Rate Of Sea Level Rise Faster Than Thought - NASA

[hatrack]

BROOKLIN, Canada, Dec 15 (IPS) - The predicted rise in sea levels caused by the world's changing climate will have to be revised upward after U.S. scientists recorded accelerated melting of ice in the Arctic and Antarctic, one researcher said this week.

New and updated satellite data from Greenland, the Canadian Arctic and Antarctica show parts of these regions are rapidly melting and contributing three times as much than previously believed to sea level rise.

"This is the first time researchers have been able to get real data on this," said Waleed Abdalati, a researcher at the Goddard Space Flight Centre of the U.S National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Abdalati and NASA colleagues presented their findings at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco this week. The melting appears to be in direct response to the surface air temperature warming in these regions. What is alarming is how quickly these massive ice sheets are responding to temperature increases of around 2C, said the scientists."

EDIT

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/interna.asp?idnews=26699

[Muzzle Tough]

1. Response

When I saw the heading of this thread, I said, "It's NASA. They're reliable." So I wanted to read it to find out how much sea level had risen.

But when I read the actual article, it only talked about predicted rises in sea level for the future.

[NNadir]

2. Maybe you should read some of the other sentences.

Those of us who have actually done science know the difficulties of calibration. Frankly we have never known exactly what the sea level is and anyone who claims to know that it is not rising because "I trust NASA," is not making a scientific claim at all, but is rather merely expressing ignorance of how science is done.

Maybe you'd like to read all the sentences you like in this article and report back to us on what it says.

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/99/10/6524

This is an article about calibration.

Now in the article referenced in the creation of this thread, in which you might be suspected of reading only the sentences you liked and none of those that you didn't like, and felt qualified to report about back here, there's all sorts of (irrelevant, I guess) stuff about big blocks of ice slipping and melting. Small matter, I guess, completely unrelated to the matter (which after all should be decided by dogma and not science) of the possibility that climate change might be happening.

In any case, Ayn Rand (famous, internationally known, scientifically illiterate idiot) would have found all that glacial slipping, sliding, bumping, and disappearing as beautiful as say, billboards and asphalt, and so, it's lovely, just lovely. (Ayn of course, was exempt from needing either eyes or workable synapses on the grounds she was a goddess and not a mere human.) In Rand-think (excuse the oxymoron) if we get those nasty glaciers off the landmasses, why we can find all sorts of new places to dig holes and pits where we can make to express our contempt for even the most primitive level of ethics. And if someone says that the disappearance of these glaciers and the ecosystems and river systems that they once fed is "climate change," why then we'll just selectively read some sentences in an article and say, "No it's not! Don't worry be happy! Plant a tree farm!"

Of course, if one has been going to the beach for 50 years, as I have, one can form a qualitative assessment of sea level by noticing the fact that beaches that used to be there are now missing.

Maybe I'm mistaken about those beaches. The great Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich once proposed a law (which happily didn't pass) to ban mind control agents from outer space. Maybe NASA felt free, since HR2977 was withdrawn, to mess with my memory using their satellites, which are by the way the only things we actually need in the universe to tell us what is going on. Maybe I only think those beaches used to be there. Maybe NASA just created my memory of beaches as sort of an April Fool's joke. Do ya think?

[Muzzle Tough]

3. Thank you.

Here's a paragraph from the new link:

Munk (6) adds Earth rotation and other geodynamic results to examine the quantitative contributions of steric and eustatic sources of sea-level rise. He takes the "historic" sea-level rate of rise to be 18 cm per century (cm/cy), a value somewhat higher than the IPCC 2001 central value (Table 1) but less than that suggested by some other authors (e.g., refs. 2 and 7). He then adds an average contribution of 3 cm caused by greenhouse warming during 1950-2000 (one could argue that this is actually included in the historic rise) and subtracts a value for a eustatic contribution of 6 cm attributed to the IPCC (5) to give a residual rise to be explained of 12 cm to the end of the century, which cannot be accounted for by steric expansion only; the heat content of ocean water would have to be far greater than that measured and modeled. Nor does he indicate that it could be accounted for by additional eustatic sources; this would imply a far larger "attrition of the polar ice sheets" than that estimated by the IPCC and conflicts with astronomic evidence (see below) as well.

That answers my question. So thank you.

I had indeed read the entire article at the link in the post that started this thread before I responded.

This beach that you visit that disappeared. Did it disppear from rising seas levels, or from beach erosion?

If it disppeared from rising sea levles, the the same thing should have happened at beaches everywhere all over the world.

I am not obsessed with Ayn Rand the way you are. It is you, not I, who keeps bringing her up. I read Atlas Shrugged one time. And it was many years ago. I prefer to read Calvin and Hobbes.