Ice has been expanding for the last seven years. But libs don't want to talk about it, because it blows their theory. Temperatures have been "fluctuating" since forever, and that is "climate change". No credible scientist "denies" climate change. Its politicians who insist on linking climate change to human activity, not scientists. Here are a few charts to consider. As you can see, temperatures peaked 7000 years ago and have been in long-term decline. Smaller temperature cycles within that decline show higher temperatures in 1300 AD and even higher temps in 1100 AD. The reality is that we are in a global "cooling" period that could take us into a little ice age similar to what we had when Washington and his troops froze at Fort Necessity; it ended around 1850.

Lets look at this from another side? It's your OPINION that you can guarentee us that we WON"T HAVE ANY BAD WEATHER, if we give you all of our money, We (only) quit eating, we (only) quit heating our homes, We (ONLY) eliminate all forms of energy and transportation! While YOU live the wasteful life of absurd consumption! YOU ask US to ignore all common sense and math, to believe that ONLY WE are causing bad weather! And if we have proof that YOU are lying, WE must be anti-science" According to YOU. WE are expected to believe ONLY YOU know the answers and are doing natures work, therefore YOU should be exempt from onerous taxes and confiscation? Guess What.....WE think YOU are liars and crooks! The old polynesians sacrificed virgins to appease the volcanos! That might be a good idea........we can sacrifice environmentalists to your great god gaia to get good weather?

Global warming may be one of the biggest hoax's of all time. And, a lot of lefties have gotten rich off it...like Al Gore for just one. You gullible leftie lemmings just eat it up even though there is NO EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE to prove global warming, instead you only have flawed computer models. The planet in fact has been cooling for the past decade, not warming. What we have is CLIMATE CHANGE caused by the sun, and it goes in cycles. We're currently in a cycle that closely resembles the weather cycle we went through in the 50s.

This global warming crap just proves how gullible and ignorant you lefties really are.

Sign's of global warming are all over the globe. in the last century and a half the earths average temperature has risen 1 degree Fahrenheit. and about twice that in the arctic
Of course that doesn't mean temperatures haven't fluctuated among regions. Keys to the past lie at the bottoms of lakes, and ocean's tree rings, Pollen ,creatures, and particle fall to the bottom in to sediments. Ice cores drilled through the polar ice sheets show tiny gas bubbles trapped in the ice tell us that the concentrations of green house gasses are the highest they have been in hundreds of thousands of years. The Heartland institute try's every thing in their power to persuade right wing idiots that global warming is a hoax but Senator Inhoff of Oklahoma who coined that phrase is beholden to the fossil fuel industry and the Koch Brothers are major funders of H.I. and the Koch's are major fossil fuel polluter's

What caused the ice age to melt is the wobble in the earths axis. It's a 24 thousand year Less sunlight fell on the northern hemisphere and the glaciers crept down from the Arctic when the wobble put more sunlight in the north the glaciers melted. At this point in the wobble the Arctic should be growing the ice sheets but they are receding each summer. There is 40 % less ice in the Arctic than there was 40 years ago and the sea which absorbs 90 % of the CO2 released into the atmosphere is warming and is responsible for the collapse of the West Antarctic ice shelf this year. The western region of the US is in severe drought as is Australia. It is becoming obvious that floods and torrential rains are occurring with drought next door.

Weird weather is a symptom of global warming. The fire season in the west has doubled in the last 25-30 years as the climate has warmed. The oceans are not going to rise suddenly It is happening slowly in human terms but very rapidly in Geologic time scales

Only a small clue for you and others, JMHO, Antarctic ice area and Antarctic ice volume are two different measurements. The floating ice is covering a greater are because it has broken into smaller peaces and spread out over a larger area.

This is a lengthy article which if you read it, which I doubt you or any of you will, explains the situation quite well.


West Antarctic Ice Sheet's Collapse Triggers Sea Level Warning
By Alan Boyle

Two teams of scientists say the long-feared collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has begun, kicking off what they say will be a centuries-long, "unstoppable" process that could raise sea levels by as much as 15 feet.

"There's been a lot of speculation about the stability of marine ice sheets, and many scientists suspected that this kind of behavior is under way," Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in a news release about one of the studies published Monday. "This study provides a more qualitative idea of the rates at which the collapse could take place."

The findings from Joughin and his colleagues, appearing in the journal Science, indicate that in some places, Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier is losing tens of feet, or several meters, of ice elevation every year.

They estimate that Thwaites Glacier would probably disappear entirely in somewhere between 200 and 1,000 years. That loss would raise global sea levels by nearly 2 feet (60 centimeters). The glacier serves as a linchpin for the rest of the West Antarctic Ice sheet, which has enough frozen mass to cause another 10 to 13 feet (3 to 4 meters) of sea level rise.

Antarctica Ice Sheet Is Disintegrating
Nightly News

A second study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, reports the widespread retreat of Thwaites and other glaciers on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet — and says the retreat can't help but continue.

"It has passed the point of no return," the research team's leader, Eric Rignot of the University of California at Irvine, told reporters during a NASA teleconference on Monday. The second study projected that the glacial retreat in Antarctica's Amundsen Sea Embayment, which includes Thwaites Glacier, would result in 4 feet (1.2 meters) of sea level rise — and open the way to more widespread retreats.

Rignot's team based their findings on a detailed analysis of radar data from two European Earth Remote Sensing satelllites, ERS-1 and ERS-2. Joughin's team relied on radar maps primarily derived from an aerial NASA survey called Operation IceBridge.

Scientists have been warning for decades that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet was in peril due to climate change, and recent readings have shown that the region is warming more quickly than expected. The loss of ice that is floating on the seas surrounding the continent would not contribute significantly to sea level rise. However, losing the ice that's currently grounded on the continent would.

A moment of 'wow'

The two studies released on Monday document the glaciers' retreat and project what's likely to happen in the future. "We finally have hit this point where we have enough observations to put this all together, to say, 'Wow, we really are in this state.'" NASA scientist Tom Wagner told reporters.

The key findings in both studies relate to what's happening to the "grounding line" for Antarctica's glaciers. That's the subsurface boundary between ice that is floating on the sea and ice that is anchored to land.

"The grounding line is buried under a thousand or more meters of ice, so it is incredibly challenging for a human observer on the ice sheet surface to figure out exactly where the transition is," Rignot explained in a NASA news release. “This analysis is best done using satellite techniques."

The radar readings from both teams show that the grounding line for some areas of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has retreated by as much as 20 miles (37 kilometers) over the past couple of decades, apparently due to the interaction with warmer seas. The main worry is that there appears to be no submerged hill or mountain that could slow down further retreat.

Rignot said that means the glacial retreat has triggered a process of "positive feedback."

"We feel that this is at the point where even if the ocean is not providing additional heat, the system is in a chain reaction that is unstoppable," he told reporters.

Joughin said computer models produce a wide range of scenarios for the collapse of Thwaites Glacier. Some scenarios suggest that the glacier could last more than a millennium longer, but the most likely scenarios predict that rapid collapse would occur somewhere between 200 and 500 years from now.

What lies ahead

Higher greenhouse-gas emissions would lead to faster ice loss, and lower emissions could slow down the meltdown. But in any case, the loss of Thwaites Glacier appears inevitable, Joughin said: "All of our simulations show it will retreat at less than a millimeter of sea level rise per year for a couple of hundred years, and then, boom, it just starts to really go."

In its most recent assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that global sea levels were likely to rise between 4 inches and 3 feet (10 to 90 centimeters) by the year 2100. Sridhar Anandakrishnan, a geoscientist at Penn State University who didn't play a role in either study, said future IPCC estimates "will almost certainly be revised, and revised upwards."

"The IPCC projections don't really include Antarctic contributions to any great measure," he told reporters. "The results are just now starting to come together."

Anandakrishnan said future middle-of-the-road estimates for 2100 may well zero in on the top end of the current IPCC projection, around 3 feet. Without mitigating measures, that amount of sea level rise would inundate significant areas of coastal cities including Miami Beach, New Orleans and New York.

David Shean / Univ. of Washington
A high-resolution radar map shows Thwaites Glacier’s thinning ice shelf. Warm circumpolar deep water is melting the underside of this floating shelf, leading to a speedup in the glacier's retreat. This glacier now appears to be in the early stages of collapse, with full collapse potentially occurring within a few centuries.

In addition to Rignot, the authors of the paper in Geophysical Research Letters, "Widespread, Rapid Grounding Line Retreat of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith and Kohler Glaciers, West Antarctica From 1992 to 2011," include Jeremie Mouginot, Mathieu Morlighem, Helene Seroussi and Bernd Scheuchl.

In addition to Joughin, the authors of the paper in Science, "Marine Ice Sheet Collapse Potentially Underway for the Thwaites Glacier Basin, West Antarctica," include Benjamin Smith and Brooke Medley.
First published May 12th 2014, 11:02 am
byline photo
Alan Boyle

Alan Boyle is the science editor for NBC News Digital. He joined MSNBC.com at its inception in July 1996,... Expand Bio

Only a small clue for you and others, JMHO, Antarctic ice area and Antarctic ice volume are two different measurements. The floating ice is covering a greater are because it has broken into smaller peaces and spread out over a larger area.

This is a lengthy article which if you read it, which I doubt you or any of you will, explains the situation quite well.


West Antarctic Ice Sheet's Collapse Triggers Sea Level Warning
By Alan Boyle

Two teams of scientists say the long-feared collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has begun, kicking off what they say will be a centuries-long, "unstoppable" process that could raise sea levels by as much as 15 feet.

"There's been a lot of speculation about the stability of marine ice sheets, and many scientists suspected that this kind of behavior is under way," Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in a news release about one of the studies published Monday. "This study provides a more qualitative idea of the rates at which the collapse could take place."

The findings from Joughin and his colleagues, appearing in the journal Science, indicate that in some places, Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier is losing tens of feet, or several meters, of ice elevation every year.

They estimate that Thwaites Glacier would probably disappear entirely in somewhere between 200 and 1,000 years. That loss would raise global sea levels by nearly 2 feet (60 centimeters). The glacier serves as a linchpin for the rest of the West Antarctic Ice sheet, which has enough frozen mass to cause another 10 to 13 feet (3 to 4 meters) of sea level rise.

Antarctica Ice Sheet Is Disintegrating
Nightly News

A second study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, reports the widespread retreat of Thwaites and other glaciers on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet — and says the retreat can't help but continue.

"It has passed the point of no return," the research team's leader, Eric Rignot of the University of California at Irvine, told reporters during a NASA teleconference on Monday. The second study projected that the glacial retreat in Antarctica's Amundsen Sea Embayment, which includes Thwaites Glacier, would result in 4 feet (1.2 meters) of sea level rise — and open the way to more widespread retreats.

Rignot's team based their findings on a detailed analysis of radar data from two European Earth Remote Sensing satelllites, ERS-1 and ERS-2. Joughin's team relied on radar maps primarily derived from an aerial NASA survey called Operation IceBridge.

Scientists have been warning for decades that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet was in peril due to climate change, and recent readings have shown that the region is warming more quickly than expected. The loss of ice that is floating on the seas surrounding the continent would not contribute significantly to sea level rise. However, losing the ice that's currently grounded on the continent would.

A moment of 'wow'

The two studies released on Monday document the glaciers' retreat and project what's likely to happen in the future. "We finally have hit this point where we have enough observations to put this all together, to say, 'Wow, we really are in this state.'" NASA scientist Tom Wagner told reporters.

The key findings in both studies relate to what's happening to the "grounding line" for Antarctica's glaciers. That's the subsurface boundary between ice that is floating on the sea and ice that is anchored to land.

"The grounding line is buried under a thousand or more meters of ice, so it is incredibly challenging for a human observer on the ice sheet surface to figure out exactly where the transition is," Rignot explained in a NASA news release. “This analysis is best done using satellite techniques."

The radar readings from both teams show that the grounding line for some areas of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has retreated by as much as 20 miles (37 kilometers) over the past couple of decades, apparently due to the interaction with warmer seas. The main worry is that there appears to be no submerged hill or mountain that could slow down further retreat.

Rignot said that means the glacial retreat has triggered a process of "positive feedback."

"We feel that this is at the point where even if the ocean is not providing additional heat, the system is in a chain reaction that is unstoppable," he told reporters.

Joughin said computer models produce a wide range of scenarios for the collapse of Thwaites Glacier. Some scenarios suggest that the glacier could last more than a millennium longer, but the most likely scenarios predict that rapid collapse would occur somewhere between 200 and 500 years from now.

What lies ahead

Higher greenhouse-gas emissions would lead to faster ice loss, and lower emissions could slow down the meltdown. But in any case, the loss of Thwaites Glacier appears inevitable, Joughin said: "All of our simulations show it will retreat at less than a millimeter of sea level rise per year for a couple of hundred years, and then, boom, it just starts to really go."

In its most recent assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that global sea levels were likely to rise between 4 inches and 3 feet (10 to 90 centimeters) by the year 2100. Sridhar Anandakrishnan, a geoscientist at Penn State University who didn't play a role in either study, said future IPCC estimates "will almost certainly be revised, and revised upwards."

"The IPCC projections don't really include Antarctic contributions to any great measure," he told reporters. "The results are just now starting to come together."

Anandakrishnan said future middle-of-the-road estimates for 2100 may well zero in on the top end of the current IPCC projection, around 3 feet. Without mitigating measures, that amount of sea level rise would inundate significant areas of coastal cities including Miami Beach, New Orleans and New York.

David Shean / Univ. of Washington
A high-resolution radar map shows Thwaites Glacier’s thinning ice shelf. Warm circumpolar deep water is melting the underside of this floating shelf, leading to a speedup in the glacier's retreat. This glacier now appears to be in the early stages of collapse, with full collapse potentially occurring within a few centuries.

In addition to Rignot, the authors of the paper in Geophysical Research Letters, "Widespread, Rapid Grounding Line Retreat of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith and Kohler Glaciers, West Antarctica From 1992 to 2011," include Jeremie Mouginot, Mathieu Morlighem, Helene Seroussi and Bernd Scheuchl.

In addition to Joughin, the authors of the paper in Science, "Marine Ice Sheet Collapse Potentially Underway for the Thwaites Glacier Basin, West Antarctica," include Benjamin Smith and Brooke Medley.
First published May 12th 2014, 11:02 am
byline photo
Alan Boyle

Alan Boyle is the science editor for NBC News Digital. He joined MSNBC.com at its inception in July 1996,... Expand Bio

Ice has been expanding for the last seven years. But libs don't want to talk about it, because it blows their theory. Temperatures have been "fluctuating" since forever, and that is "climate change". No credible scientist "denies" climate change. Its politicians who insist on linking climate change to human activity, not scientists. Here are a few charts to consider. As you can see, temperatures peaked 7000 years ago and have been in long-term decline. Smaller temperature cycles within that decline show higher temperatures in 1300 AD and even higher temps in 1100 BC. The reality is that we are in a global "cooling" period that could take us into a little ice age similar to what we had when Washington and his troops froze at Fort Necessity; it ended around 1850.