2 Responses to “Brrr… Antarctic Sea Ice at Record Levels By ‘Significant Margin’”

1. couragec
   May 14th, 2014 @ 8:53 pm

   Frenetic Headlines About West Antarctic Ice Melt Are Unequivocally Deceptive

   Written by CCD Editor on May 13 2014 .
   antarcticaYou may have seen the alarming news stories that the West Antarctic ice sheet is going to collapse, leaving low-lying areas completely flooded. With apologies to Al Gore, it’s just not gonna happen anytime soon, if ever. The harrowing headlines refer to the Thwaites Glacier study, posted online yesterday, and quickly became grist for the mill for our front-page grabbing news media reporting the most implausible, and silliest, scenarios that may or may not happen in 200 to 900 years based on data fed into computer models.
   Even Andrew Revkin of the NY Times, a long-standing, fully pledged, global-warming ‘enthusiast’, took issue with the mainstream media’s handling of this non-catastrophic news, subtly blaming it on the language used, not the messenger. He even encourages his savvy readers to “consider clashing scientific and societal meanings of ‘collapse’ when reading antarctic ice news”. If that sounds similar to, “that depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is”, you’re not alone. Revkin doesn’t explicitly hand-wring his fellow journalists, but instead asks you, fellow reader, to analyze the amped-up rhetoric for yourself. As Revkin writes,
   Some headlines are completely overwrought — as with this NBC offering: “West Antarctic Ice Sheet’s Collapse Triggers Sea Level Warning.” This kind of coverage could be interpreted to mean there’s an imminent crisis. It’s hard to justify that conclusion given the core findings in the studies. (Am I trying to maintain a hold on reality or am I a “scold”?)
   Take the Science paper: “Marine Ice Sheet Collapse Potentially Under Way for the Thwaites Glacier Basin, West Antarctica.” Using ice-flow models and observations, the researchers, led by Ian Joughin of the University of Washington, concluded:
   Except possibly for the lowest-melt scenario, the simulations indicate that early-stage collapse has begun. Less certain is the time scale, with the onset of rapid (>1 mm per year of sea-level rise) collapse in the different simulations within the range of 200 to 900 years.
   To translate a bit, that means sometime between 200 and 900 years from now the rate of ice loss from this glacier could reach a volume sufficient to raise sea levels about 4 inches (100 millimeters) a century. At that point, according to the paper, ice loss could pick up steam, with big losses over a period of decades.* But in a phone conversation, Joughin said the modeling was not reliable enough to say how much, how soon.
   “Collapse is a good scientific word,” he told me, “but maybe it’s kind of a bad word” in the context of news. There’s more on this work in a well-written news release from Joughin’s university.
   Eric Rignot at the University of California, Irvine, admitted in a NASA recording of a conference call with reporters that the term “collapse” was inappropriate in this case.
   Collapse in the imagination of most people sounds like a catastrophic event that is going to happen in the next few years. We are talking about a retreat that is unstoppable because we think we have enough evidence to say that these glaciers will keep retreating for decades and even centuries to come…. We’re talking about a slow degradation of ice in this part of Antarctica.
   So what went wrong? Call it fright-write. Scary headlines grab reader’s eyeballs. Antarctica as a whole has not only increased in size, but the western portion of the continent sits on underground volcanoes, as does its sea ice. As Graham Lloyd of the Australian (paywall) wrote yesterday,
   Antarctic sea ice has expanded to record levels for April, increasing by more than 110,000sq km a day last month to nine million square kilometres. The National Snow and Ice Data Centre said the rapid expansion had continued into May and the seasonal cover was now bigger than the record “by a significant margin’’. “This exceeds the past record for the satellite era by about 320,000sq km, which was set in April 2008,’’ the centre said.
   For an overview on the state of affairs of all things glacier, check this page out.

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