March 25, 2008

It's TEOTWAWKI - Ice shelves doing what ice shelves do in late fall

CNN News is going hyperbolic over this story:
Massive ice shelf on verge of breakup
Some 220 square miles of ice has collapsed in Antarctica and an ice shelf about the size of Connecticut is "hanging by a thread," the British Antarctic Survey said Tuesday, blaming global warming.

"We are in for a lot more events like this," said professor Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Scambos alerted the British Antarctic Survey after he noticed part of the Wilkins ice shelf disintegrating on February 28, when he was looking at NASA satellite images.
And a bit more:
Scientists say the western Antarctic peninsula -- the piece of the continent that stretches toward South America -- has warmed more than any other place on Earth over the past 50 years, rising by 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit each decade.

Scambos said the poles will be the leading edge of what's happening in the rest of the world as global warming continues.

"Even though they seem far away, changes in the polar regions could have an impact on both hemispheres, with sea level rise and changes in climate patterns," he said.

News of the Wilkins ice shelf's impending breakup came less than two weeks after the United Nations Environment Program reported that the world's glaciers are melting away and that they show "record" losses.

"Data from close to 30 reference glaciers in nine mountain ranges indicate that between the years 2004-2005 and 2005-2006 the average rate of melting and thinning more than doubled," the UNEP said March 16.

The most severe glacial shrinking occurred in Europe, with Norway's Breidalblikkbrea glacier, UNEP said. That glacier thinned by about 10 feet in 2006, compared with less than a foot the year before, it said.
Ice shelves have always calved off at this time of the year. It is late fall in the Southern Hemisphere and they have had a full summer to warm up. Notice that the focus is on Western Antarctica. That is because W. Antarctica is indeed undergoing some warming while East Antarctica is undergoing a pronounced cooling -- the glaciers there are growing. You don't hear anything about that on the mainstream media. NY Times, Nature news, Heritage Expeditions and Financial Post. It is fun that the cooling and increased snowmass is credited to warming instead of being dismissed as a local event. Bad model! And TEOTWAWKI?
The end of the world as we know it
Posted by DaveH at March 25, 2008 9:08 PM | TrackBack
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