Ice cubes can't melt if your freezer is set at -10C. That defies all empirical scientific evidence. Now ice can melt at below 0C if ice is a greater absorber of cosmic rays making it actually warmer than the outside temperature. Or if it's facilitated with salt, sugar or ethanol though those things aren't geophysically present in antarctic ice sheet.
President Is Dead Wrong About Climate Change: Nobel Prize Winning Scientist
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The antarctic peninsula is the only part of Antarctica that hasn't seen lower temperature averages for the past 3 decades. It is a small part of the continent that actually falls outside of the antarctic circle. The summer melt is but a tiny fraction of the total antarctic ice sheet. The fact that the BBC highlights this without saying how much relative impact this is speaks to shoddy journalism and their complicity in the whole alarmist propaganda.
The politics of this issue has corrupted the science as well as the journalism. To the average person that seems unfathomable but sadly it is ringing more and more true. We'll convince you yet GPI
Okay but shouldn't there be no melting in the Antarctic? Even in the summer? How typical is it for there to be "billions of tonnes of melted land ice"?The antarctic peninsula is the only part of Antarctica that hasn't seen lower temperature averages for the past 3 decades. It is a small part of the continent that actually falls outside of the antarctic circle. The summer melt is but a tiny fraction of the total antarctic ice sheet. The fact that the BBC highlights this without saying how much relative impact this is speaks to shoddy journalism and their complicity in the whole alarmist propaganda.
The politics of this issue has corrupted the science as well as the journalism. To the average person that seems unfathomable but sadly it is ringing more and more true. We'll convince you yet GPI
Sublimation
http://water.usgs.gov/edu/watercyclesublimation.html
I vaguely remember the concept of sublimation. I thought ice cubes can 'vaporize' over time, but not sure how (is it caused by the blower inside the freezer)? Or is that from temporary power outages?
The link above explains how snow on the side of Mt. Everest dissipate from sublimation, despite cold ambient temperatures.
http://water.usgs.gov/edu/watercyclesublimation.html
I vaguely remember the concept of sublimation. I thought ice cubes can 'vaporize' over time, but not sure how (is it caused by the blower inside the freezer)? Or is that from temporary power outages?
The link above explains how snow on the side of Mt. Everest dissipate from sublimation, despite cold ambient temperatures.
Because a) there is more land ice than sea ice, and
b) as I mentioned, thermal expansion of water makes the water levels rise as the water temperature increases.
So try it. Fill your ice cube trays, let it freeze, measure the ice, leave it for a few months, measure it again. Sublimation is the process at work. A similar example is why water vapour is in the air when the air temperature is less than 100C. Water being a polar molecule has some neat properties.
It's funny when deniers talk about "empirical scientific evidence".
That's what I thought. Old ice cubes shrink. Even if there was a power outage, the melt water would stay inside the ice cube and re-freeze after the power resumes. Yet, ice cubes still shrink over time inside the freezer.
Okay but thermal expansion of water alone isn't likely to cause coastal flooding now will it?
There has been melting in both the Arctic and Antarctic in the summer months for as long as we know. What some studies have shown is that the land ice in western Antarctica has been decreasing faster in recent years, although the East has seen an increase in it's ice sheet. Also sea ice has been increasing in the Antarctic the past 30 years. Many scientists believe the melting of the western sheet has more to do with the rise in the ocean temperature of 0.5C the past 100+ years which has less to do with AGW and more to do with ocean currents.
Okay but has summer melting been as great as indicated in that article ("billions of tonnes of land ice melted"). Also, I haven't read that Antarctic land ice has increased, only it's sea ice, but that's from the run off of melted land ice which freezes readily on the surface of the coastal sea.
Similarly, wet hair freezes then dries in the winter and wet clothes hung outside on a line will freeze then be dry within a day. It's not a simple process scientifically but as K says, the empirical scientific evidence is there for anyone to see.
You said melting which infers a change to liquid form. That is not sublimation. Just to be clear here.
Absolutely can. Some studies I've seen say that it can account for far more rise in seal level than melting ice.
Also is something you can experiment with yourself if you get hold of a narrow graduated cylinder.
I've explained how in post 501. Plus in the summer months it gets above freezing in the northwest peninsula.But wait, how can there be melting if the temperature is below freezing?
I don't think the AGW proponents have found it "difficult" to make predictions. The difficulty has been that their predictions have been spectacularly wrong.
I also don't think I ever said we should "ignore" AGW. But there is damn good reason to be skeptical about the claims that are being made.
And the people who say AGW is the greatest threat we face today are making baseless assertions. Their agenda should be weighed against other pressures in the world today that we know are real.
Remember, every dollar that is spent on "climate change" is a dollar that isn't being spent on cancer research, care for the elderly, creating good jobs for young people, etc., etc. Never mind the harm that reckless policy responses might cause in developing countries.
I meant difficult to make accurate predictions.
When I see forest fires, droughts, retreating glaciers, freaky storms, I tend to think something is happening. Maybe we don't have to implement carbon taxes, but policies should change to encourage alternate and cleaner energy sources that could become more reliable by 2050 let's say.
I agree with some of your thinking but not for your reasons.
For example, I think it probably makes good sense to phase out our use of coal. But that's not because I"m worried about man-made global warming.
I would say that I would prefer to see decisions made on the basis of evidence and thoughtful analysis, rather than fear-mongering.
Forest fires, droughts and tropical storms are not anything unusual. There is no empirical evidence to suggest that we are suffering through any more today (in quantity or intensity) than we have in the past. In fact there is more risk of drought under cooling conditions than under warmer, because warmer climates typically carry more moisture.
