An unGRACEful finding

According to some Warmist scientists using the GRACE satellite experiment, the earth's glaciers have been melting at a great rate and pouring a torrent of water into the ocean. See below. So how come sea levels have been falling in recent years? How come lots of other data show Antarctica to be getting cooler, if anything? One has to ask: Could there be something wrong with the GRACE data or its interpretation?

John Wahr (author below) knows of one possibility: The earth moves. He said so in a 2007 paper titled: "Elastic uplift in southeast Greenland due to rapid ice mass loss". So what GRACE is detecting could be at least in part earth movements rather than changes in the ice on top of it.

But the man is clearly dishonest. Look at the last sentence below. He admits that very cold ice won't melt in response to recent small changes in atmospheric temperatures. But how cold are Greenland and the Antarctic? Are they very cold too? They sure are -- averaging around minus 30 degree Celsius for Greenland and minus 40 degrees for Antartica. So on his own admission they COULD NOT be melting. There is something fishy with either the GRACE data or his interpretation of it.

Earth’s glaciers and ice caps outside of the regions of Greenland and Antarctica are shedding about 150 billion tons of ice annually, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder.

The total mass ice loss from Greenland, Antarctica and all Earth’s glaciers and ice caps between 2003 to 2010 was 1,000 cubic miles, about eight times the water volume of Lake Erie.

“The total amount of ice lost to Earth’s oceans from 2003 to 2010 would cover the entire United States in about 1 and one-half feet of water,” said CU-Boulder physics Professor John Wahr, who helped lead the study.

The research effort is the first comprehensive satellite study of the contribution of the world’s melting glaciers and ice caps to global sea level rise. The results indicate all the melted ice is raising sea levels by about 0.4 millimeters annually, said

The measurements are important because the melting of the world’s glaciers and ice caps, along with Greenland and Antarctica, pose the greatest threat to sea level increases in the future, Wahr said.

The researchers used satellite measurements from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) to calculate that the world’s glaciers and ice caps lost about 148 billion tons, or about 39 cubic miles of ice annually from 2003 to 2010. The total does not count the mass from individual glacier and ice caps on the fringes of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which could add up to an additional 80 billion tons.

“This is the first time anyone has looked at all of the mass loss from all of Earth’s glaciers and ice caps with GRACE,” said Wahr. “The Earth is losing an incredible amount of ice to the oceans annually, and these new results will help us answer important questions in terms of both sea rise and how the planet’s cold regions are responding to global change.”

One unexpected study result from GRACE was that the estimated ice loss from high Asia mountains — including ranges like the Himalaya, the Pamir and the Tien Shan — was only about 4 billion tons of ice annually. Some previous ground-based estimates of ice loss in the high Asia mountains have ranged up to 50 billion tons annually, Wahr said.

“The GRACE results in this region really were a surprise,” said Wahr. “One possible explanation is that previous estimates were based on measurements taken primarily from some of the lower, more accessible glaciers in Asia and were extrapolated to infer the behavior of higher glaciers. But unlike the lower glaciers, many of the high glaciers would still be too cold to lose mass even in the presence of atmospheric warming.”

More HERE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).