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Kieran
Joined: 25 Jul 2006
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Location: West Yorkshire
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 Posted: Thu Sep 15, 2011 5:57 pm Post subject: Cartographers kept busy |
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2037572/How-map-makers-green-Greenland-climate-change-wipes-glaciers-size-UK-Ireland.html
"A new atlas of the world has turned an area of Greenland the size of the UK and Ireland from white to green as it charts the retreat of once-permanent ice cover.
Cartographers have had to erase 15 per cent of the ice on the world's largest island, reflecting the retreat of Greenland's glaciers in the past 12 years in the face of a warming climate.
They have also included a new island off the coast of Greenland, named Warming Island, which has appeared as a separate piece of land several miles long as the ice melts."
Article continues...
Read the comments after and weep. Or laugh. Or both. |
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emordnilap
Joined: 05 Sep 2007
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| Posted: Fri Sep 16, 2011 10:22 am Post subject: Re: Cartographers kept busy |
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| Kieran wrote: | | Read the comments after and weep. Or laugh. Or both. |
Please, I'm in a good mood today.
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clv101
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| Posted: Fri Sep 16, 2011 9:50 pm Post subject: |
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This 15% is 100% bogus. The area of the ice sheet has shrunk by well under 1% over the last 12 years. I expect the atlas people have just reclassified the large ice cap on the east coast as a separate ice cap rather than the ice sheet proper.
| Daily Fail wrote: | | Cartographers have had to erase 15 per cent of the ice on the world's largest island, reflecting the retreat of Greenland's glaciers in the past 12 years in the face of a warming climate. |
This statement is totally wrong, 15% of the ice has not been 'erased' (either by area or volume). I don't even think there's been any significant retreat of land based glaciers in Greenland.
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Kieran
Joined: 25 Jul 2006
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JavaScriptDonkey
Joined: 02 Jun 2011
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Location: SE England
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| Posted: Sun Sep 18, 2011 1:38 am Post subject: |
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Is it surprising? A sensationalist story like that; proof that the world will end soon and it's all our fault. Or their fault if you're a Guardian reader. 
Never mind what the actual science is, people love confirmation of their beliefs. |
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clv101
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| Posted: Sun Sep 18, 2011 6:53 am Post subject: |
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| JavaScriptDonkey wrote: | Is it surprising? A sensationalist story like that; proof that the world will end soon and it's all our fault. Or their fault if you're a Guardian reader.
Never mind what the actual science is, people love confirmation of their beliefs. |
This isn't a Guardian issue - lots of media outlets have simply reported the erroneous press release from the Atlas launch. It's not a newspaper journalist's job to sort, sift and judge all the decisions made by Times catrographers. The Times is a highly reputable publisher, having established itself as one of the the most comprehensive and authoritative atlases in the world, journalists have little choice but to talk their word.
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Kieran
Joined: 25 Jul 2006
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| Posted: Mon Sep 19, 2011 9:27 pm Post subject: |
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More on this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14969399
"Leading UK polar scientists say the Times Atlas of the World was wrong to assert that it has had to re-draw its map of Greenland due to climate change.
Publicity for the latest edition of the atlas, launched last week, said warming had turned 15% of Greenland's former ice-covered land "green and ice-free".
But scientists from the Scott Polar Research Institute say the figures are wrong; the ice has not shrunk so much."
Article continues... |
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biffvernon
Joined: 24 Nov 2005
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Location: Lincolnshire
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| Posted: Tue Sep 20, 2011 1:36 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | The Times Atlas is not owned by The Times newspaper. It is published by Times Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, which is in turn owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. |
That's all right then. We can blame Rupert Murdoch for the error, and global warming as well while we're at it. I hear the eider duck population has been going down. I expect Murdoch has too many eiderdowns on his bed.
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An Inspector Calls
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| Posted: Thu Sep 22, 2011 8:41 am Post subject: |
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Well at leats the Guardian writer is fully on board with alarmism | Quote: | | The Greenland Ice Sheet contains 2.9m cubic kilometres of ice – enough to raise the sea level by 7 metres if it were to melt. . . . The answer is that it is a small fraction of a very large number. The current annual loss of ice from Greenland is about 200 cubic kilometres per year. This is about 0.007% of the total ice volume, but the same as 6mm/decade in terms of sea level rise. This is a substantial number which excludes losses from other ice sheets and ice caps, and mountain glaciers, which tend to melt faster. |
6mm sea level rise per decade. That's a whole 6 cm per century. No wonder we're worried! |
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lancasterlad
Joined: 22 Jun 2007
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| Posted: Thu Sep 22, 2011 8:50 am Post subject: |
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Now who's being alarmist. The article makes it quite clear that the 6mm/decade excludes losses from other sources.
Nice try Inspector.
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An Inspector Calls
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| Posted: Thu Sep 22, 2011 9:01 am Post subject: |
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lancasterlad
Ah well, I suppose
| Quote: | | This is a substantial number which excludes losses from other ice sheets and ice caps, and mountain glaciers, which tend to melt faster. |
had too many big words for you to understand? |
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clv101
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| Posted: Thu Sep 22, 2011 11:58 pm Post subject: |
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| An Inspector Calls wrote: | Well at leats the Guardian writer is fully on board with alarmism | Quote: | | The Greenland Ice Sheet contains 2.9m cubic kilometres of ice – enough to raise the sea level by 7 metres if it were to melt. . . . The answer is that it is a small fraction of a very large number. The current annual loss of ice from Greenland is about 200 cubic kilometres per year. This is about 0.007% of the total ice volume, but the same as 6mm/decade in terms of sea level rise. This is a substantial number which excludes losses from other ice sheets and ice caps, and mountain glaciers, which tend to melt faster. |
6mm sea level rise per decade. That's a whole 6 cm per century. No wonder we're worried! |
The 6mm/decade is the current (actually a few years back) rate. A decade earlier the ice sheet was in balance. It is not reasonable to assume, as you have done, this is a stable rate which will continue for the century. Using a large font doesn't improve things. There's incontrovertible evidence from several independent sources that the rate of Greenland's mass loss has accelerated over the last decade.
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kenneal - lagger
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| Posted: Fri Sep 23, 2011 2:26 am Post subject: |
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I saw a report somewhere recently that the sun now rises a day earlier in the spring in one Greenland town because the ice mountains surrounding the town have thinned and allow the sun to be seen sooner.
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An Inspector Calls
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| Posted: Fri Sep 23, 2011 9:01 am Post subject: |
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| clv101 wrote: | | An Inspector Calls wrote: | Well at leats the Guardian writer is fully on board with alarmism | Quote: | | The Greenland Ice Sheet contains 2.9m cubic kilometres of ice – enough to raise the sea level by 7 metres if it were to melt. . . . The answer is that it is a small fraction of a very large number. The current annual loss of ice from Greenland is about 200 cubic kilometres per year. This is about 0.007% of the total ice volume, but the same as 6mm/decade in terms of sea level rise. This is a substantial number which excludes losses from other ice sheets and ice caps, and mountain glaciers, which tend to melt faster. |
6mm sea level rise per decade. That's a whole 6 cm per century. No wonder we're worried! |
The 6mm/decade is the current (actually a few years back) rate. A decade earlier the ice sheet was in balance. It is not reasonable to assume, as you have done, this is a stable rate which will continue for the century. Using a large font doesn't improve things. There's incontrovertible evidence from several independent sources that the rate of Greenland's mass loss has accelerated over the last decade. |
Oh, I'm well aware of the fact that the rate of sea level rise or fall could change; in fact it's just fallen dramatically:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-262
(Amusingly, it's fallen by a neat 6mm which in this context we might term 'One Greenland'!)
If the author of the Guardian article wishes to make a projection for the next decade in order to stoke alarm, I don't see why I should be constrained not to demonstrate the weakness of his argument by reductio ad absurdum. We're not writing your Ph.d here. |
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kenneal - lagger
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| Posted: Sat Sep 24, 2011 5:20 am Post subject: |
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You should read the articles that you quote, Inspector.
| Quote: | Data from the NASA/German Aerospace Center's twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) spacecraft provide a clear picture of how this extra rain piled onto the continents in the early parts of 2011. "By detecting where water is on the continents, Grace shows us how water moves around the planet," says Steve Nerem, a sea level scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
So where does all that extra water in Brazil and Australia come from? You guessed it--the ocean. Each year, huge amounts of water are evaporated from the ocean. While most of it falls right back into the ocean as rain, some of it falls over land. "This year, the continents got an extra dose of rain, so much so that global sea levels actually fell over most of the last year," says Carmen Boening, a JPL oceanographer and climate scientist. Boening and colleagues presented these results recently at the annual Grace Science Team Meeting in Austin, Texas.
But for those who might argue that these data show us entering a long-term period of decline in global sea level, Willis cautions that sea level drops such as this one cannot last, and over the long-run, the trend remains solidly up. Water flows downhill, and the extra rain will eventually find its way back to the sea. When it does, global sea level will rise again. |
We'll just have to wait a few years to see if the upward trend returns as it has done in a major way at least 8 or 9 times in the recent past as shown on the graph in the article you quoted but didn't read fully.
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