More Stupid from Anthony Watts of WUWT
Today Anthony Watts (who runs a blog called WUWT) wrote about a new paper by Rignot et al to be published in Science *, and crowed triumphantly - see, it's not CO2 that's melting the ice shelves around the Antarctic continent, it's warmer sea water. He proclaimed it a game changer saying it made studies of surface temperature over the continent itself "even more irrelevant"!
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| Source: plognark |
Huh?
Now why would Anthony confuse land surface temperature across the huge continent of Antarctica with sea temperature around the edge of the continent? (Antarctica is a bit smaller than South America, larger than Europe and almost twice the size of Australia.) Is he that stupid or is he intentionally misleading his readers? It's an even bet with Anthony Watts.
Not only that, but why would he think that warmer oceans around Antarctica are not related to global warming? Does he think oceans warm by magic? Or that global warming would not have an impact on ocean currents and atmospheric circulation?
Needless to say, Anthony is not only wrong about this being a "game changer", he is also wrong about Eric Steig's work. The extent of the contribution of warmer waters at 55% is a new and important finding, but it's not as if melt from warm ocean waters as a concept is new. As Dr Steig wrote back in April 2013 about past research focusing on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (my bold):
For WAIS, the culprit for the rapid thinning of ice shelves is increased delivery of warm ocean water to the base of the ice shelves. This isn’t due to a warming ocean (though the deep water off the Antarctic coast line is indeed warming), but to changes in the winds that have forced more circumpolar deep water onto the continental shelf. Circumpolar deep water, at about +2°C, is very hot compared with the in situ melting point of glacier ice.
In a series of papers, we’ve shown that the warmer temperatures observed over the WAIS are the result of those same atmospheric circulation changes, which are not related to the SAM, but rather to the remote forcing from changes in the tropical Pacific: changes in the character of ENSO (Steig et al., 2012; Ding et al., 2011; 2012).)
This article is a bit long and has some nice photos and images, so to save those of you who might have limited bandwidth, I've put the rest of the article below the jump.
