The dreamers of global warming calamity always have to find imaginative explanations for inconvenient truths and paradoxes. Today’s German papers are reporting on the recent study by Judith Curry and Jiping Liu, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology. The paper is an attempt to provide an explanation for the paradox of increasing Antarctic sea ice in a warming climate.You see, there’s a simple explanation for everything.
The latest explanation is a brainstormed hypothesis at most, and nothing more. Hypotheses are important in science of course, but they are only its very raw trial material. They are not fact.
Yet today, in climate science, we are expected to accept half knowledge and computer-generated scenarios as “finished” science. Folks, it’s a farce.
So just what is the Liu/Curry explanation? The German Sueddeutsche Zeitung here presents it as follows:
The ice in the south polar sea is still growing there because climate change means more precipitation, most of it as snow. This snow reflects part of the radiative warming back out into the atmosphere and thus prevents the ice from melting.
But if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase over the next decades as expected, then sea ice will eventually melt from underneath. In addition, precipitation will fall increasingly as rain, and not as snow. This means the radiative reflection will diminish and thus lead to acclerated ice melt at the surface from above.
Depending on the amount of greenhouse gas emissions in the decades ahead, the researchers calculate a shrinkage in Antarctic sea ice of 40,000 to 300,000 sq. km. per decade . The ice is expected to melt especially rapidly starting at the end of the 2060s.
40,000 to 300,000 sq km/decade? At the end of the 2060s? Really?
Recall this is all based on still really crappy climate models. It’s crystal ball science by fortune tellers. Don’t get me wrong. Science starts with wild hypotheses. But only in climate science do they seem to end there. Curry and Liu, your work is far from finished. You are a long way from being able to make such predictions with even minimal certainty. You get paid for that?
This is not the first time an attempt has been made to hastily explain, using dubious methods, why the Antarctic is not cooperating. Steig et al used dubious statistical acrobatics to produce a warming Antarctic graphic, i.e. it is cooperating! Read here.
The following NASA chart made before all this Orwellian history rewriting shows some parts of Antarctica indeed have warmed over the last decades, but most of the continent has cooled.
he Antarctic continet has cooled, not warmed.
Source: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=6502
And as long as it cools, the ice will expand, reflect more radiation out into space and…well, I’ll let the readers apply their own Curry-like hypotheses from there.
They look at tiny parts of a huge system, saying things like “because we have snow here, it reflects sunlight and that’s why we get more ice here” when in fact huge amounts of energy are transported through space, through the oceans, somewaht less through air masses… Even if there is some albedo self-amplification in some locale, this is irrelevant for the system. They could just as well write “we don’t know”.
And greenhouse gas emissions? The biggest greenhouse gas is water vapor. Did water vapor emissions rise? Idiots! Süddeutsche writers, drop your pens, get a real job at a fast food chain, start doing something useful for society.
Nature takes her course. Now on the threshold of a 20-year Dalton if not a 70-year Maunder Minimum, while our current Holocene Interglacial Epoch is some sixty years past-due to end, climate hysterics’ escalating Sturm-und-Drang seems vastly overblown. Philosopher Emeritus Yogi Berra had it right: “Never predict anything, especially about the future.”
“This snow reflects part of the radiative warming back out into the atmosphere and thus prevents the ice from melting”
The “radiative warming” from greenhouse gases is long wave radiation. The snow does not reflect any long wave radiatoon, it absorves almost 100% of it.
I have to read the original paper but that bit is weird.
Reply: Albedo is meant here. -PG
That quote gets me every time. Well, ya, that is how the sea ice usually melts, with or without CO2 (H2O I suspect is the culprit 😉 ).
This rubbish is a mind-numbingly banal jargonator of “basically accepted concepts” that was mixed with the “Kool-Aide” and called a theory/hypothesis/article but is only vomit of the next morning.
I had hope for Curry, but this is just stupid. Both poles have gotten colder in the last 5 years. The Antarctic for the last 15. It is true the ice extent in the Arctic has substantially decreased. But given the temperature, it means the decrease is caused by something other than warming…..like tides or wind.
The ice would also have to go out (disappear) faster and earlier. Snow is a great insulator as they mention, just ask anyone in the lake country in the north. When it snows early on ice the snow insulates the ice from the cold and the ice doesn’t thicken…not safe for ice fishing. In the Spring the ice goes out quicker than split! The theory should show very rapid and early melts compared to average for the theory to hold.
Antarctic ice melt: Spring 2007-2008 & 2008-2009 vs 1979-2000 average.
http://www.mcculloughsite.net/stingray/assets_c/2008/12/antarctic_sea_ice_2008_12-20-thumb-400×320.png
This does not match snow.
This the UAH satellite temperature anomaly for the region, monthly data and annual filter. The linear trend is -0.069 K per year, but as R. Spencer would say, it is given only for amusement.
http://a.imageshack.us/img837/4098/uahsopol.png
pfff… you should rather discuss about football!
I would like to exchange links with your site notrickszone.com
Is this possible?
These fatuous “researchers” write that “if greenhouse gas emissions increase … as expected then sea ice will eventually melt …” But what facts are such facile “expectations” based on? What if, as a majority of responsible scientists say, “greenhouse gas” is only a small element in global climate? In that case other factors, like dormant sunspots, will offset whatever minor warming influence these trace elements might have. The portentous statement about greenhouse gas then becomes trivial. Who cares about such worthless nonsense?
Hey, you dopes! What is the most important factor that determines the world’s climate? You can’t or won’t say, because you don’t know; and the reason is that no such factor exists. Global climate is a chaotic system subject to a vast number of inter-related, incommensurable variables whose cumulative effect cannot be predicted. “Climate change” is a fool’s errand, and you know it.
One fact we do know for sure, from inter-disciplinary historical studies that you phonies can’t distort or fabricate: the current inter-glacial epoch which began about 12,500 years ago was statistically due to end about 1950. Every honest indicator we have shows a cooling trend, and that trend is likely to continue and accelerate. All your fake data, juvenile tantrums, and hysterical insults do not change that reality one jot.