[This message has been edited by rinselberg (edited 04-17-2016).]

[This message has been edited by avengador1 (edited 04-17-2016).]

I hope that jmclemore looks in here soon and checks out the "tutorial" that I posted (my last post, just before this one). Aside from whether man-made global warming is "true" or "false", I am interested in what the "non-scientist community" (that includes me) thinks of the style and clarity of this long page about the Greenhouse Effect. Did this page from UCAR (University Corporation for Atmospheric Research) explain anything about the Greenhouse Effect in a way that wasn't already familiar to "you"..? IMADTK; Inquiring Minds Are Dying To Know.


Pennock's correspondent avengador1 just posted something about Antarctica, which I will respond to in a moment, but first, an update about the Arctic from one of the NOAA's web pages, called "Arctic Report Card: Update for 2015". These are my words; I am just paraphrasing some of the text on this NOAA webpage:

quote During 2015, the Arctic ocean areas covered by ice (sea ice) "maxed out" on February 25. The areas covered by sea ice at this yearly winter maximum were the lowest in the nearly 40-year history of satellite observations, which goes back as far as 1979. Melting occurred over more than 50% of the Greenland Ice Sheet for the first time since the also exceptional melting of 2012, and glaciers terminating in the ocean showed an increase in ice velocity and decrease in area; i.e., the glaciers in Greenland are melting more rapidly.

As the Arctic sea ice disappears, it does not contribute directly to global sea level rise; i.e., "What happens when an ice cube suspended in a glass of water melts...". But this is an indicator of a warming climate trend in the Arctic. Greenland ice is land ice, and it contributes directly to rising sea levels as it disappears. The Greenland Ice Sheet is second only to Antarctica, in terms of where most of the land ice is located around the world.

There's a four-minute video presentation on this Arctic Report Card 2015 web page; also on YouTube.
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/


As far as the new post about the Antarctic--from avengador1--the blog that it references is ludicrous. It starts with the traditional and highly ceremonial "Lib-hater" bloviations about Al Gore, which is a name that's never been referenced in any peer-reviewed scientific journal that I ever saw. As for myself, I am not a quote scientist unquote, but I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express and while I was there, I browsed some of the peer-reviewed science journals like Nature that offer free Internet access, which is not uncommon these days.

After the obligatory reference to Al Gore, the blog from Right Wing News (following the link posted by avengador1) segues to some grade school level calling out of "Libs", which is deliciously ironic, considering that some of the Pennock's members that are the most dogmatic and prolific in ranting about "Libs" (liberals) are about as well prepared to analyze a peer-reviewed journal article on climate research in scientific terms as I am prepared to take the place of any of the players on the fields of tonight's Major League Baseball contests.

But to go to the heart of the matter, the material that was just posted by the Orlando area's Pennock's correspondent, which claims to "debunk global warming", is a deceptive spin piece. It's based on a recent study from NASA. I found my way (without any assistance from the Right Wing News blog, which didn't even bother to specifically identify the report) to a summary page about the report, also from NASA. This is from the summary page:

quote A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers. The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice. According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008.

I don't know about "your" eyeballs, but when I look at the last two sentences, I am calling it, for the purpose of some rough calculations, an ice sheet gain during recent years of about 100 billion tons per year.

Holy smokes! A HUNDRED BILLION TONS MORE ICE around the South Pole every freakin' year. That's a really big effin' deal, right? (~Penn Jillette.)



It means that during recent years, the ice sheet increased in mass every year by about 0.001 percent or a thousand times less than one percent of where it currently stands. If the Antarctic ice sheet were to continue to add mass at this same steady rate of 100 billion tons per year, it would take the next 1000 years for it to enlarge its total mass by one percent, above where it stands today; and the next 10,000 years to enlarge its total mass by 10 percent above where it stands today.

I am basing this on some easy online calculations that I made. I started with one data point, that the Antarctic ice sheet, as it stands today, is represented by a total volume of about 30 million cubic kilometers of glacial ice. Then I found some recent references online about the density of glacial ice. This is "tricky", because the density of glacial ice depends on whether it is near the surface of the glacier, or buried deep below the surface of the glacier. The deeper the ice, the more it is compressed by the weight of the ice above it, and that increases its density. But I have a density figure for glacial ice of about 1000 kilograms per cubic meter of volume.

For the sake of erring in favor of Right Wing News, I slashed that density figure, taking it down from 1000 kilograms to just 300 kilograms of glacial ice mass per cubic meter of volume. This is giving the best accommodation to the "good folks" at Right Wing News, because I am using a conservative or low-end estimate for the mass of the Antarctic ice sheet as it stands today. In this way, I am representing the recent upwards trend for the mass of the Antarctic ice sheet--as reported in the new NASA study, and which is the trend that Right Wing News has seized upon as its new "talking point" for debunking global warming--in the best possible light. Otherwise, the numerical significance of this recent upwards trend would be even smaller, proportionally, than the 0.001 percent (one thousand times less than one percent) enlargement of the ice sheet mass per year.


Now for what Right Wing News chose not to report:

quote But it might only take a few decades for Antarctica’s growth to reverse, according to [NASA lead study researcher] Zwally. “If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate they’ve been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years -- I don’t think there will be enough snowfall increase to offset these losses.”

This is how the NASA summary page ends:

quote “The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away,” Zwally said. “But this is also bad news. If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for.” “The new study highlights the difficulties of measuring the small changes in ice height happening in East Antarctica,” said Ben Smith, a glaciologist with the University of Washington in Seattle who was not involved in Zwally’s study. "Doing altimetry accurately for very large areas is extraordinarily difficult, and there are measurements of snow accumulation that need to be done independently to understand what’s happening in these places,” Smith said. To help accurately measure changes in Antarctica, NASA is developing the successor to the ICESat mission, ICESat-2, which is scheduled to launch in 2018. “ICESat-2 will measure changes in the ice sheet within the thickness of a No. 2 pencil,” said Tom Neumann, a glaciologist at Goddard and deputy project scientist for ICESat-2. “It will contribute to solving the problem of Antarctica’s mass balance by providing a long-term record of elevation changes.”

http://www.nasa.gov/feature...-greater-than-losses


I found another report about Antarctica in the peer-reviewed science journal Nature that came out after that NASA study.

Contribution of Antarctica to past and future sea-level rise
Robert M. DeConto & David Pollard
Nature 531, 591–597 (31 March 2016)
http://www.nature.com/natur...ull/nature17145.html

Abstract:
Polar temperatures over the last several million years have, at times, been slightly warmer than today, yet global mean sea level has been 6–9 metres higher as recently as the Last Interglacial (130,000 to 115,000 years ago) and possibly higher during the Pliocene epoch (about three million years ago). In both cases the Antarctic ice sheet has been implicated as the primary contributor, hinting at its future vulnerability. Here we use a model coupling ice sheet and climate dynamics—including previously underappreciated processes linking atmospheric warming with hydrofracturing of buttressing ice shelves and structural collapse of marine-terminating ice cliffs—that is calibrated against Pliocene and Last Interglacial sea-level estimates and applied to future greenhouse gas emission scenarios. Antarctica has the potential to contribute more than a metre of sea-level rise by 2100 and more than 15 metres by 2500, if emissions continue unabated. In this case atmospheric warming will soon become the dominant driver of ice loss, but prolonged ocean warming will delay its recovery for thousands of years.


If anyone could intelligently put all this together, back from the point where I started here, with the Arctic Report Card 2015, and still believe that Right Wing News has actually debunked the potential for negative impacts that is comprised by the general scientific consensus on global warming, then I think it would be very reasonable to surmise that President Lincoln thoroughly enjoyed his legendary evening at Ford's Theatre.

"You make the call"


Here's what two well known but not peer-reviewed science venues have to say about the new report in Nature:

"Scientists nearly double sea level rise projections for 2100, because of Antarctica"
Washington Post; March 30, 2016
https://www.washingtonpost....2100-scientists-say/

Climate Model Predicts West Antarctic Ice Sheet Could Melt Rapidly
New York Times; March 31, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016...level-rise.html?_r=0


References for my own calculations about the significance of recent mass gains reported by NASA for the Antarctic ice sheet:

"Quick Facts on Ice Sheets" from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), which is supported by NASA, NOAA, the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies via competitive grants and contracts
https://nsidc.org/cryospher...facts/icesheets.html

"Density assumptions for converting geodetic glacier volume change to mass change"
M. Huss; Department of Geosciences, University of Fribourg, 1700 Fribourg, Switzerland
The Cryosphere; May 27, 2013
http://www.the-cryosphere.n...13/tc-7-877-2013.pdf

[This message has been edited by rinselberg (edited 04-18-2016).]