How to make a mountain out of a molehill
The Flood is near! A large chunk of the Wilkins ice shelf in Antarctica is hanging by a thread ready to collapse into the sea. A clear sign of global warming! Antarctica is a thermometer that can’t be ignored, states Times Online today. And I fully agree.
The thing is that the Wilkins ice shelf is hardly the same as Antarctica. It is a part of the Antarctic peninsula, the northernmost part of the mainland of Antarctica, and almost the only part of that continent that extends outside the Antarctic Circle. See the relation between the peninsula and the rest of the continent in the picture below.
Let me ask you, if you lose a hair, do you automatically assume you are going bald? Times Online obviously does.
But there is no longer any reasonable doubt that climate change is the cause; that it would take centuries of lower temperatures for these ice shelves to re-form; and that if they do not, the great ice sheets of the Antarctic interior will be the next to melt.
Times Online admits though that all the eight ice shelf collapses in the past 30 years have occurred on the Antarctic Peninsula and that there is evidence that mean temperature at the South Pole is actually falling. But Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, has seized on the Wilkins event to give warning of “irreversible and abrupt changes” including cataclysmic sea level rises.
In the light of world temperatures slightly falling I guess IPCC is desperately catching at every straw.
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The bias and partisanship of the IPCC is continually exposed by its seizure of events such as this as evidence of global warming (oops, climate change). Many people operate under the assumption that the IPCC is an impartial body, collecting and objectively weighing all evidence related to climate change.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The IPCC has an agenda that is clearly stated in its mandate, which is to collect evidence of human-caused global warming and asses its attendant risks. The IPCC is not open to any other expalantion of climate change except anthropogenic. Thus one should never expect any contextual information from that outfit, such as the very important point that this collapsing ice shelf was not even in the Antarctic.
BTW, isn’t this evidence of advancing ice? To become a shelf, doesn’t a glacier have to move forward out over the sea until it collapses from its own weight? So how is this evidence of retreating ice, as the IPCC and the warmist scare-mongers assert?
Check out today’s post at climatesci.org.
Ice BREAKING OFF of Antarctical is a simple result of icecover GROWING rapidly, thus getting HEAVIER and extending further off land. The ice shelves at the edges is likely not “land ice” but is ALREADY FLOATING (why do they call them SHELVES which they send research submarines under?), and just as ice cubes melting in water don’t cause a glass of water to spill over, these outer-edge break-offs will have ZERO effects on sea level.
ICE CANNOT MELT IN ANTACRCTICA EXCEPT NEAR VOLCANOES THAT EXIST ON IT AS WELL AS UNDER IT.
It is SO cold there that nothing EVER MELTS without VOLCANOES. You’d need *not* a half or 2.5 degree rise in temperature, but upwards of many dozens of degrees for that.
There is also the mystery of why ocean levels are rising, even though the last decade have shown cooling oceans. Well. Guess what happens when Antaractica’s ice keeps rapidly increasing? It gets much HEAVIER, so gravitationally pushes on the liquid mantel. Being one of the heavier continents for its already large size, might, as it sinks down into that mantel, cause contained liquefied rock pressure elsewhere to rise, so lifting the ocean floor in both Atlantic and Pacific oceans upwards? Just an idea.
It’s rather well known that it’s not wise to leave things like cranes lying around in Antarctica. You see it snows a lot there, especially as it has been getting colder each decade for a century:
http://www.iceagenow.com/Growing_Antarctic_Ice_Sheet-1.jpg
And the peninsula? Unlike the rest of the continent, it has several active and inactive VOLCANOS (!!!!):
At it’s very tip is an active one, on aptly named “Deception Island”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deception_Island
Though it hasn’t erupted since the twice in the 60s, it still offers a “hot springs” bathing experience:
http://www.micktravels.com/antarctica/deception/
Not hard to spot on a satellite image that SOMETHING wild is going on right in the MIDDLE of the peninsula through that HAS *UTTERLY* NOTHING TO DO WITH “ANTARCTICA” (as an overall continent):
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/ANTARCTIC/TRENDS/IMAGES/annual.trend.1958-2002.gif
This is most likely due to liquid hot rock in the mantel about to form another volcano there.
There is from South America down to the peninsula a well known chain of volcanism.
Yet keep reading in popular science magazines that Antartcia is “melting.”
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