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Antarctic Ice Shelf Collapse == Climate Change + ???

Abdul Alhazred

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Antarctic Ice Shelf Collapse Blamed On More Than Climate Change -- Science Daily

When the Larsen B Ice Shelf in Antarctica collapsed in 2002, the event appeared to be a sudden response to climate change, and this long, fringing ice shelf in the north west part of the Weddell Sea was assumed to be the latest in a long line of victims of Antarctic summer heat waves linked to Global Warming.

However in a paper published in the Journal of Glaciology, Prof. Neil Glasser of Aberystwyth University, working as a Fulbright Scholar in the US, and Dr Ted Scambos of University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Centre now say that the shelf was already teetering on collapse before the final summer.

“Ice shelf collapse is not as simple as we first thought,” said Professor Glasser, lead author of the paper. “Because large amounts of meltwater appeared on the ice shelf just before it collapsed, we had always assumed that air temperature increases were to blame. But our new study shows that ice-shelf break up is not controlled simply by climate. A number of other atmospheric, oceanic and glaciological factors are involved. For example, the location and spacing of fractures on the ice shelf such as crevasses and rifts are very important too because they determine how strong or weak the ice shelf is”.

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Professor Glasser acknowledges that global warming had a major part to play in the collapse, but emphasises that it is only one in a number of contributory factors, and despite the dramatic nature of the break-up in 2002, both observations by glaciologists and numerical modeling by other scientists at NASA and CPOM (Centre of Polar Observation and Modeling) had pointed to an ice shelf in distress for decades previously. “It's likely that melting from higher ocean temperatures, or even a gradual decline in the ice mass of the Peninsula over the centuries, was pushing the Larsen to the brink”, said co-author Ted Scambos of University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Centre.
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The point of this thread is?
 
So these groups all look quite foolish now, having lost their favorite "poster child" of ice shelf collapse due to man's infernal production of carbon dioxide -
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NRDC attributes Larsen B breakup to Global Warming.
[/FONT]After existing for many millennia, the northern section of the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica -- a section larger than the state of Rhode Island -- collapsed between January and March 2002, disintegrating at a rate that astonished scientists. Since 1995 the ice shelf's area has shrunk by 40 percent.

And wikipedia -
The Larsen disintegration events were unusual. Typically, ice shelves lose mass by iceberg calving and by melting at their upper and lower surfaces. The disintegration events are linked to the ongoing climate warming in the Antarctic Peninsula, about 0.5 °C per decade since the late 1940's, which is a consequence of global warming.[2]

And Spencer Wert,
In February-March 2002 the Larsen B ice shelf, a mass of floating ice some 220 meters thick and larger than Rhode Island, broke up into icebergs. The flow of glaciers held behind the ice shelf accelerated. The ice shelf had probably existed since the last ice age. This was only the largest in a 30-year series of retreats of ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula, the only part of the continent that scientists had predicted would be affected soon by greenhouse warming.

So did Greenpeace.

So did commondreams.org -

Many others. Let's see how many, and how fast, any of these groups correct their stories.
 
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mhaze said:
So these groups all look quite foolish now, having lost their favorite "poster child" ... Let's see how many, and how fast, any of these groups correct their stories.
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the article that mhaze is giddy about said:
Professor Glasser acknowledges that global warming had a major part to play in the collapse
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:confused:
 
Just another expert opinion that - once again - serves to, at the very least, underscore how much we have yet to learn.

-Dr. Imago
 
"Death from falling is not as simple as we first thought. We had always thought that in deaths associated with a fall from a height, such as a building, it was the fall that was to blame. But now we're seeing that while the fall has a major part to play in these deaths, the rapid deceleration that occurs upon hitting the ground is very important as well."
 
Dr. Imago said:
Just another expert opinion that - once again - serves to, at the very least, underscore how much we have yet to learn.

-Dr. Imago
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You mean you have got to learn.

http://realclimate.org/

Modelers took a closer look and noticed some complications. As greenhouse gases increase, the heat seeps gradually deeper and deeper into the oceans. But when larger volumes of water are brought into play, they bring a larger heat capacity. Thus as the years passed, the atmospheric warming would increasingly lag behind what would happen if there were no oceans. In 1980 a New York University group reported that “the influence of deep sea thermal storage could delay the full value of temperature increment predicted by equilibrium models by 10 to 20 years” just between 1980 and 2000 A.D. (2)
The delay would not be the same everywhere. After all, the Southern Hemisphere is mostly ocean, whereas land occupies a good part of the Northern Hemisphere. A model constructed by Stephen Schneider and Thompson, highly simplified in modern terms but sophisticated for its time, suggested that the Southern Hemisphere would experience delays decades longer than the Northern. Schneider and Thompson warned that if people compared observations with what would be expected from a simple equilibrium model, “we may still be misled… in the decade A.D. 2000-2010.” (3)
The pioneer climate modelers Kirk Bryan and Syukuro Manabe took up the question with a more detailed model that revealed an additional effect. In the Southern Ocean around Antarctica the mixing of water went deeper than in Northern waters, so more volumes of water were brought into play earlier. In their model, around Antarctica “there is no warming at the sea surface, and even a slight cooling over the 50-year duration of the experiment.” (4) In the twenty years since, computer models have improved by orders of magnitude, but they continue to show that Antarctica cannot be expected to warm up very significantly until long after the rest of the world’s climate is radically changed.
Bottom line: A cold Antarctica and Southern Ocean do not contradict our models of global warming. For a long time the models have predicted just that.
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They seem to be doing a pretty good job of understanding what is going on.
 
This has to be the silliest attempt to deny global warming that I have ever seen. I am of course refering to the posts in this thread, not the linked article. The linked article is a perfectly reasonable piece. The interpretations here on the other hand are just silly.
 
mhaze said:
One of several causes is quite different than "The Cause".
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Absolutely. Falling from a building isn't "The Cause" of death, either. Strictly speaking, it isn't even the rapid deceleration, nor the briefly increased intraluminal pressure which results. It's more complicated than that. It involves fractures, and puddles, and rifts -- particularly those involving the cellular structures that hold internal organs together.
 
mhaze said:
Warmologists on thin ice, once again?
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Come on. You're straying into Ann Coulter territory with these knee-jerk reactions.

There are serious people looking into the science of this issue, some who seriously don't believe the data on AGW is correct. But you're just acting like a petulant child, swatting away every piece of data out of some weird anti-AGW reflex.

I think you should take some time and really look at how you come off. Because you're getting more shrill by the day.
 
You know, this is a lot like the guys who deny that HIV causes AIDS; Most of them just want to keep on doing what they are doing and so have to deny the inconvenient truth that their actions are putting them and others in great danger.
 
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