German researchers have established the height of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps with greater precision than ever before. The new maps they have produced show that the ice is melting at an unprecedented rate.
The maps, produced with a satellite-mounted instrument, have elevation accuracies to within a few metres. Since Greenland’s ice cap is more than 2,000 metres thick on average, and the Antarctic bedrock supports 61% of the planet’s fresh water, this means that scientists can make more accurate assessments of annual melting.
Dr Veit Helm and other glaciologists at the Alfred Wegener Institute’sHelmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, report in the journal The Cryosphere that, between them, the two ice sheets are now losing ice at the unprecedented rate of 500 cubic kilometres a year.
The area of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets combined is 16,000,000 km². The claim is that they are losing 500 km³/year – which would be .03 metres/per year. Yet their accuracy is “within a few metres” – which means that they are claiming precision two orders of magnitude higher than their accuracy. Both ice sheets could just as easily have been claimed to be showing gain of ice as loss, based on their methodology.
The second problem is that they are conflating claimed ice loss with “melt” The surface mass balance of just Greenland showed 300 GT of ice gain this past year, which is nearly the same as the claimed loss from both ice sheets. And even if the net balance was negative, it would be due to glacial flow into the ocean – rather than melt.
The third problem is that they printed a map of elevations with higher elevations colored red, to fool the reader into believing that the red color has something to do with warmth or melting. It doesn’t. In fact, the red areas almost never experience any melting.
These people are either beyond stupid, or hard core fraudsters – and need to be called out as such.
Also, If the best they can do with elevation measurement is within a few meters, how in the hell can they measure 2 to 3mm of sea level rise every year via satellite? Constantly moving waves and water would be a much more difficult thing to measure the surface of than stationary Ice.
To quote an excerpt I just saw from one of those Antarctic sea level rise proclamations; “We find that from 1992 to 2011, sea-level rise along the Antarctic coast is at least 2 ± 0.8 mm yr−1 greater than the regional mean…” they appear to have proposed melt as the mechanism for that horrendous rise and then say “We estimate that an excess freshwater input of 430 ± 230 Gt yr−1 is required to explain the observed sea-level rise.” Just… wow! an error range of 460 Gt/yr and from that they pull 230 Gt/yr as an accurate figure. I do not understand how these people think or how they ever passed a mathematics course.
Abstract:
Rapid sea-level rise along the Antarctic margins in response to increased glacial discharge Nature Geoscience (2014) doi:10.1038/ngeo2230
Sorry, that should be 430 Gt/yr measured not 230.
“Also, If the best they can do with elevation measurement is within a few meters, how in the hell can they measure 2 to 3mm of sea level rise every year via satellite? “
Magic?
Even at the rates they cited the ice capes would be gone in 30,000 years… that’s well into the next ice age. If our global warming prevents that from happening we should all be rejoicing.
Actually, more than 30,000 years because the ice caps are more than a kilometer thick on average.
Fraudsters.
Next they’ll be saying couples should be limited to one baby each, only blonde haired and blue eyes permitted to have a family, and all others should be sterilised.
Now that sounds like a plan!
Except that it didn’t end well for the world, the planners nor the millions of planee’s who didn’t have blond hair and blue eyes.
Tony … I pick door number two = “hard core fraudsters” 😉
‘Malicious Frauds’ or just “MF’s will do.
You are insulting “MF’s”
How do they know it is at an “unprecedented rate”, if they have only just started measuring it this accurately?
They don’t.
That keeps taxpayer funds flowing. The word “unprecedented” impresses politicians.
Of course it’s unprecedented, if you have nothing to compare it to…
as scott says ,they used the wrong satellites,should have used the same ones that get mm precision when measuring sea level 😉
The didn’t need accuracy because as they said “They were able to study how the ice sheets changed by comparing the data with measurements made by Nasa’s IceSat mission.”
The relied (re-lied) on NASA’s well known accuracy. /sarc
Even if you take their figures of 375 km^3 ice loss from Greenland (area 1.7 million km^2), this yields ice thickness loss of 0.22 meters, which is at least one order of magnitude higher than the satellite’s accuracy.
Tony – I’m not sure where you got 300 gigatons of ice gain from the graph. I read it as about 150 gigatons, and in August only (lower number for other parts of the year).
You are probably looking at the wrong year
Let me retract my second paragraph in my above comment. I see now where you got the 300 (which I read as 275). I was looking at the differential (blue line minus red line), and that is my mistake.
Admittedly, I’m having a little trouble interpreting the graph, since if look at the gray line (or even the red line), it seems to show that the ice mass is increasing every year (i.e. the August 31st figure is always greater than zero). For example, the gray line indicates ice gain of 400 gigatons per year average. This does not make sense to me.
The point is the the surface is gaining ice, not melting down.
John, you are correct, but leaving out an essential element.
Glaciers gradually move toward the oceans and then calve.
When that is added to the scenario there is a net loss.
Click on the reference by mjc below.
Then remember that as ice recedes in Greenland, remnants of Viking civilizations are uncovered.
The Vikings left for a reason.
The graph compares two years with the years 1990-2011. The surface mass varies with the season. Each year starts at “zero” for comparison. The blue line is this current “year” (12 month time frame). The gray line value of approx 400Gt is the average seasonal gain for the years 1990-2011.
So, are you saying that their graph showed a 400 Gt gain on average from 1990-2011, and 275 Gt gain from Sep 1 2013 to Aug 31 2014, i.e. more than the gain from 2011-2012?
I thought Greenland overall is losing ice, and that the debate is over how much.
The webcam location you often post would seem to be gaining snow/ice, but that is only one location at altitude.
John, large portions of Greenland, away from the coast are ‘at altitude’…because the ice is over 3500 meters thick (that’s 2 miles+ thick), so even accounting for depression due to the weight of ice, it’s still going to be significantly higher than ‘sea level’ at the interior.
darrylb – My previous comment was to Tony.
I appreciate your clarification.
First, remember I am skeptical of any significant AGW.
However, oceans are continually rising a lot, or a little, or falling a little or a lot, Depends on location and movement of land masses in various ways. Values are averaged.
I do believe there is some increase in sea level, I do not believe the increase is accelerating and I believe it has been increasing since the middle of the last mini ice age.
Tony has indicated often that for some history begins in 1979 for various reasons.
But take it a bit further. Oceans rise because of glacial melt, thermal expansion and something they may be overlooked, water runoff; that is aquifers are being depleted.
***Use this argument if you like based on back of the envelope math.
Here in Minnesota, I am sitting where glaciers used to be 12,000 years ago. After the glacier melt Lake Agassiz was formed, Its area was much larger than the sum of the great Lakes. As it drained oceans were believed to have risen at an enormous rate.
Considering the fact that I am at least 2,000 miles from the nearest glacier I could say that the glaciers melted back at the rate of 3 feet per day. (although they melted in place)
We know have the remains of that in MN- 10,000 actually closer to 15,000 lakes.
Climate and therefore the face of the earth is always changing, and because we often do not wrap our brains around it, changing at a faster rate that we can imagine.
Where’s the 30+ yrs of measurments with this technique?
3 yrs of data is not long enough to determine a trend (anything, really).
From the abstract…
CryoSat-2 DEMs have an uncertainty of less than 3 m ± 15 m
Full paper…
http://www.the-cryosphere.net/8/1539/2014/tc-8-1539-2014.html
And one of the most interesting things, in the full paper, at least from the quick read through, is that the areas of greatest uncertainty are also the areas showing the greatest NEGATIVE changes in elevation. It looks like there are more changes in elevation that could be attributed to the changes in instruments and better resolution than anything else, because with the uncertainty being what it is and the greatest changes being in the areas of highest uncertainty, those changes have a very high chance of just being caused by the changes in the data gathering/processing and not any actual melting/loss.
And another thing…looking at the key to the maps, the red color on the Antarctic map represents a ‘height’ of 4 km+ and in Greenland, 3.5 km+. So a ‘melt’ rate of 3 cm/yr is going to take a hell of a lot longer than 30,000 yrs to melt either location.
Overall, it looks to me, that this paper and this set of DEMs (digital elevation maps) should be looked at as a new baseline, rather than comparing them to the past maps. There are enough changes in how the data is gathered and the resolution to make any meaningful comparisons to the past data rather imprecise.
Oh, yeah, the Guardian article is typical MSM alarmism reporting to what, on deeper reading, looks to be a not so alarming paper.
Tony, how much “melting” are they claiming is happening at the Greenland Klimate Kleptocrats Kountry Klub? You know, where they keep having to dig out their golf cart shack and the 19th Hole Bar & Grille from accumulating snow and ice?
Unfortunately Steve has made a mistake on this one. He too has succumbed to the confusion between “ice loss” and “melt” which is due to the fact that a newspaper intended for public consumption uses the term “melt” in a different way to the usage in a scientific research article. In the link http://beta.dmi.dk/en/groenland/maalinger/greenland-ice-sheet-surface-mass-budget/ there are charts showing a “surface mass balance”, which Steve correctly quotes as positive. But if you read the text of the paper it also says :-
“Note that the accumulated curve does not end at 0 at the end of the year. Over the year, it snows more than it melts, but calving of icebergs also adds to the total mass budget of the ice sheet. Satellite observations over the last decade show that the ice sheet is not in balance. The calving loss is greater than the gain from surface mass balance, and Greenland is losing mass at about 200 Gt/yr.”
In other words, the surface mass balance is positive each year, but the calving of icebergs is a larger figure than this and is, of course, negative. This means that there is a net total ice loss, which the link from which the graph is taken, says is 200 GT/year (or about 200 cubic km). This is just for Greenland. Double it for Antarctica as well and you get a similar figure to that in the Guardian article.
The Guardian article is using “melt” loosely, to mean “total ice loss”. The CRYOSAT-2 satellite has an instrument called SIRAL – SAR (Synthetic Aperture) Interferometric Radar Altimeter. This can measure sea ice elevations to about 1.5cm accuracy, but for land ice on steep slopes the accuracy is only around 3cm. So the accuracy is not “metres” as described in Steve’s comments above – “a few cm” would be more accurate. Not Steve’s fault as the Guardian also gets this wrong, describing the maps as correct to “a few metres” which clearly would not be enough.
Steve’s calculation of 0.03m per year is correct. In the context of 2100 this is a total of 3m depth of ice lost across the 16m square km of the ice sheets, which would be around 12cm for the approximate 350m square km of the oceans – not disastrous in its own right but if the rate increased then it could be a swinger.
And although red may not be a good color to use for heights, if you are going to use the full spectrum (red through green to blue) of colors then it would make far less sense to have coastal areas colored red than the current scheme which results in coastal areas being blue to match the ocean (although that is probably frozen and therefore white much of the year).
ROFL
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/09/01/climate-experts-dont-understand-what-a-river-is/
Ignore the newspaper and go straight to the source paper…
The combined volume change of Greenland and Antarctica for the observation period is estimated to be −503 ± 107 km3 yr−1. Greenland contributes nearly 75 % to
the total volume change with −375 ± 24 km3 yr−1 .
Elevation change estimates are also used to assess the mass balance of the ice sheets, considering additional information such as firn densification and accumulation (Zwally et al., 2011; Shepherd et al., 2012).
Comparisons with ICESat data show that 80 % of the CryoSat-2 DEMs have an uncertainty of less than 3 m ± 15 m.
1. Antartic ice loss is NOT double Greenland.
2. ± 107 km3 is a pretty big margin of error (about 20%).
3. If elevation maps are used in estimating mass balance and mass balance changes are used in making elevation maps…
4. It isn’t a question of the instrument’s uncertainty, but rather the elevation maps themselves being ‘accurate within a few meters’…as shown by the statement from the actual paper. (3 m ± 15 m)
In 1922, Svalbard Glaciers were receding at 1km per year.
In 1932, Svalbard Glaciers grew 10km in less than a year.
Glaciers in Greenland respond the same.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/p1386e/svalbard.pdf
Anyone worried about melting of Greenland means they are drinking too much Kool aid.
These scientists are not scientists and they are making large amounts of $$. The love of money is the root of evil.
I don’t think the Guardian is doing this for the money. In fact they’re losing money. Or do you think they’re simply foolish people who believe the evil scientists? (And in that case why not quote the skeptical scientists as well?)
That is one paper that is up to its eyeballs in the mess. They are so deep and entwined with the CAGW establishment there is no exit strategy they can employ and have any, even microscopic, shreds of crediblity.
I love the deliberately deceptive use of red for HOT and blue for COLD.
This of course shows incredible stupidity – a blue coloured flame is orders of magnitude hotter than a red one.
Just like the rest of climate science this is arse about.
Also Antarctica is 6 and a half times the size of Greenland.
My late big brother admitted being astonished at the accuracy of pre-satellite maps. Only a few feet difference from space satellite mapping compared to the traditional methods employing transit and chronometer and sextant over the 3000 miles coast to coast.
I did ask how accurate the satellite measurements were. Just because my instruments have a digital read-out doesn’t make them more precise than analog dials.
An unmentioned issue is that as glaciers pile up, gravity exerts pressure on an increasing mass, compressing the ice and making it flow. Humans have an “unprecedented” amount of information regarding ice pack altitude–but ice has mass. The predicted rise in sea level may actually be an increase in Greenland an Antarctic ice.
That shoots another hole in computer climate models!
Something else that should be said…after comparing maps of known volcanoes, in Antarctica, to the new maps, the ‘thin’ regions of land ice line up nicely with the volcanic regions.
Great point..
“Both ice sheets could just as easily have been claimed to be showing gain of ice as loss, based on their methodology.”
Hilarious!! They claim “within a few meters” accuracy of the surface yet the claimed loss would be just a teenie fraction of that !!
Red=Hot.. we see it all over the Global Warming charts/maps… even negative temps can be red..