this 1,083,000,000,000,000 cubic metres of water is coming from.
You cannot change the amount of water on the planet, There is the same amount today as there was thousand millions of years ago.
Water can be turned to steam, rain, snow or ice but it is still the same amount when condensed, you cannot get rid of water and it will not increase.
They recon that islands in the Pacific are suffering higher sea levels. Then discovered that the islands that were once volcanos that came up from the ocean bed, and over the millennia the weight of the mountains pressing down the islands were actually sinking back into the ocean bed rather than the water levels increasing.
The Motus such as Tuomotu was once a big volcano, it is now a ring of atolls that are just the tops of what was mountains, It has gone back from whence it came , into the sea bed.
Cheers
Brian

[j.sabourn]

Lou do you put ice in with your gin and tonic ? If you do will you let us know how far the level of the liquid in your glass rises when the ice melts. You might not think it at the time if you try that experiment after a few G and Ts . But most sane people will tell you the level will not rise at all. Who do some of these Whako"s think they are kidding. Basic science should tell them this is false and no need to buy thigh seaboots. Melting ice will make absolutely no difference to sea levels, that is ice that is already floating as they prefer not to tell you. Ice off the land will add to the amount and height of the sea, but would have to be a helluva a lot of land ice. A good mathematician could probably work it out say the land ice the size of Asia and the depth of melting ice and see some proper figures to back up their arguments, then we might go out and buy a pair of wellies. Cheers how is the G and ts these days anyhow. Regards JS PS Didn't see Brian had already put something similar until had posted this. Cheers Brian.... JS

[Rodney Mills]

The latest update to the glacier melting and fires in Alaska and its effect on global warming.

Many years ago people scoffed at the idea that cigarettes caused cancer and then, low and behold, it became proof positive that there is a link between cigarettes and cancer, but many smokers continued to smoke...until the doctor pronounced those terrible words, "You have lung cancer." I wonder how many of them wished they had listened to the 'canary down the coal mines?'





Global warming carving changes into Alaska in fire and ice

Aug 30, 11:04 AM (ET)

By SETH BORENSTEIN and DAN JOLING


(AP) In this June 16, 2015 file photo, two Nikiski Fire Department firefighters...
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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Global warming is carving measurable changes into Alaska, and President Barack Obama is about to see it.

Obama leaves Monday for a three-day visit to the 49th state in which he will speak at a State Department climate change conference and become the first president to visit the Alaska Arctic. There, and in the sub-Arctic part of the state, he will see the damage caused by warming — damage that has been evident to scientists for years.

More than 3.5 trillion tons of water have melted off of Alaska's glaciers since 1959, when Alaska first became a state, studies show — enough to fill more than 1 billion Olympic-sized pools.

The crucial, coast-hugging sea ice that protects villages from storms and makes hunting easier is dwindling in summer and is now absent each year a month longer than it was in the 1970s, other studies find. The Army Corps of Engineers identified 26 villages where erosion linked to sea ice loss threatens the communities' very existence.


(AP) In this Aug. 4, 2012 file photo, tourists walk to Exit Glacier in Kenai...
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Permafrost is thawing more often as the ground warms, so as the ground oozes, roads, pipelines and houses' foundations tilt and shift — sometimes enough to cause homes to be abandoned. In far northern Barrow, the upper part of the ground is 7 degrees warmer than it was in the late 1950s and getting closer to the melt point in the summer, data shows. And scientists fear the thawing permafrost will unleash large amounts of trapped greenhouse gases and speed up worldwide warming.

So far this year, more than 5.1 million acres in Alaska — an area the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined — have burned in wildfires. In the first 10 years of statehood, Alaska averaged barely a quarter million acres of wildfires yearly. The last 10 years have averaged 1.2 million acres.

"The state is changing and changing rapidly," said Fran Ulmer, chairwoman of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission and Alaska's former lieutenant governor.

And scientists say those things are happening — at least partly and probably mostly — because of another thing they can measure: Alaska's temperature. Alaska's yearly average temperature has jumped 3.3 degrees since 1959 and the winter average has spiked 5 degrees since statehood, according to federal records. Last year was the hottest on record and so far this year Alaska is a full degree warmer than last year.

Alaska "is sort of a bell weather," said John Walsh, chief scientist of the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. "The changes are definitely happening and we're out in front of the rest of the country."


(AP) In this June 17, 2015 file photo provided by the Alaska Army National Guard,...
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And what happens in Alaska isn't staying in Alaska, because weather changes in the Arctic trigger changes in the jet stream and reverberate down south, including the dreaded polar vortex escape that has brought sub-freezing temperatures to great expanses of North American in recent winters, said Martin Jeffries, an Arctic scientist for the U.S. Office of Naval Research.

Warming's effects seem to be speeding up. From 1959 to 1993, Alaska's glaciers lost 57 billion tons of ice a year, but that jumped to almost 83 billion tons a year since 1994, according to Anthony Arendt, who co-authored a study on the subject this July.

And while there may be many factors involved in glacier melt, all but about five of Alaska's 25,000 glaciers are shrinking, said University of Alaska Fairbanks glacier expert Regine Hock. She's adamant: "That's related to climate change."

On the ocean, sea ice in the Arctic in the summer has shrunk by about one-third over three decades, leading to a loss of habitat for walrus and a threatened species listing for polar bears and their main prey, ringed seals. But in Alaska, what really hits hard is the loss of sea ice that's connected to the coast. That's the ice that protects villages from the worst of storms and allows both people and animals to hunt more at sea. But that type of ice is disappearing two weeks earlier in the summer and returns two weeks later when compared to the 1970s, geophysicist Andy Mahoney at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Meanwhile, Alaska's wildfires are "more frequent, they're hotter and they're more severe," said Glenn Juday, a professor emeritus of forest ecology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.


(AP) In this Sunday, June 7, 2015 file photo provided by the Alaska Division of...
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Rapid and sustained warming has led to new patterns of insect outbreaks and new pest species affecting trees, he said. One of the chief problems is the spruce bark beetle, which thrive under warmer conditions. By 2006, aerial surveys had found spruce bark beetles had killed mature white spruce trees on 4.4 million acres following mild winters and hot summers. The acreage has increased since then, though not dramatically.

Wildlife has changed, too. George Divoky and others have been tracking how early the black guillemot bird lays its first egg on far north Cooper Islands. In the 1970s they used to lay their eggs around June 25. The last five years, the average has been June 15 and this year it was June 8.

The U.S. Geological Survey has found a host of other animals changing their habits with warmer weather, including pink salmon, trumpeter swans, and caribou. It's a problem because sometimes the plants and animals don't quite match up — caribou, for example, born before the plants they eat, according to the USGS.

The record warmth this spring has "turned the state into a melting pot, almost literally," said Jake Weltzin, who runs the USGS program tracking changes in plant and animal timing. "It's an enormous experiment."

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Borenstein reported from Washington.

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Online:

Study on melting Alaska glaciers: Alaska glaciers make large contributions to global sea level rise

Study on wildland fires in Alaska: http://bit.ly/1LDVxNv

U.S. Geological Survey on timing changes of animals, plants: http://bit.ly/1ElpAH7

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Seth Borenstein can be followed at seth borenstein (@borenbears) on Twitter


Rodney, just listening to the canary chirping.

[Rodney Mills]

...And then there's CO2 emissions....Chirp, chirp.


BBC news service.


Scientists have warned that marine life will be irreversibly changed unless CO2 emissions are drastically cut.

Writing in Science, experts say the oceans are heating, losing oxygen and becoming more acidic because of CO2.

They warn that the 2C maximum temperature rise for climate change agreed by governments will not prevent dramatic impacts on ocean systems.

And they say the range of options is dwindling as the cost of those options is skyrocketing.

Twenty-two world-leading marine scientists have collaborated in the synthesis report in a special section of Science journal. They say the oceans are at parlous risk from the combination of threats related to CO2.




They believe politicians trying to solve climate change have paid far too little attention to the impacts of climate change on the oceans.

It is clear, they say, that CO2 from burning fossil fuels is changing the chemistry of the seas faster than at any time since a cataclysmic natural event known as the Great Dying 250 million years ago.

They warn that the ocean has absorbed nearly 30% of the carbon dioxide we have produced since 1750 and, as CO2 is a mildly acidic gas, it is making seawater more acidic.

It has also buffered climate change by absorbing over 90% of the additional heat created by industrial society since 1970. The extra heat makes it harder for the ocean to hold oxygen.

'Radical change'

Several recent experiments suggest that many organisms can withstand the future warming that CO2 is expected to bring, or the decrease in pH, or lower oxygen… but not all at once.

Jean-Pierre Gattuso, lead author of the study, said: “The ocean has been minimally considered at previous climate negotiations. Our study provides compelling arguments for a radical change at the UN conference (in Paris) on climate change”.

They warn that the carbon we emit today may change the earth system irreversibly for many generations to come.

Carol Turley, of Plymouth Marine Laboratory, a co-author, said: “The ocean is at the frontline of climate change with its physics and chemistry being altered at an unprecedented rate so much so that ecosystems and organisms are already changing and will continue to do so as we emit more CO2.

“The ocean provides us with food, energy, minerals, drugs and half the oxygen in the atmosphere, and it regulates our climate and weather.

“We are asking policy makers to recognise the potential consequences of these dramatic changes and raise the profile of the ocean in international talks where, up to now, it has barely got a mention.”

The scientists say ocean acidification is likely to impact reproduction, larval survival and feeding, and growth rates of marine organisms - especially those with calcium carbonate shells or skeletons.

Dangerous path

The authors say when the multiple stressors work together they occasionally cancel each other out, but more often they multiply negative effects.

The experts say coastal protection, fisheries, aquaculture and human health and tourism will all be affected by the changes.

They warn: “Immediate and substantial reduction of CO2 emissions is required in order to prevent the massive and effectively irreversible impacts on ocean ecosystems and their services”.

Professor Manuel Barange, director of science at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, said: “Climate change will continue to affect ocean ecosystems in very significant ways, and society needs to take notice and respond.

“Some ecosystems and their services will benefit from climate change, especially in the short term, but overall the impacts are predominately negative.

“Negative impacts are particularly expected in tropical and developing regions, thus potentially increasing existing challenges in terms of food and livelihood security.

"We are allowing ourselves to travel a uniquely dangerous path, and we are doing so without an appreciation for the consequences that lie ahead."



I would be grateful if you would post YOUR copies of scientific denials to this post for all to review. I certainly hope all these scientists and environmental experts are wrong. I think in light of all the evidence re. smoking and lung cancer I wouldn't take that first puff.