More bad news. One of the most depressing aspects of this controversy is that, even as we debate basic issues such as whether there is any warming in the first place, the data just keep rolling in and the situation keeps turning out to be worse than we had earlier thought. If you read the sequence of IPCC reports, you see (well, there are a few minor exceptions) a steady sequence of increasing confidence that the situation is bad, that it's happening faster than we though it would, and that the predictions for the future are even worse than they were before.

Of course, this is just one report, and it hasn't yet gone through the full process of scientific criticism. Perhaps somebody will find a flaw in the methodology. Perhaps somebody else has another paper in the works with better news. That's why we really shouldn't place too much emphasis on the breaking news. Better to wait for it to be digested and integrated into the next IPCC report. Only then will we non-experts be able to appreciate the significance of this paper.

This artical makes me not only a skeptic, but a cynic.

I've been paying attention to the sea temperature anomalies at the Accuweather Site,

http://proa.accuweather.com/adcbin/professional/models_grads.asp?mod=sst&mv0=accubigfour850&cap=Sea%20Surface%20Temperature%20Anomalies%20(C)&hr=1&gs=sst_anom&map=world&gv0=A&uid=wo_anomn

and for the most part the waters around Antarctica have been below normal for the past two years.

How then can Dr. Rignot speak of "upwelling of warm waters along the Antarctic coast?" Wouldn't such upswelling create a warm anomaly?

Reply: Keep in mind the study was done with data between 1996 and 2006, not 2007 or 2008.

I can only assume Dr. Rignot is comparing the data from 1992 with the data from 2006, oblivious to current conditions. I furthermore note some of his data is generated by models, which is not the same as data generated by actual conditions.

I recently read that over 1 million Km2 of sea ice had disappeared from the "averages" of Antarctic sea ice. Nowhere did this artical note that this reduced the "averages" from 2 million to 1 million ABOVE normal. And how can there be more sea ice than normal, if you have "warm upswelling?"

I think some people have such an eager wish to see certain results that they manage to be oblivious to actual conditions. This is always a danger in life. In romance, it is called "infatuation." In science, it is called "bad science."

Arctic melting
Climate scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, outside Washington, say the Arctic Ocean could be entirely ice free in late summer 2013.

"The sea ice is decreasing faster than all the models predicted," says Jay Zwally, the ice satellite project scientist at NASA Goddard, "We not only have the warming of the atmosphere, we have a warming of the ocean that is affecting this. It has been surprising to everybody, this decrease in area. This is a marked departure, and this is suggesting to us that maybe we are getting at this tipping point."

http://www.voanews.com/english/2008-01-09-voa12.cfm

http://www.voanews.com/mediaassets/e...ngPoint_bb.wmv

Better build my "TUNNELS" Now!They shpould have been computer modeled in 1997!!

This is a remarkable piece of journalism, for two reasons.

1. If Dr. Rignot's measurements of the melt of the earth's two ice sheets are correct, it would indicate a marked decrease in the rate of sea level rise over the last century. (Reply: The point of his study is that there has been an increase in the rate of "ice sheet loss" in Antarctica. )
The claim is that Greenland and Antarctica are each responsible for a rise of 1/2 mm per year, for a total of one millimeter per year. That corresponds to a total rise of one meter per 1000 years, or about one foot per 300 years. A much lower rate than even the IPCC's most conservative estimates, and also much lower than the last century. There are no other significant sources of water to contribute to the ocean's volume, so it becomes apparent that sea level rise has slowed considerably.

2. Given the conclusions from part 1, the author's obvious attempt to cause alarm would appear to be completely inappropriate. Difficult to say if the fault lies with Dr. Rignot or with the newspaper.

Dr. Rignot said the shrinkage can be attributed to upwelling of warm waters along the Antarctic coast, which is causing some glaciers to flow more rapidly into the ocean. He suspects the trend is due to global warming and not a normal natural fluctuation.

Hopefully Dr. Rignot did not ask to have his "suspicions" quoted. That would be rather poor form and unprofessional. Given that both regions of melt (Antarctic Peninsula and West Antarctica) are active volcanic and geothermal areas, he would be wise to keep his unsubstantiated speculations to himself.

The ice loss in 2006 raised sea levels about a 1/2 millimeter

Great comedy! That corresponds to 1 meter per 2,000 years, or one inch of sea level rise every 50 years.

For reference, I was at the beach last October near the mouth of the Severn River in Wales - where sea level fluctuates 260 inches every day.

I also enjoyed his discussion of "computer models, suspicions and lullabies." That sounds like a good title for a country music album.

Here is some more serious journalism-

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,322452,00.html

Feud Heats Up Between Cities Over 'Nation's Ice Box' Trademark

Sunday, January 13, 2008

FRASER, Colorado — A feud between two U.S. cities over who owns the trademark "Ice Box of the Nation" is heating up.

Fraser, Colorado Town Manager Jeff Durbin said the Minnesota town of International Falls has replied to a lawsuit filed by Fraser with a countersuit.

Fraser officials say their town has used the phrase since 1956, and officials in International Falls say they have used it since 1948. The dueling lawsuits ask city officials to prove it.

The two chilly municipalities fought an earlier cold war over the motto decades ago that ended in 1986 with Fraser giving up its "official" claim to the trademark in exchange for $2,000 from International Falls.

But the Minnesota city last year acknowledged it had inadvertently failed to renew its federal trademark back in 1996, even while keeping a state trademark up to date. That allowed Fraser to file its own application.

To outsiders it might seem ridiculous, but Durbin said it is important to Fraser's residents.

"We ought to get something out of it after having to live through winters here," resident Joan Christensen said.

The Summit Daily News in Frisco, Colorado, reported an attempt to settle it with a duel failed when Fraser wanted it to be a contest on snowshoes and the Minnesota mayor wanted a snowball fight.

On Sunday afternoon, the National Weather Service said, Fraser was the warmer of the two cities at a balmy 19 degrees. International Falls was 17 degrees.

Some quick calculations - at "1/2 millimeter per year," it will take 50,000 years to get to Hansen's predicted sea level rise of "up to 25 meters this century" but only 1,180 years to fulfill the IPCC's prediction of "59 cm this century."

http://www.physics.utoronto.ca/news_repository/will-oceans-surge-59-centimetres-this-century-or-25-metres

Brett,

The only significant sources of new water causing sea level rise are from melting ice in Antarctica and Greenland. Dr. Rignot has measured both, and came up with a total contribution of 1mm per year.

The average rate of sea level rise over the last century was close to 3mm per year. The rate of sea level rise is directly proportional to the rate of ice loss, so it can be inferred that ice loss from Antarctica has decreased by 2/3 over the last century.

For reference, since the end of the last ice age, sea level has risen an average of nearly 7mm per year.

TH,

"There are no other significant sources of water to contribute to the ocean's volume"

Well, you missed thermal expansion for starters.

"Given the conclusions from part 1, the author's obvious attempt to cause alarm would appear to be completely inappropriate."

I think it's inappropriate to speculate on someone's intentions when you do not have all the facts in hand.

Marie,
"Some quick calculations - at '1/2 millimeter per year,' it will take 50,000 years to get to Hansen's predicted sea level rise of 'up to 25 meters this century' but only 1,180 years to fulfill the IPCC's prediction of '59 cm this century.' "

1/2 mm per year is not the right number. The current rise is 6 times that and expected to continue rising. As to Hansen's "prediction" of 25 meters, saying something is possible does mean he is predicting it will happen.

Hi Guys,

Talk about cherry picking. These guys want their cake and eat it too. If you put data up for say 10 years and they say your just cherry picking. But then they can use the same time scale and say see look the sky is falling. Look I don't think any here will say that the sea level rise changes from year to year. Some times more some times less.
http://nzclimatescience.net/images/PDFs/mornerpaper497.pdf

One thing to note is that the author came to this number by subtracting ACTUAL ice loss from ESTIMATED snow accumulation. Thus one thing is measured while one is modeled. This estimation was taken from computer models of snow accumulation. How accurate are these models. I would have more faith in that 0.5 mm estimate if snow was actually measured instead of modeled.

From an article in Science magazine, 11 January 2008: Vol. 319. no. 5860, p. 145,

�More Climate Wackiness in the Cretaceous Supergreenhouse?�. (subscription)

Some researches have evidence that there was a great sheet of glacial ice sitting on Antarctica at the height of the Cretaceous hothouse. The research is based on a classic analysis of microfossils boosted by a newer innovation.

From the paper (peer-reviewed no less in Science magazine) �The Turonian (93.5 to 89.3 million years ago) was one of the warmest periods of the Phanerozoic eon, with tropical sea surface temperatures over 35�C. High-amplitude sea-level changes and positive 18O(delta superscript 18 Oxygen) excursions in marine limestones suggest that glaciation events may have punctuated this episode of extreme warmth. New 18O (delta superscript 18 Oxygen) data from the tropical Atlantic show synchronous shifts 91.2 million years ago for both the surface and deep ocean that are consistent with an approximately 200,000-year period of glaciation, with ice sheets of about half the size of the modern Antarctic ice cap. Even the prevailing supergreenhouse climate was not a barrier to the formation of large ice sheets, calling into question the common assumption that the poles were always ice-free during past periods of intense global warming. �

(delta superscript 18 Oxygen didn't transfer very well to this site)

So maybe all the ice won�t melt from the Antarctic as we warm up a tad.

Please, the situation is not getting worse, compared to what? Compared to the Middle Ages, life looks pretty good to me. I don't have to spend all day over the fire cooking dead animals my hunter husband has brought home and living in a hovel trying to get warm.

So the JPL made some type of measurements (I'm assuming remote satellite sensors), and plugged these numbers into a model, and viola the Antartic should have lost an X amount of ice.

Everyone knows that most glaciers will lose mass along unfrozen waters; Dr Rignot speculates that the warmer waters of course are caused by GHG. As far as I know the passage between South America and the Antartic have always been open (at least since the 1600s), and that warmer tropical waters are carried poleward by natural ocean currents. There has yet been no proof that our ocean currents are caused by or "enhanced" by GHGs.

What is interesting, the folks at the JPL really don't know what is going on there. Actual surface weather reports give us a totally different picture of the Antartica. The last 18-24 months have seen some of the coldest temperatures in the last 30 years. Vostock came close to setting a record low last August. The polar source regions of the SH continue to generate anomously cold air masses. This is the kind of "studies" that go against empirical knowledge. Computer models and "adjusted" temps seem to be the only leg the Alarmists can stand on.

Yikes, scientists are duking it out over climate change. I guess it isn�t totally settled. At least in some scientific circles, it is still ok to discuss theories. (Which I had always assumed was one of the characteristics of a true scientist.)

From Science magazine, 11 January 2008,
�Daggers Are Drawn Over Revived Cosmic Ray-Climate Link�.

�Last year, climate change scientists thought they had driven a silver stake through the idea that fluctuations in solar activity were behind global warming in the last century. Now, a high-profile team led by geophysicist Vincent Courtillot, director of the Institut de Physique du Globe in Paris, has sought to raise the dead in a paper linking changes in Earth's magnetic field to temperature variations in recent millennia."

"The paper, which appeared last year in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, has drawn fierce criticism, including a rebuttal in the 15 January issue of EPSL, and sparked a rancorous debate on a climate blog. "There is nothing new nor valuable in Courtillot's paper," asserts Gilles Delaygue, a geochemist at the University Paul C�zanne Aix-Marseille 3. Not so, says Courtillot. "If we are proven to be right, this will seriously backlash on scientists' credibility," he says.�

Courtillot is one of a handful of credible scientists who reject IPCC's bottom line. "Magnetic field fluctuations and sun pulses fit with global temperature change better than carbon dioxide does," he asserts, reviving a hypothesis that many scientists believe the IPCC reports had discredited. Knowing they are touching a sore spot, Courtillot cautions: "We are not yet drawing conclusions nor giving definitive explanations. We are providing new evidences from observations." He and his team acknowledge that "anomalous warming" in the past 2 decades apparently cannot be linked to solar or geomagnetic activity, although they decline to ascribe it to greenhouse gases.

This is unlikely to be the last word in the saga. "Many mechanisms that have been debunked have not been debunked at all," claims Courtillot, who says that he will soon publish two studies arguing that methods used to measure global temperature need to be revised. Delaygue and many others, however, say that Courtillot's group is doing more harm than good by downplaying the carbon dioxide-climate change link.�

Dr. Rignot specializes in geoscience applications of RADAR interferometry and polarimetry.
He is not a "climatologist" per se.
Does this mean that we can rely on his measurements but ignore his suspicions about GW being the cause?
If Dr. Rignot is a member of the American Geophysical Union, and the International Glaciological Society should he not be concerned about active volcanic and geothermal areas as well (both known and to be discovered)?

Scotland's 5 ski centres have been enjoying the recent wintry weather with some of the "best skiing in years."

http://www.edinburghguide.com/story/sport/skiing/1194

One of 704 Google hits for "best skiing in years".

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2006-45,GGGL:en&q=%22best+skiing+in+years%22&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=nw

PH re previous postings temps IPCC etc: I wonder if you have thought of advising climateaudit about the ice graph discrepancies.

Daily weather observations are not evidence of climate, of course. We all know that, but apparently Patrick Henry will never quit hoping otherwise.

Hi Guys,

Some more cherry pickin' denier stuff. Another hot summer in Antarctica.

Five GISS Stations To The North And East Coast Of The West Antarctic Peninsula

70188968000 BASE ORCADAS -60.75 -44.72 6 0R -9HIICCO 1x-9WATER
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=301889630008&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1

70089050000 BELLINGSHAUSE -62.20 -58.93 16 76R -9HIICCO 1x-9ANTARCTICA A
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=700890500008&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1

30489056000 CENTRO MET.AN, Marsh -62.42 -58.88 10 0R -9HIICCO 1x-9ANTARCTICA A
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=304890560008&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1

30188963000 BASE ESPERANZ -63.40 -56.98 13 45R -9HIICCO 1x-9WATER A
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=301889630008&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1

70089055000 CMS_VICE.DO.Marambio -64.23 -56.72 198 0R -9HIICCO 1x-9WATER A
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=700890550008&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1

Three GISS Stations On The West Coast Of The West Antarctic Peninsula

70089063000 FARADAY -65.25 -64.27 11 0R -9HIICCO 1x-9WATER A
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=700890630008&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1

70089062000 ROTHERA POINT -67.57 -68.13 16 12R -9HIICCO 1x-9WATER A
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=700890620000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1

70089066000 BASE SAN MARTIN -68.13 -67.13 4 233R -9MVICCO 1x-9WATER A
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=700890660004&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1

Old data, old data. 2007 was a record year for the highest amount of sea ice coverage in the Southern Hemisphere.(http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.south.jpg)
The majority of the Arctic regions are currently at or above "normal" as well.

Reply: Fred, your talking sea ice. The study is talking about the ice sheet.

1/2 millimeter? We better head for the hills. I hate to break to it to the the AGW'ers but it's summer in that part of the world and congrats they figured out that the ice melts. Bravo!

This sentence really makes me ask:

"the figures were calculated by deducting the amount of ice losses on the continent from the amount of snow computer models indicate it receives."

So they weren't actual measurments!!?? If I went by computer models I would have gotten 5-10 inches of snow last night here in Jersey but instead I got a half inch. It wasn't to warm, just that the storm ended at mid-night and didn't get into to action. I would not trust ANY study done by using computer models to "guess" at the information. This study is irrelavent and biased.

"He suspects the trend is due to global warming and not a normal natural fluctuation."

-Next he Will blame it on Crab People. Right Patrick Henry?

Several people have observed that a rate of sea level increase of 0.5 mm/year is low enough that we needn't be concerned about sea level rise any longer. There are two flaws with this reasoning:

1. This is not asserted to be the TOTAL sea level rise, it is asserted t