Antarctic ice shelf melt 'lowest ever recorded, global warming is not eroding it'

Antarctic ice shelf melt 'lowest EVER recorded, global warming is NOT eroding it'

Human CO2 just not a big deal at Pine Island Glacier

By Lewis Page, 3rd January 2014, The Register

Scientists at the British Antarctic Survey say that the melting of the Pine Island Glacier ice shelf in Antarctica has suddenly slowed right down in the last few years, confirming earlier research which suggested that the shelf's melt does not result from human-driven global warming.

The Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica and its associated sea ice shelf is closely watched: this is because unlike most of the sea ice around the austral continent, its melt rate has seemed to be accelerating quickly since scientists first began seriously studying it in the 1990s.

Many researchers had suggested that this was due to human-driven global warming, which appeared to be taking place rapidly at that time (though it has since gone on hold for 15 years or so, a circumstance which science is still assimilating).

However back in 2009 the British Antarctic Survey sent its Autosub robot probe under the shelf (famously powered by some 5,000 ordinary alkaline D-cell batteries on each trip beneath the ice, getting through no less than four tonnes of them during the research). The Autosub survey revealed that a previously unknown marine ridge lay below the shelf, over which the icepack had for millennia been forced to grind its way en route to the ocean. However in relatively recent times the ice had finally so ground down the ridge that the sea could flow in between shelf and ridge, freeing the ice to move much faster and warming it too.

As we reported at the time, this caused BAS boffins to suggest that the observed accelerating ice flow and melt seen since the '90s was actually a result of the ridge's erosion and sea ingress, rather than global warming.

Now, the latest BAS research has revealed that rather than accelerating, "oceanic melting of the ice shelf into which the glacier flows decreased by 50 per cent between 2010 and 2012".

The BAS goes on to explain:

Observations made in January 2012, and reported now in Science, show that ocean melting of the glacier was the lowest ever recorded. The top of the thermocline (the layer separating cold surface water and warm deep waters) was found to be about 250 metres deeper compared with any other year for which measurements exist.

This lowered thermocline reduces the amount of heat flowing over the ridge. High resolution simulations of the ocean circulation in the ice shelf cavity demonstrate that the ridge blocks the deepest ocean waters from reaching the thickest ice ... 

In January 2012 the dramatic cooling of the ocean around the glacier is believed to be due to an increase in easterly winds caused by a strong La Ninã event in the tropical Pacific Ocean.

Dr Pierre Dutrieux of the BAS adds, bluntly:

"We found ocean melting of the glacier was the lowest ever recorded, and less than half of that observed in 2010. This enormous, and unexpected, variability contradicts the widespread view that a simple and steady ocean warming in the region is eroding the West Antarctic Ice Sheet."

The Science paper can be read by subscribers to the journal here. The BAS announcement of the results can be read here. Readers unfamiliar with the rules of the climate game should note that the term "climate variability" as used in those documents means for this purpose "climate effects not caused by humans".

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The Alps defy global warming - but no one wants to hear it!

Meteorologist Dominik Young writing at the German Huffington Post site:

• "The data shows winter in the Alps has become clearly colder in the last decades. We have examined an extra-long time series of 20 to 30 years, just as is always demanded by the climatologists." 


• "This begs the question: If we know these results, will they just not listen because they do not fit into the current world view of climate change or global warming? The climate experts 20 years ago preached that there would be no more future winters with ice and snow in Central Europe. In addition, they said winter sports would be possible only in the highest regions of the Alps, as the temperatures would continue to rise. But none of this has been the case"


• "To me it seems as if the issue of climate change or global warming has now become a kind of religion. Those who belong tolerate no other findings when they are based on even the facts such as these measured temperature values. It borders almost on a scandal that competent professionals just seem to ignore these findings."


• "Conclusion: For mild winters, we are obviously far away in the Alps. The trend is moving in exactly the opposite direction!"

Google translation + light editing from the German Huffington Post site:




Dominik Young Meteorologist at wetter.net

The Alps defy global warming - but no one wants to hear it!

Published: 21/11/2013 

Subjectively, there were the inhabitants of the Austrian ski resort of Kitzbühel in recent years so ago, when the winter would be colder. In order to gain an objective picture of the situation, we went out and ordered at the Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics (ZAMG), the state weather service in Austria, the appropriate weather data for the last 20 years. In assessing the data and results I was of MMag. Günther Aigner, Marketer at Kitzbühel Tourismus, provided technical support.

The evaluation has amazing result:

According to a peer review for my part I am very surprised. The winters there in the last 20 years have proven colder, and sometimes quite massively. The last two winters in Kitzbühel were even the coldest of the past 20 years.

In order to make further investigations were requested and evaluated by a further four alpine mountain weather:

· Germany Zugspitze (2,962 m)

· Schmittenhoehe Austria (1,972 m)

· Sonnblick Austria (3,105 m)

· Santis Switzerland (2,502 m)

They all came to the same amazing result:

The data shows winter in the Alps has become clearly colder in the last decades. We have examined an extra-long time series of 20 to 30 years, just as is always demanded by the climatologists.
They even questioned the meteorological professionals on site according to their opinions on the results. However, this had little success. In some cases it was even surprised by these results, in part, attempts the results were put into perspective.

This begs the question: If we know these results, will they just not listen because they do not fit into the current world view of climate change or global warming? The climate experts 20 years ago preached that there would be no more future winters with ice and snow in Central Europe. In addition, winter sports would be possible in the coming decades only in the highest regions of the Alps, as the temperatures would continue to rise. But none of this has been the case, as this observational data from official monitoring networks of the German Weather Service (Zugspitze), the ZAMG (Kitzbühel, Sundays views and Schmitt height) and the MeteoSwiss prove (Santis) impressive.

To me it seems as if the issue of climate change or global warming has now become a kind of religion. Those who belong tolerate no other findings when they are based on even the facts such as those measured temperature values. It borders almost on a scandal that competent professionals just seem to ignore these findings. 

Conclusion:

For mild winters, we are obviously far away in the Alps. The trend is moving in exactly the opposite direction! Climatologists had advised a few years ago the winter sports resorts of the Alps to their investment in terms of winter sports back down-that would not be worth it due to the rising average temperatures soon.

It makes you wonder: what rising temperatures meant the men and women merely?

Dominik Jung on Twitter: www.twitter.com / weather expert

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WSJ: 'We long for the days when the weather wasn't politicized'

It Isn't Climate Change
We long for the days when the weather wasn't politicized.

WSJ.COM 2/2/13: In case our California and Miami readers haven't heard, it's cold across most of North America. Very cold. Thursday's high in Minneapolis soared to 3 degrees Fahrenheit, which was toasty compared to minus-4 degrees in Winnipeg. The cold snap is spread across the Continent and includes a major snowstorm in the Northeast, which as usual is freaking out in ways that would make residents of the Twin Cities shake their heads.

Our favorite headline of the week was the CBC report that "Winnipeg deep freeze as cold as uninhabited planet." The Manitoba Museum, a connoisseur of such things, is reporting that on Tuesday Mars had reached a maximum temperature of minus-29 Celsius (minus-20 Fahrenheit), which Winnipeg didn't reach until 3 p.m. that day. The Mars temperature comes courtesy of the Curiosity Rover.

This being 2014, when everything devolves to politics, any spell of cold or heat inevitably leads to explanations of climate change. The conservative websites are having a good time pointing to the cold temps as a repudiation of global-warming models, while the global-warming crowd says even the cold is proof of . . . climate change. You see, it's all about climate extremes. That's why the liberals no longer refer to "global warming."

Normal human beings who prefer not to politicize the weather report understand that climate change has nothing to do with what is . . . winter. The average temperature in Winnipeg in December was close to minus-6 degrees Fahrenheit, which makes it only the fifth or sixth coldest on record. CBC says as recently as the year 2000, the Manitoba capital averaged minus-7.6 degrees in December.

For our part we're looking forward to the weekend NFL playoff games, especially the one in frigid Green Bay (Sunday forecast: minus-3). We long even more for the day when we can gripe about the weather without having to think about Al Gore.

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New research shows Greenland is melting naturally from below & in no danger of slipping into ocean

Sea level rise from Greenland and Antarctica is natural and primarily due to geothermal heat from below. Surface temperatures on Greenland and Antarctica rarely rise above zero °C and thus, surface melting is relatively insignificant in comparison to the volcanic/geothermal heat from below both continents. 

Greenland surprises

by Jonathan DuHamel on Jan. 02, 2014


Ice-penetrating radar and drilling have led to some surprises in Greenland during the last few years. The continent is bowl-shaped, it has a massive canyon running down its middle, and it contains a large aquifer of liquid water beneath the ice.

NASA’s ice-penetrating radar is interpreted to show that the bedrock of the island is bowl-shaped as shown in the image below. That means that the continental ice sheet is in no danger of slipping into to ocean as some have proposed.


The radar imaging shows a large canyon running down the center of the island (see story from LiveScience.) The canyon starts in the middle of the island and heads northwest to the Petermann Glacier on the coast. The canyon is about 460 miles long, six miles wide, and up to 2,600 feet deep. This canyon must have been carved before the ice sheet formed 1.8 million years ago.

More recently, a giant aquifer of liquid water has been identified below the ice sheet (see story here). This discovery is based upon both NASA’s Operation Icebridge radar data and upon drilling. Researchers estimate that the aquifer covers about 27,000 square miles. The aquifer is apparently fed by meltwater that percolates from the surface during the summer. Researchers speculate that the thick ice and snow cover insulates it and keeps the aquifer from freezing.

But there is another possibility for why the water is not frozen. As I reported back in August, the Helmholtz Centre Potsdam, GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, claims that “The Greenland ice sheet is melting from below, caused by a high heat flow from the mantle into the lithosphere.” “The Greenland lithosphere is 2.8 to 1.7 billion years old and is only about 70 to 80 kilometers thick under Central Greenland.”

Even though the continental ice sheet is confined by topography, there will still be calving from outlet glaciers in fjords along the coast. During the 2000s, there was much media hype about faster than normal calving of these glaciers, but research shows that the rate was similar to that in the 1930s and due to the North Atlantic Oscillation [source]. The photo below, which I took when flying over Greenland in June, 2012, shows a typical coastal glacier.




Geologic evidence suggests that the Greenland ice sheet was at its smallest extent of the last 10,000 years from 3,000- to 5,000 years ago. It was also less extensive about 1,100 years ago when the Vikings colonized western Greenland during the Medieval Warm Period. They were driven out by the subsequent cooling of the “Little Ice Age.”

See also:

The Arctic-Antarctic seesaw

The great Arctic methane scare, again

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5 million Scottish trees felled for wind farms, not replanted

Wind turbines do not reduce CO2 emissions because of the backup by fossil fueled generators required for this intermittent and unreliable power source. In addition, millions of trees have been cut down and not replaced, thus resulting in wind farms acting as net generators of CO2 greater than fossil fuels alone. 

5 million Scottish trees felled for wind farms

Wind turbines remain a source of controversy

by ILONA AMOS

Published on the 02 January 2014

ONLY a fraction of Scottish forests felled to make way for wind farms have been replanted, figures show, sparking calls for a ban on new developments.

Forestry Commission statistics reveal that about five million trees – almost one for every person in Scotland – have been cut down to clear space for turbines in the past six years but less than a third of them have been replaced.

Of the 2,510 hectares stripped of woodland to make way for turbines since 2007, just 792 hectares were reforested after construction was completed.

The Scottish Conservatives, who obtained the figures through a Freedom of Information request, claimed the figures are evidence that the Scottish Government is “destroying nature” in a bid to meet its own climate targets, which aim for all the country’s electricity to come from renewable sources by 2020.

MSP Murdo Fraser, energy spokesman for the party, said: “The SNP is so blindly obsessed with renewable energy that it doesn’t mind destroying another important environmental attribute to make way for it.

“It’s quite astonishing to see almost as many trees have been destroyed as there are people in Scotland.”

The government has hit back at the claims, saying the figures do not represent the full picture.

Environment and climate change minister Paul Wheelhouse said: “We have replanted nearly 800 hectares and have restored significant areas of important open habitat where this is best for the environment. The result is that, of the area felled for wind farms, only 315 hectares of land suitable for another rotation of trees has not been replanted.”

He also pointed out that 31,400 hectares of new forestry was planted around the country in the same six-year period. “That’s a staggering 62 million trees in the ground across Scotland,” he said.

“Scotland is also shouldering the vast majority of tree-planting in Britain, with nearly two and a half times more in Scotland compared to south of the Border.”

Mr Fraser, who has previously voiced his opposition to wind farms, is calling for a year-long moratorium on planning applications for new developments.

The regional MSP for Mid-Scotland and Fife said: “The contribution of trees to our environment has been well established through the ages.

“I’m still waiting to see compelling evidence of the contribution wind farms make. They are an expensive, intermittent and unreliable alternative, and not one that it’s worth making this level of sacrifice to ­accommodate.

“If the Scottish Government cooled its ludicrous renewable energy targets, we wouldn’t see this kind of wanton destruction and intrusion on our landscape.”

Mr Wheelhouse defended Scotland’s planning rules, which he said require developers to plant new trees to replace any cut down to make way for wind farms.

He added: “It was the Scottish Government that took a proactive role in protecting Scotland’s forests and woodlands. In 2009, we tightened up the guidance around felling from wind farm developments.

“A key component is to keep any felling to a minimum and compensatory planting undertaken where suitable. Every energy company building wind farms has to comply with this policy. All renewable developments are subject to environmental scrutiny through the planning process and this manages any impacts on the natural environment, landscape and ­communities.”

Related:

Global Warming Solved: All we need is 14,600 additional nuclear power plants or 146,000,000 wind turbines

EU plans to waste $7 trillion on climate policies that will make no noticeable difference

WSJ Op-Ed: We have to kill eagles with wind turbines in order to save them

New report shows wind power doesn't reduce CO2 emissions

New study finds wind farms last only 50% of claimed lifetime

Optimistic long-term projections show renewable energy will be 3 times more expensive than fossil fuels

Inconvenient truth: Fracking has cut CO2 emissions 4 times faster than Obama's failed cap & trade legislation

The Renewable Energy Reality Check

The green dream is not compatible with billions of the poor in search of higher living standards

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California Energy Commission says no to desert solar plant that could kill birds

Finally, a bit of environmental sanity from California:

California Energy Commission says no to desert solar plant that could kill birds

Do

Judith Lewis Mernit | Dec 24, 2013 05:00 AM

It came as a shock last spring, at least to me, when BrightSource Energy decided to suspend its Hidden Hills Solar project near Pahrump, Nev. For starters, I had a story going to press whose conclusions were somewhat tied to the looming specter of Hidden Hills, a large concentrating solar “power tower” project which would have occupied five square miles of the Mojave Desert just north of Death Valley National Park. Plus, I’d always had the impression that the Oakland, Calif.-based BrightSource subscribed to Winston Churchill’s apocryphal dictum for success: “Never, never, never give up.” But while the company's ambitions have weathered controversies over funding, cultural artifacts and desert tortoise, it appears they have finally met their match: Birds that die in the specific kind of facility BrightSource specializes in. And not simply by colliding with towers or mistaking shiny solar panels for water. They die by burning.

The problem figured prominently in public hearings over Hidden Hills, where researchers with the California Energy Commission described the bird-death problem in detail. That wasn't what derailed Hidden Hills, then-BrightSource spokesman Keely Wachs reassured the media; instead, the company just wanted to focus on a different project: A collaboration with Spanish developer Abengoa on a project in Riverside County, Calif., close to Southern California’s border with Arizona, called the Palen Electric Generating Station. Another developer, Solar Millennium, had won approval in 2009 to build a solar plant at the Riverside site, using parabolic solar trough technology — no towers, just long tubes of mirrors that heat water in tubes. After Solar Millennium went bankrupt, BrightSource and Abengoa took over, figuring that building Palen using BrightSource technology would only require an amendment to the prior application, allowing for the change to a new technology. 

A bird that died at Ivanpah solar plant in California. Courtesy California Energy Commission / BrightSource.

The changeover proved more difficult than predicted. Fearing that the Palen project would “very likely result in significant and unmitigable impacts to biological resources,” the California Energy Commission issued a decision to deny the amendment to the application December 13. The commission was particularly concerned with potential injuries to birds who might fly through the field of solar flux, the intense heat and energy field that forms around the particular kind of plant BrightSource builds, in which fields of supplicant mirrors reflect sunlight up to a 500-foot tower. The sun's concentrated radiant energy  zaps birds in mid-air — while they're migrating, feeding, or just flying around.

The theoretical safe level of solar flux for birds is one minute of exposure at 5 kilowatts per square meter. In the skies above the Ivanpah Solar plant the Mojave on the California-Nevada border, solar flux near the tower is a hundred times higher than that. The facility has not gone into full operation — it's 99 percent complete and only partially online — and already dozens of birds have been found dead just in the the last few months. Some of the dead and injured are not species common to the Mojave; they may have been seduced by the illusion of water the mirrors present from the sky, and drawn into a death trap during migration.

The list of affected species and the details of their potential deaths is long and grisly in the energy commission report. Swallows and swifts are at risk because they migrate during the day; flycatchers because they feed during flight; hummingbirds because they’re so little. Raptors, turkey vultures, doves, owls, house finches, thrashers, eagles and hawks are all mentioned as birds that could die from long periods of contact with “high-intensity solar flux,” while shorter exposures could “cause tissue or feather damage that could impair flight or vision.” This latter impact has been known at least since 1986, when a research team led by California orinthologist Michael McCrary published a paper in the Journal of Orinthology called, “Avian Mortality at a Solar Energy Power Plant.” McCrary found that a small number of birds from seven species died by burning in the solar fields of a relatively small plant near Daggett, Calif., but concluded that many more die in collisions.

The energy commission decision, however, suggests that McCrary may have underestimated the problem. Birds that die in collisions with equipment may have been already blinded or disoriented by flux; some birds might “continue flying for a few seconds or minutes, perhaps long enough to escape the hazard, but will be unable to fly effectively, find food, or escape predators and will die a short time after the exposure or persist for longer periods but with reduced reproductive success.” 

Image from the 1986 report, 'Avian Mortality at Solar Energy Plant' by Michael McClary.

And some birds that migrate in crowds, like the Vaux’s swift, could “potentially suffer catastrophic, single-incident adverse consequences” if a large flight of migrating birds flies into the flux field.

Birds die in other ways at solar plants, and at large electrical facilities of all kinds. They collide with towers; they get electrocuted on transmission lines. But those hazards have solutions. Collisions can be greatly reduced with strobe and blinking red lights, and the Edison Electric Institute in 2006 published a wholereport, “Suggested Practices for Avian Protection on Power Lines,” on reducing bird death by electrocution. By contrast, there seems to be no way to guard against death by flux. Indeed, says the energy commission report, “substantial evidence in the record leads us to the conclusions that avian mortality at the (Palen) project is a virtual certainty.” Hence, “we do not find that the project benefits outweigh the significant impacts that could result from the potential avian morbidity and mortality at the facility.”

There’s no official word yet from BrightSource on the fate of the project. Keely Wachs left in September to work for Clif Bar, and the solar company's new spokesman has only issued a statement saying the company is reviewing the report. The California Energy Commission on Tuesday put out word that the decision isn't final, and BrightSource has asked for (and been granted) "a chance to present more scientific evidence about bird deaths and the project’s benefits."

Once again, however, it may be worth consulting Churchill. Evidently, despite the many pendants and t-shirts with the never never quote bearing his name, what the man really said, to a group of 29 schoolboys in 1941, was "Never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense." It may be just honor and good sense to spare the birds of the southwestern deserts more terror.

Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that Abengoa would provide storage at the Palen plant. While Abengoa does use storage at its Solana solar plant in Arizona, the company would only be involved in the Palen plant's construction.

Judith Lewis Mernit is a contributing editor to High Country News. She tweets @judlew.

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Cold fact: More record lows than highs in the USA in 2013

Cold fact: More record lows than highs in the USA in 2013

By Doyle Rice, @USATODAYWeather, USA TODAY
Posted 1/2/2014 12:00:03 AM

Miley Cyrus was a baby and Bill Clinton had just been inaugurated the last time this happened: For the first time in 20 years, the U.S. saw more record cold temperatures than record hot temperatures in 2013, according to statistics from the National Climatic Data Center.

You have to go back to 1993 to find the last time this took place.

"For the first year since 1993, there were more daily record lows than daily highs that were either tied or set in 2013," reported Weather Channel meteorologist Guy Walton, who keeps track of the data from the climate center.

Through Dec. 28, there were 11,852 daily record lows in 2013, compared with 10,073 daily record highs, according to Walton.

A "daily" record occurs when a specific location sets a record high or low temperature for a particular day; other types of records include monthly and all-time. Walton said that an unusually cold spring was the main factor in the "cool" 2013.

The year was a stunning turnaround from the USA's amazingly warm year of 2012, when more than 34,000 record highs were measured, compared with 6,644 record lows.

Overall, the year was likely a blip in a long-term warming trend: "The ratio of daily highs to daily lows continues to be near 3 to 1 for this decade, so far," Walton said.

Also for the decade so far, there have been 700 all-time record highs set, compared with only 74 all-time record lows.

Because the USA accounts for only about 2% of Earth's surface, what happens here is far from representative of the planet as a whole.

Through November, the most recent month for which national and global climate statistics are available, the world was having its fourth-warmest year on record, while the USA was seeing its 35th-warmest on record, the National Climatic Data Center reported. Climate records go back to the 1880s.

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