Thursday, November 05, 2015


"Wired" is still holding fast to the Warmist faith

Zwally (who is a Warmist but apparently an honest one) has stirred up a hornet's nest with his latest paper on Antarctic ice. Warmists are coming out of the woodwork all over to cry that ice gain in Antarctica does not mean the end of their hoped-for catastrophe.  The article below from "Wired" seems typical so I thought I might insert some comments into it.

PERHAPS YOU’VE HEARD about the death of climate change. “Antarctica is actually gaining ice,” says NASA. “Is global warming over?” asks one headline writer. Not quite, goes the inevitable hedge.

Well…yes. But no. Climate change is depressingly robust. The new study—published October 30 in the Journal of Glaciology—offers no evidence that the planet’s temperature has returned to pre-1860s levels

[Why should it?  There was some slight warming during C20 which stopped around the beginning of C21 but whether that warming will return is the question and nobody knows the answer to that]

Atmospheric carbon dioxide has not dropped below 250 parts per million

[So what? CO2 levels and temperature have been uncorrelated for a long time now].

Sea levels have not receded

[But their rate of growth has not increased, which global warming theory predicts.  Sea levels were increasing long before the alleged anthropogenic global warming].

What has happened is that some parts of Antarctica are (maybe) freezing faster than other parts are melting.

About which, hooray! If the study is correct in its assessment of Antarctica’s freeze, that is. Some climate scientists say the study itself might be flawed.

Antarctica is losing ice, mostly from its western ice sheets

[You'd warm up if you had a volcano under you too].

This new study says that accumulation in the continent’s interior is offsetting that progressive sloughing, for a net gain of about 100 billion tons of ice per year (though it has been slowing in recent years). “The other point is that the gain of ice is taking out about a quarter of a millimeter per year from sea level rise,” says Jay Zwally, chief cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and lead author of the study.

That’s fine, but it doesn’t mean the climate isn’t changing. Zwally himself points out that if Antarctica is gaining more ice, then somewhere else in the world is melting faster—because scientists have pretty good data showing that sea levels have been rising at a rate of about three millimeters a year for the past 100 years.

[There is a lot of dispute about that.  Sea level expert Nils-Axel Mörner points out that the raw satellite data shows barely any rise] ....

Right or wrong, Zwally’s study says little about climate change as a whole.

[Are you sure?  Antarctica contains 91% of the earth's glacial mass. What happens in Antarctica governs the whole

In fact, equating Antarctic ice gain to the death of global warming is about as accurate as saying that racism in America ended the day Barack Obama took office.

SOURCE  

There's another, much longer and more deeply aggrieved article on the Zwally study here.  To give you the flavor of it, I reproduce an early sentence from it:  "The study stated that ice losses in West Antarctica have been outweighed by East Antarctica's ice increases, but that this trend may reverse itself in only a few decades.".  Just faith-based prophecy as usual.

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

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