Shifting into high gear: Amundsen Sea Embayment melt - Antarctica

While WUWT has slowed to a crawl the science hasn't. So today I'll just write about a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL).

A large team led by Tyler C. Sutterley has found that in fast-melting regions of Antarctica, the rate of melt has tripled during the last decade. The team includes scientists from the USA, France, the Netherlands and the UK and includes some whose names you'll probably recognise, such as Eric Rignot and Isabella Velicogna. They did a comprehensive analysis of measurements of glaciers in the Amundsen Sea Embayment over last 21 years, evaluating and reconciling observations from four different measurement techniques. The loss has been accelerating, a lot.

UCI and NASA glaciologists, including Isabella Velicogna and Tyler Sutterley, have discovered that the melt rate of glaciers in West Antarctica has tripled, with the loss of a Mt. Everest's worth of water weight every two years.

Credit: Michael Studinger / NASA  Source: UC Irvine

Larry Hamlin blunders down under in Antarctica

The rapid increase in the loss of ice in West Antarctica is really eating the heart out of Anthony Watts and his band of science deniers at WUWT. After, what is it, five articles in as many days?  Now there's a sixth (archived here). A shouty rant by Larry Hamlin who is really, really scared by global warming, going by his two latest articles.

You may remember this one from yesterday, where poor Larry was so terrified of the risk of wildfires he could scarcely restrain himself. Well, today it's the ice that's got him quaking in his boots. He's let forth on an article by Damian Carrington in the UK Guardian, which reports on a new study showing that Antarctic ice is disappearing twice as fast as it was a few years ago. (Larry was so overcome by fear that he could only manage a broken link to the article).

This is a bit long, so if you're on the home page, click here to read more...

The desire to not look stupid is pretty strong...

Noticed at WUWT today (archived here):

I urge others to follow my lead: when ridiculous claims are made in the media, challenge them with supportable facts. You may not get an acknowledgment, but the desire to not look stupid is pretty strong, and will have an effect.

His article was about a big blooper by the Governor of California, talking about LAX being flooded by rising seas, though it's apparently more than 30 metres (100 feet) above sea level. Anthony got up at half past five in the morning to send a missive off to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times to tell him what a duffer he and the Governor were.

This was the second article by Anthony on the subject. In his first article (archived here), Anthony had some big bloopers of his own. So I'll do as he urged and follow his lead and challenge what he wrote with supportable facts.

Anthony's ridiculous claim

Anthony made the ridiculous claim that Suzanne Goldenberg was wrong when she wrote that "The loss of the entire western Antarctica ice sheet could eventually cause up to 4 metres (13ft) of sea-level rise". He reckons she meant four feet, not four metres. Anthony was wrong! Suzanne Goldenberg was right.

Challenging Anthony Watts with supportable facts

Anthony copied a quote from a NASA article about the recent paper by Eric Rignot (which I wrote about earlier):

The Amundsen Sea region is only a fraction of the whole West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which if melted completely would raise global sea level by about 16 feet (5 meters).

He followed this up with:

Here is where I think Brown went wrong:

He listened to the Guardian’s Susanne Goldenberg, who conflated 4 feet to 4 METERS (13 feet), which would affect SFO airport, but not LAX.

...And the error is still in her story, a day later. 

This is what Suzanne Goldenberg wrote in the Guardian:

The loss of the entire western Antarctica ice sheet could eventually cause up to 4 metres (13ft) of sea-level rise

Obviously it's Anthony who is wrong.  And this even with him copying Suzanne's comment and highlighting it in yellow. I've remarked before (and Anthony confirmed it) that he doesn't read what he writes about on his blog. In this case he didn't bother reading two pieces of information he selected himself, from different sources.

The melting of western Antarctica would cause a very large rise in sea level. In a 2009 paper in Science, Jerry X. Mitrovica,1 Natalya Gomez,1 Peter U. Clark have estimated the melting of western Antarctica would result in a sea level rise of five metres  - and effectively much more in some parts of the world (and less in others). In another paper in Science in the same year, Jonathan L. Bamber and colleagues estimated a rapid collapse of the west Antarctic ice sheets at 3.3 metres, but 25% higher in some regions, specifically the along the Pacific and Atlantic seaboard of the United States. So that would make it about a four metre rise in those regions. (The latter calculation allows for the fact that not all the ice would go into the sea in a "rapid collapse", among other things.)

Anthony's four foot rise is only 1.2 metres. This is the expected rise in sea level just from the ice sheets of the Amundsen Sea Embayment (ASE). As explained in Rignot14:

The ASE is a dominant contributor to the mass loss from the Antarctic Ice Sheet at present, with losses driven almost entirely by increases in flow speed (Mouginot et al., 2014). This sector is of global signi cance since it contains enough ice to raise global sea level by 1.2 m (e.g. Rignot, 2008).

Will Anthony change his article so as to not look stupid? I doubt it. No-one else picked him up on his ridiculous claim about the volume of ice in western Antarctica.

From the WUWT comments

ZombieSymmetry says:

May 13, 2014 at 6:56 pm
There isn’t even that much water on the planet, is there? I mean, if all ice, everywhere melted, how high would the sea level go?

NASA says it would rise 75 metres, which is 246 feet. That would put LAX under 45 metres of water (nearly 150 feet of water).


Col Mosby says:

May 13, 2014 at 7:55 pm
Now, irregardless of your beliefs about climate, does anyone out there actually believe we
will still be filling our vehicles with gasoline a hundred years from now? Or burning coal or natural gas to make electricity? These people that predict well into the future always assume things won’t change much in the next hundred years (we’ll be on the iPad CLMXXV by then). That’s the most idiotic assumption I’ve ever heard. Nobody believes that. Not even the alarmists, which is quite illogical considering their beliefs. That’s the strongest argument I can think of for not doing anything.

Steven Mosher is rambling and says:

May 13, 2014 at 10:16 pm
It is 200 ,years worst case and then 1mm would be added per year. So its ,200 ,years until the onset of a ,1mm rise per year. Best case 1000 years until the onset

tty says:

May 14, 2014 at 1:15 am
“There isn’t even that much water on the planet, is there? I mean, if all ice, everywhere melted, how high would the sea level go?”

About 70-80 meters (250 feet). But that won’t happen. Neither the Ellsworth mountains (4900 meters), the Transantarctic mountains (4500 meters), the Executive Committee Range (4300 meters) nor Fimbulheimen (3100 meters) are going to become ice-free until Antarctica moves away from the pole or the sun turns into red giant, whichever comes first.
The Ellsworth and Executive Comittee ranges are in West Antarctica by the way. 

markstoval is a fake sceptic, he doesn't compute that Anthony gets so much wrong and says:

May 15, 2014 at 12:41 am
It is nice to win one once in a while. I am glad that Anthony forced this retraction. (misspoke indeed)

The problem is that the mainstream media is all on-board with alarmist scaremongering and we are fighting people who “buy ink by the barrel” (need an updated saying there I guess). How do we get the facts out while the alarmists spread lies, misinformation, and delusions through a compliant mainstream media? 

Why not finish with a comment by Leo Geiger, who says:

May 15, 2014 at 3:52 am
when ridiculous claims are made in the media, challenge them with supportable facts

Absolutely. Same thing applies to ridiculous claims made in blogs.

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E. Rignot, J. Mouginot, M. Morlighem, H. Seroussi, B. Scheuchl. "Widespread, rapid grounding line retreat of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith and Kohler glaciers, West Antarctica from 1992 to 2011".. Geophysical Research Letters, 2014; DOI: 10.1002/2014GL060140

Bamber, Jonathan L., Riccardo EM Riva, Bert LA Vermeersen, and Anne M. LeBrocq. "Reassessment of the potential sea-level rise from a collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet." Science 324, no. 5929 (2009): 901-903. DOI: 10.1126/science.1169335 

Mitrovica, Jerry X., Natalya Gomez, and Peter U. Clark. "The sea-level fingerprint of West Antarctic collapse." Science 323, no. 5915 (2009): 753-753. DOI: 10.1126/science.1166510

Unstoppable meltdown in Antarctica - and at WUWT, with a doozy of chart

Anthony has taken another trip to Antarctica. This time he is complaining about an article in the Guardian, written by Suzanne Goldenberg. What Anthony seems to be complaining about is that the time scale of the projected total collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheets isn't in the headline, which reads:

Western Antarctic ice sheet collapse has already begun, scientists warn

So there is an indication of time - it's already started. Anthony's upset though. He reckons his deniers will only read the headline and get too scared to read any further. He's really scared that deniers won't read as far as the fourth sentence in the article, which is about the resulting four metre rise in sea level:

But the researchers said that even though such a rise could not be stopped, it is still several centuries off, and potentially up to 1,000 years away.

Abused by buried facts

Anthony thinks that if you have to read beyond 75 words of an 880 word article, then the next few words can be regarded as "buried".  He wrote:

Truly an abuse of the headline. Buried below the headline in the article, there is agreement with Revkin:

Anthony was referring to a five-year old article in DotEarth, which was about two papers published in Nature early in 2009. At the time (March 2009), Andy wrote about a paper in Nature, which modeled the West Antarctic ice sheets and reported that:

In this simulation, the ice sheet does collapse when waters beneath fringing ice shelves warm 7 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit or so, but the process at its fastest takes thousands of years. Over all, the pace of sea-level rise from the resulting ice loss doesn't go beyond about 1.5 feet per century.

Obviously as far as Anthony Watts is concerned, some models are good!

Collapses to the West and the East

What Suzanne Goldenberg was writing about in the Guardian today was a new paper by Eric Rignot and colleagues. This is the same Eric Rignot that Andy Revkin quoted five years ago (in Anthony's preferred 2009 article) writing:

Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory cautioned that the new findings were based on a single, fairly simple simulation and said that while the results matched well with the seabed evidence, they lacked the precision needed to know what will happen over short periods.

"This new study illustrates once more that the collapse of West Antarctica and parts of East Antarctica is not a myth." he said. "It happened many times before when the Earth was as warm as it is about to be. In terms of time scales, I do not think the results of this study are relevant to what will be happening in the next 100 years and beyond. The problem is far more complex. But this is a step forward."

Western Antarctica has already started to collapse, but it will take time

The long and short of it is that in denier land, it's an "abuse" to have a factual headline about new research findings:

Western Antarctic ice sheet collapse has already begun, scientists warn

That Guardian headline was mild compared to the NASA headline about the paper, which was:

West Antarctic glacier loss appears unstoppable

Anthony, for a change, not only included the title of the paper, which is:

Widespread, rapid grounding line retreat of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith and Kohler glaciers, West Antarctica from 1992 to 2011.

...he even copied and pasted the abstract. Though he didn't go as far as providing a link to it. (My paras & bold italics)

We measure the grounding line retreat of glaciers draining the Amundsen Sea Embayment of West Antarctica using Earth Remote Sensing (ERS-1/2) satellite radar interferometry from 1992 to 2011.

Pine Island Glacier retreated 31 km at its center, with most retreat in 2005–2009 when the glacier un-grounded from its ice plain.

Thwaites Glacier retreated 14 km along its fast-flow core and 1 to 9 km along the sides.

Haynes Glacier retreated 10 km along its flanks.

Smith/Kohler glaciers retreated the most, 35 km along its ice plain, and its ice shelf pinning points are vanishing.

These rapid retreats proceed along regions of retrograde bed elevation mapped at a high spatial resolution using a mass conservation technique (MC) that removes residual ambiguities from prior mappings. Upstream of the 2011 grounding line positions, we find no major bed obstacle that would prevent the glaciers from further retreat and draw down the entire basin.

Below is a map showing a couple of these glaciers. (Click to enlarge it.)

Source: Rignot13, Science

Anthony Watts doesn't usually go beyond newspapers and press releases. Scientific papers are a bit too deep for deniers. Anyway, he was comforted by Andy Revkin's 2009 headline, made especially for the scaredy cats like Anthony Watts and other science deniers:

Study: West Antarctic Melt a Slow Affair

Andy's latest headline on the subject was similarly aimed at calming the scaredy cats:

Consider Clashing Scientific and Societal Meanings of Collapse When Reading Antarctic Ice News

He's right of course. But deniers go way too far in the other direction.  They don't realise that only a couple of centuries from now, there could be a massive collapse causing a big rise in sea level. It might be later (I guess it might be sooner, too.)

Rabbet Run has the scary science

Eli Rabett has written about the study and what it means. It means that sometime in the next few centuries - maybe as soon as 200 years ahead (that is, it could be the children of your children's children who have to cope), the ice in West Antarctica could, over a matter of decades, cause a sudden large rise in sea level. Not something you would wish on your children or theirs.

Where are all the fake sceptic fact-checkers?

I don't know where all the fake sceptic fact-checkers have gone. They are quick off the mark if they see a similar mistake here, but a worse mistake at WUWT eludes them.  See if you can spot it.  Anthony wrote the following and put up a chart:

And there’s not any significant warming over the entire continent, as it is nearly flat as well (from 70S to the pole):

Source: WUWT

I think annual averages allow you to see the trend a bit better than monthly charts.

Data source: RSS

Did you see the main problem? Of course you got it. Anthony plotted a chart of the lower troposphere from the outer edge of Antarctica upwards to the equator. Antarctica is more like 70 south to 90 south. RSS doesn't show lower troposphere temperatures below 70S.

What happens near the surface is much more important

The other thing of course is that it's the temperature of the ocean that plays a very big role in melting the ice in West Antarctica. Probably much more so than the temperature of the lower troposphere.  There have been other papers about that. A reduction in snow cover can also speed up melting rather a lot.

From the WUWT comments

John Boles is optimistic and thinks the collapse will happen later rather than sooner, and says:

May 12, 2014 at 2:41 pm
It might be worse than we thought, well maybe in the distant future, our models suggest that it could happen perhaps in 1000 years.

Justthinkin doesn't do any thinking at all (or reading) and says:

May 12, 2014 at 2:49 pm
So what’s the problem? She writes a piece full of BS,gets paid,and doesn’t give a hoot about what others say. Until you take away her paycheck,same old,same old. And scientific or un-scientific facts will not stop that. And just what the heck is “several centuries” or a thousand years? To me,several could be 20,000years from now.

Martin C is relieved that the seas may not rise quite four metres until after he's six feet under and says:

May 12, 2014 at 2:51 pm
I think it’s great to see these extremely ‘alarmist’ headlines, followed by a bit less alarmist in the text. People will continue to see the ‘alarmism’ for what it is. And likely continued to get turned off by it. Especially when the same ‘journalists’ keep printing this crap. 

pablo an ex pat has been misled by Anthony, who recently made a big fool of himself, and doesn't realise how big Antarctica is (it's about twice the size of Australia ie around twice as big as contiguous USA), or that there are lots of mountains separating east and west, and says:

May 12, 2014 at 2:53 pm
So in two alarmist stories reported during the space of on one day on WUWT the Antarctic is getting colder and warmer all at the same time. It’s both gaining ice and it’s losing ice. And both these occurrences are issues that needs us to do something right now. What exactly ?

Ed P is not good at assessing relative risk but he values money, and says:

May 12, 2014 at 2:53 pm
Yellowstone could explode or meteors might wipe out most of humanity before the sea rises that much. All that is certain is that governments will steal your savings long before you need a boat. 

Jeff in Calgary doesn't have a clue what the new paper is about and yes, he's missing something:

May 12, 2014 at 3:22 pm
Isn’t this about a floating ice sheet? How is a floating ice sheet melting going to raise sea levels? Am I missing something? 

sadbutmadlad is sad and deluded and doesn't realise that climate is changing in the here and now, and says:

May 12, 2014 at 9:53 pm
The narrative works. Lie first, lie big. Just watching a BBC Breakfast item on the newspapers at 5:50am and they talked about not being able to do anything about global warming as its already here. No mention of the 1000 years, everything was couched in terms of immediacy. Even journalists don’t read the small print and are fooled by the article. Ultimate scaremongering

In all the 97 comments over 13 hours I didn't see one that picked up on Anthony's gaffe with his RSS temperature chart. There may have been one or two that discussed the science. The rest were pure unadulterated wails of denial.

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E. Rignot, J. Mouginot, M. Morlighem, H. Seroussi, B. Scheuchl. "Widespread, rapid grounding line retreat of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith and Kohler glaciers, West Antarctica from 1992 to 2011".. Geophysical Research Letters, 2014; DOI: 10.1002/2014GL060140

Rignot, E., S. Jacobs, J. Mouginot, and B. Scheuchl. "Ice-shelf melting around Antarctica." Science 341, no. 6143 (2013): 266-270. DOI: 10.1126/science.1235798

Peter Kuipers Munneke, Stefan R.m. Ligtenberg, Michiel R. Van Den Broeke, David G. Vaughan. "Firn air depletion as a precursor of Antarctic ice-shelf collapse". Journal of Glaciology, 2014; 60 (220): 205 DOI: 10.3189/2014JoG13J183

Huybrechts, Philippe. "Global change: West-side story of Antarctic ice." Nature 458, no. 7236 (2009): 295-296. doi:10.1038/458295a

Naish, Timothy, R. Powell, Richard Levy, G. Wilson, R. Scherer, Franco Talarico, L. Krissek et al. "Obliquity-paced Pliocene West Antarctic ice sheet oscillations." Nature 458, no. 7236 (2009): 322-328. doi:10.1038/nature07867