What happened to global warming?

haha, ...how very wily, ..er "wiley" of you..

... dog ate my script, so i gotta improv..

 

technology/innovation will change the energy landscape, ..but i believe fossil fuels w/ continue to be the majority contributor for a long time, ... mainly because it is much more "energy dense" than other forms, ..well except for nuclear... the first question is, do we shuffle the portfolio to add more nuclear?... some of the others like solar and wind are much less viable on a large scale at present, and is unreliable because it relies on weather.. ..but as you've probably seen in your AO, ..that small solar cells are popping up to power small utilities and gadgets - so there is promise, but technology has a long long way to improve it to make it a major "player" that can carry the load..

 

Havent read anything. but. it got cold. /thread

 

Al better be counting his blessings since the $100 million he made happened before this stuff leaked out! :lol:

Earth's Polar Ice Melting Less Than Thought

Better technology yields better data. The bad news is the extra water from 2003-2010 would fill Lake Erie eight times

By JASON KOEBLER
February 8, 2012 RSS Feed Print
Nearly 230 billion tons of ice is melting into the ocean from glaciers, ice caps, and mountaintops annually—which is actually less than previous estimates, according to new research by scientists at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

If the amount of ice lost between 2003 and 2010 covered the United States, the whole country would be under one-and-a-half feet of water, or it'd fill Lake Erie eight times, researchers say. Ocean levels worldwide are rising about six hundredths of an inch per year, according to researcher John Wahr.

While vast quantities of ice melting into the ocean is not exactly good news, Wahr says, according to his team's estimates, about 30 percent less ice is melting than previously thought.

The team used data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellite, which was launched as a joint project between NASA and Germany in 2002. The GRACE satellite measures gravity, which is related to mass, in 20 distinct regions worldwide. Wahr says that gives the team more accurate estimates, because previous teams had to measure ice loss at "a few easily accessible glaciers" and then extrapolate it to the 200,000 glaciers worldwide.

"It's tough to get an estimate [with previous methods]," he says.

With GRACE, the team can measure wide swaths of the earth, giving them a more complete picture. "It was time to do a complete global inventory," he says. Although the team used eight years of GRACE's data, Wahr says it's important to realize that melting patterns are hard to predict.

"Even with an eight-year estimate, it's not clear how far into the future you can project," he says. "A lot of people want to predict into the end of the century, but I think it's too dangerous to do that … We don't have enough info to know what'll happen. There's some ebb and flow to these things."

Study: Global Warming is Real
Economy Keeps Global Warming on Back Burner for 2012
10 Reasons Americans Aren’t Talking About Climate Change
jkoebler@usnews.com

Twitter: @jason_koebler

Corrected 2/8/12: An earlier version of this article misidentified the rate at which global sea levels are rising.

 

The Himalayas and nearby peaks have lost no ice in past 10 years, study shows
Meltwater from Asia's peaks is much less then previously estimated, but lead scientist says the loss of ice caps and glaciers around the world remains a serious concern
• In pictures: the best images of the earth from space


Hopar glacier in Pakistan. Melting ice outside the two largest caps - Greenland and Antarctica - is much less then previously estimated, the study has found. Photograph: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

The world's greatest snow-capped peaks, which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice over the last decade, new research shows.

The discovery has stunned scientists, who had believed that around 50bn tonnes of meltwater were being shed each year and not being replaced by new snowfall.

The study is the first to survey all the world's icecaps and glaciers and was made possible by the use of satellite data. Overall, the contribution of melting ice outside the two largest caps – Greenland and Antarctica – is much less then previously estimated, with the lack of ice loss in the Himalayas and the other high peaks of Asia responsible for most of the discrepancy.

Bristol University glaciologist Prof Jonathan Bamber, who was not part of the research team, said: "The very unexpected result was the negligible mass loss from high mountain Asia, which is not significantly different from zero."

The melting of Himalayan glaciers caused controversy in 2009 when a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change mistakenly stated that they would disappear by 2035, instead of 2350. However, the scientist who led the new work is clear that while greater uncertainty has been discovered in Asia's highest mountains, the melting of ice caps and glaciers around the world remains a serious concern.

"Our results and those of everyone else show we are losing a huge amount of water into the oceans every year," said Prof John Wahr of the University of Colorado. "People should be just as worried about the melting of the world's ice as they were before."

His team's study, published in the journal Nature, concludes that between 443-629bn tonnes of meltwater overall are added to the world's oceans each year. This is raising sea level by about 1.5mm a year, the team reports, in addition to the 2mm a year caused by expansion of the warming ocean.

The scientists are careful to point out that lower-altitude glaciers in the Asian mountain ranges – sometimes dubbed the "third pole" – are definitely melting. Satellite images and reports confirm this. But over the study period from 2003-10 enough ice was added to the peaks to compensate.

The impact on predictions for future sea level rise is yet to be fully studied but Bamber said: "The projections for sea level rise by 2100 will not change by much, say 5cm or so, so we are talking about a very small modification." Existing estimates range from 30cm to 1m.

Wahr warned that while crucial to a better understanding of ice melting, the eight years of data is a relatively short time period and that variable monsoons mean year-to-year changes in ice mass of hundreds of billions of tonnes. "It is awfully dangerous to take an eight-year record and predict even the next eight years, let alone the next century," he said.

The reason for the radical reappraisal of ice melting in Asia is the different ways in which the current and previous studies were conducted. Until now, estimates of meltwater loss for all the world's 200,000 glaciers were based on extrapolations of data from a few hundred monitored on the ground. Those glaciers at lower altitudes are much easier for scientists to get to and so were more frequently included, but they were also more prone to melting.

The bias was particularly strong in Asia, said Wahr: "There extrapolation is really tough as only a handful of lower-altitude glaciers are monitored and there are thousands there very high up."

The new study used a pair of satellites, called Grace, which measure tiny changes in the Earth's gravitational pull. When ice is lost, the gravitational pull weakens and is detected by the orbiting spacecraft. "They fly at 500km, so they see everything," said Wahr, including the hard-to-reach, high-altitude glaciers.

"I believe this data is the most reliable estimate of global glacier mass balance that has been produced to date," said Bamber. He noted that 1.4 billion people depend on the rivers that flow from the Himalayas and Tibetan plateau: "That is a compelling reason to try to understand what is happening there better."

He added: "The new data does not mean that concerns about climate change are overblown in any way. It means there is a much larger uncertainty in high mountain Asia than we thought. Taken globally all the observations of the Earth's ice – permafrost, Arctic sea ice, snow cover and glaciers – are going in the same direction."

Grace launched in 2002 and continues to monitor the planet, but it has passed its expected mission span and its batteries are beginning to weaken. A replacement mission has been approved by the US and German space agencies and could launch in 2016.

 

So the ice is melting at 70% of the original rate estimated , is this good news or something ?

 

This winter has been really warm for us. I haven't even built one fire in the fireplace. But i'm not contributing that to global warming. Just last winter was the opposite for us. I mean we had a good 8" snow. I know that you northern guys probably laugh at that, but that's only the second time in my 42 years I've seen that much snow. So yeah, last year all of us down here were like "global warming???" wait what?

 

The point is weather is weather. Al Gore and his minions are trying to tax us on on an inevitable fact - weather patterns change. It would be like me telling you your boyfriend is going to be crankier and crankier as this year goes on. You will watch him and any time his snaps - You will say that guy was right. That's all.

 

Well, yes. That is what I am saying. I remember the summer/fall of 1979 in Tempe and boy that was a hot one! The increment in time that we are measuring would be similar too taking 3 seconds of trading in the market and say - The Market is screaming!!! And that's what I have to say about that!

 

Let me clarify it further...


No better yet, lets see how it plays out! And I may turn out to be completely wrong about the weather but I KNOW I am not wrong about the politics!

 

Hardy har

 

And no mention of s p i d e r s!

 

they get larger...

 

I'll be sipping non-alcoholic rum on the rocks on my mountain top.
If we get sunk, then the rest of the world is fucked anyways