The last 800 years of ice cores from Antarctica shows that the icecap has apparently been increasing over the last century.
The uncertainty of science: Ice core data from the last 800 years from Antarctica suggest that the icecap has been growing over the last century.
The changes also appear to correlate with solar fluctuations, though there are so many uncertainties here that no single explanation can yet be accepted as the answer.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
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The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
The uncertainty of science: Ice core data from the last 800 years from Antarctica suggest that the icecap has been growing over the last century.
The changes also appear to correlate with solar fluctuations, though there are so many uncertainties here that no single explanation can yet be accepted as the answer.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Except thats NOT what the paper says. It says it snowing more, in certain regions, and that CLIMATE MODELS have predicted a warming climate would cause it to snow more in Antarctica. It says changes in the Surface Mass Balance (SMB) over the 800 year period are ‘statistically negligible.” That does not sound like a growing icecap to me.
I also notice the original abstract says they used ice cores with ‘greater detail’ in the last 200 years… but I don’t see any howls of protest from the ‘skeptic’ crowd about how ‘changes in data resolution’ are causing the ‘uptick’ in snowfall in the Antarctic, or that the ‘hockey stick’ in Antarctica is a ‘fraud’.
Ah, cherry picking and distortion, its what ‘skeptics’ do best. And so much for ‘all the climate models are wrong’.
Note the word “suggest”; this is not a definitive statement, so there’s not a lot to protest. The biggest beef I have with most proclamations on climate change are that they’re very definitive and intolerant of any degree of doubt, and doubt is what ultimately leads to theories that better fit the observed data.
Most of the gloom and doom climate predictions are based on the Antarctic icecap melting, raising sea levels catastrophically; if true, SMB would have been negative. The graph is interesting to me, in that it SUGGESTS a coorelation between higher temperatures and higher SMB; the text points out that this is counterintuitive and SUGGESTS a highly complicated mechanism. There are simply too many factors involved with climate, with complicated interactions, to make the kind of sweeping doom and gloom statements that warmists often make.
Columbus was a skeptic who doubted the theory that the earth was flat.
Copernicus was a skeptic who doubted the theory that the sun and everything else in the sky revolved around the earth.
Darwin was a skeptic who doubted the theory that all life was created instantaneously,
I can go on; the point is that almost all great advances in science are made by skeptics.
Garry,
Most prominent skeptics have zero scientific credentials. Comparing them to Copernicus and Darwin is ridiculous.
Thomas,
One point: this is the second time you have focused on “credentials” as a criteria for dismissing criticisms of climate work. That might make you feel good, but as far as I am concerned, it is the data that counts, not the resume of the person who compiles. it.
Moreover, I wonder why you have never watched Jasper Kirkby’s hour long presentation about the possibility of the Sun influencing the climate, included at the end of this post. Kirkby has the credentials you value so much, being a physicist as CERN. Why would you avoid hearing what he had to say about the climate, unless you fear his data might overthrow some of your preconceived notions?
Speaking of physicist, I’ve recently been watching a number of Richard Feynman videos recorded in the 80’s where he took a very dim view of what he called the soft sciences where the practitioners seemed to go through the motions of the scientific process in collecting and tabulating data, but would be unable to ever yield testable and repeatable hypothesis. He took an even dimmer view when these people wrapped themselves with the cloak of being an “expert” in their chosen field, despite the fact there was no way of ever determining how expert they really were. Finally, he was not impressed those who attempted to use computer models as proof of a scientific hypothesis being correct. Instead, Feynman greatly appreciated computers as an aid to better explore and understand “what if” scenarios, but he was careful to not confuse the output a computer gave as a substitute for reality. For him, matching reality against prediction was the gold standard of determining if science being performed had any merit.
Listening to Feynman, I couldn’t help but wonder what he would think of the global warming debate.
I have posted several Feynman interviews here on Behind the Black. See:
http://behindtheblack.com/?s=Feynman
Why I don’t trust AMATEURS:
You claim you look at the data, and resumes don’t matter to you. Well they matter to me. The reason they matter is that scientists, the ones with the resume’s, know how to interpret the raw data, while climate ‘skeptics’ don’t. Now why is this? Its because the vast majority of climate skeptics have no training as scientists, and being AMATEURS, make the kind of mistakes no scientist would make.
A case in point is you posting your headline, and linking to an article,from another skeptical AMATEUR, which simply misinterprets data. If you read down into the comments far enough ‘dumb scientist’, an actual scientist, the one with the ‘resume’, points out her mistake, and links to actual data proving his point.
So no, Anarctica is not gaining ice.
But one would never know that from gullible ‘skeptics’ who don’t seem to know how to research things, and can’t be bothered to acknowledge mistakes, and just pass them on one to another, as your links going back to the original source material containing actual data, demonstrates.
How embarrassing for you.
About the Kirkby video:
Actually I did look at it the other day. If AGW ‘skeptics’ had an ounce of his zeal for actual science and his training , more scientists would take skeptics seriously. But they don’t, so no one does. He, on the other hand, is taken seriously precisely because, although climatology is a bit outside his field of being a particle physicist , he is an actual scientist from a world renowned science lab (that old ‘resume’ thing again), and there is definite overlap between cosmic rays and the atmosphere. Unlike the ‘skeptics’ that link to him, he is the first to admit his findings don’t contain any smoking gun linking cosmic rays to global warming. So no, he does not overturn my ‘preconceived notions’. But I do admire him. If only more skeptics were like him, I would admire them also.
“Climate scientists” are themselves amateurs. It is a young field that hasn’t proved itself yet, sort of like the early days of Anthropology. In a hierarchy of academic rigor, accountability, achievement, and knowledge climate science is down there with gender studies.
I already responded to your delusion that climatology is a ‘young field’. I need not do so again.
Thomas,
Why must you be so insulting when you disagree with someone? Climatology, in its present form, is a relatively young science. Until the space age, it was impossible to measure climate accurately. For example, the first precise measurements of the sun’s variability did not occur until after 1978, after the launch of Nimbus 7.
Your original complaint to me was that I called certain climate scientists and their work fraudulent. You didn’t like it that I called them a name, even though I do have solid evidence that it is true. Well, what are you doing here, with far less justification? It certainly is not delusional to suggest the science of climate is a relatively young field. By calling wodun names, you do nothing to convince anyone of the rightness of your position. If anything, you discredit yourself.
Robert-
1. I already debunked Wodun’s idea that climatology is a new science, directly to him, in another post, and even provided a link. To then make THE SAME CLAIM is, well….
2. Your standards of what constitutes a new science – increasingly precise measurements- can be applied indiscriminately to any science. By your logic, I guess we can claim the study of cosmology is about two weeks old.
3. You’ve already discredited yourself with the posting of your bogus claim about Antarctica.
4. Your claims of fraud are equally absurd.
Based on this response, I personally wonder why you even bother reading my website.
No one seriously studied the idea of climate change until the 20th century, and no one considered the data good enough to be useful until the beginnings of the space age. Prior to that there were a few credentialed scientists with long resumes claiming they knew what was going on, but no one took their data or their theories very seriously. It wasn’t until satellites got into orbit that we could do reliable research on climate. That is when the science of climate really began, no matter what you might think.
Moreover, your “debunking” of Wodun was not very convincing to me, or to anyone. Just because you said it does not mean we have to agree with you.
And claiming my (or anyone else’s) statements are “absurd” doesn’t make them so. You need to prove it, and you need to do it in a way that will convince me. At this, you fail quite miserably. Instead, you throw out insults as proof. Very unpleasant.
Finally, you exhibit good skepticism when it comes to any claim of skepticism is made about climate change. This is worthwhile. However, why do you not also exhibit this same skepticism of any opposing claim by all global warming scientists? They are as prone to be wrong as anyone, and based on my research, more so in recent years. Instead, you take their words as gospel. They have resumes and titles, they must be right!
I read your website for your space news. For the rest, you should stick to exploring caves.
Insulting again. Very tiresome.
Oh, BTW, on your comment: “It wasn’t until satellites got into orbit that we could do reliable research on climate.”
For once we agree.
Heres a little chart from NASA clearly showing the continuing ice loss in Antarctica. Guess what its based on? Satellites!
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/Grace/multimedia/chart20121129.html
And if satellites get your nod of approval, multiple satellite must be even more convincing:
An international team of experts supported by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) has combined data from multiple satellites and aircraft to produce the most comprehensive and accurate assessment to date of ice sheet losses in Greenland and Antarctica and their contributions to sea level rise….The new estimates, which are more than twice as accurate because of the inclusion of more satellite data, confirm both Antarctica and Greenland are losing ice….The study was produced by an international collaboration — the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise (IMBIE) — that combined observations from 10 satellite missions to develop the first consistent measurement of polar ice sheet changes.
But I don’t want to bore you… you can read all about it here:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/Grace/news/grace20121129.html
Aren’t satellites great? I think so too.
Subjective and Objective.
Subjective people who hear something that makes intuitive sense to them tend to latch on to those feel good “facts” and parrot them as fact, usually to people who have heard similar “facts” on MSNBC or the like. Upon confrontation (testing) and digging into the “facts” their logic string tends to break down and the conversation tends to end. Some even doggedly insist on their version, no matter what and base their decisions on these “facts”.
There is a difference between “facts” as they exist in the minds eye of the public and scientific fact. One is based in subjectivity and the other based in the objective gathering of information through repeatable observation and testing, this is what establishes scientific fact. They are two very, very different things. The majority of the public are not qualified to judge the two because they are more subjective (emotional) than objective (void of subjective bias as much as humanly possible. I think that is a double negative statement, thats the irony and challenge of developing objectivity and scientific “fact”.).
This being understood creates the potential for manipulation of public opinion through subjectivity being leveraged into fear and then into a desired action. A pure form of manipulation.
Step back and be objective, its not as easy as most people think. You have to train yourself to it and you always have to be aware of your human potential for bias.