March 23, 2025
FINALLY climate scientists are admitting they can't predict squat about Antarctic ice because they don't have enough data.
Climate realists have argued this very point all along. The models are two-dimensional and woefully inadquate to make these lofty and confident predictions. And in fact Antarctica as a continent has been faining ice mice, not losing it.
FTA:
Web of Deep Cracks AntarcticaA web of deep cracks, or crevasses, span the icescape of an area of the Getz ice shelf in Antarctica. Credit: Jeremy Harbeck, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Operation IceBridge
"These differences influence the overall mechanical behavior, the so-called constitutive model, of the ice sheet in ways that are not captured in existing models or in a lab setting,” Lai said.
Lai and her colleagues didn’t try to capture each of these individual variables. Instead, they built a machine learning model to analyze large-scale movements and thickness of the ice recorded with satellite imagery and airplane radar between 2007 and 2018. The researchers asked the model to fit the remote-sensing data and abide by several existing laws of physics that govern the movement of ice, using it to derive new constitutive models to describe the ice’s viscosity – its resistance to movement or flow.
Compression vs. strain
The researchers focused on five of Antarctica’s ice shelves – floating platforms of ice that extend over the ocean from land-based glaciers and hold back the bulk of Antarctica’s glacial ice. They found that the parts of the ice shelves closest to the continent are being compressed, and the constitutive models in these areas are fairly consistent with laboratory experiments. However, as ice gets farther from the continent, it starts to be pulled out to sea. The strain causes the ice in this area to have different physical properties in different directions – like how a log splits more easily along the grain than across it – a concept called anisotropy.
"Our study uncovers that most of the ice shelf is anisotropic,” said first study author Yongji Wang, who conducted the work as a postdoctoral researcher in Lai’s lab. "The compression zone – the part near the grounded ice – only accounts for less than 5% of the ice shelf. The other 95% is the extension zone and doesn’t follow the same law.
We've long known there are different sorts of ice; the Eskimos knew that long ago and have different words for different types. But that has never been factored into icepack and glaciars before.
Also, Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) data (2003–08) show mass gains from snow accumulation exceeded discharge losses by 82 ± 25 Gt a−1. Icesat II is showing some ice loss since then, but that after gains during what was supposed to be increasing warming. Most of the losses detected by Icesat II has been in West Antarctica, which is primarily sea ice and not land ice. In fact it is almost entirely caused by saltier, warmer sea water intruding south of the Antarctic convergence. The movement of that water has nothing to do with carbon-dioxideinduced climate change and everything to do with the El Nino and likely with the planetary wobble.
I suspect we'll be seeing more and more science showing up in the literature as global warming has peaked as an issue and failed to catch the public imagination enough to justify things like the Paris Accord. Without the jackboot on the throats of the journals the science will start coming out showing this whole thing had nothing to do with carbon dioxide in the first place.
At least we can hope.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
09:19 AM
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As I've mentioned on these pages before, a number of years ago I quoted a real scientist as having said, in regard to just about any sort of science being discussed, that we should preface any pronouncements we make with "Taking into account our current level of ignorance,"...
Posted by: Dana Mathewson at March 24, 2025 12:40 AM (X5D0l)
Just take the temperature of the Earth; we have no way of knowing exactly what it is. It's different on every square inch. What we have is a broad average and here we have these guys claiming a fraction of a degree difference between now and say, a hundred years ago is statistically significant. It's not because we don't know what it was a hundred years ago and not really even now. But they go on t.v. and boldly claim it's doomsday if we don't reduce industrial emissions because of a fraction of a degree warming that may well be a simple measuring error.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at March 24, 2025 08:00 AM (oxGOG)
Posted by: Dana Mathewson at March 25, 2025 12:10 AM (X5D0l)
Posted by: SMM Heart at March 25, 2025 03:13 AM (H5CXu)
Posted by: SMM World Panel at April 06, 2025 10:21 AM (EilQ0)
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