Antarctic Ice Shelf?

Question

A major article highlighted here on lib friendly Yahoo is that some Arctic Ice Shelf is breaking loose. Global warming. Gasp.

I do some googling. I find MANY.. MANY reference to the FACT that the total ice in Antarctica is GROWING.

Does anyone find this to be true.

Could this be poor reporting in the article printed on yahoo?

Are they trying to deceive us?

Is there any liberal here who denies me at least the right to reasonable doubt when i find these two facts.. the one seemingly reducing the other to.. ice chips?

Answer 1

Make sure the source you read is creditable.  There is lots of mis-information out there.  Anyone can say anything they want without any requirement to justify their assertion.  BUT the facts remain...

From NASA:

When the scientists added up the overall gains and losses of ice from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, there was a net loss of ice to the sea. The amount of water added to the oceans (20 billion tons) is equivalent to the total amount of freshwater used in homes, businesses and farming in New York, New Jersey and Virginia each year.

Answer 2

That is odd.  I did some googling of my own and found 61 google pages of sites (if there are, say 10 per page = 610 sites) about Antarctic Ice Shelf Drops, Arctic Ice melting, and Antarctic temperature rise.  

Although I couldn't find a comprehensive list of Antarctic ice sheet drops, I did come up with reports of 7 individual massive drops from the Antarctic ice shelves and a number of sites saying that polar ice is decreasing.

"POLAR ice is melting faster than previously believed and could have reached a "tipping point" beyond which it may not be able to recover, a report warns today.

The warning from environmental pressure group WWF came as 21,000 responded to the draft Scottish Climate Change Bill.

The report, Arctic Climate Impact Science – An Update Since ACIA, reveals that in September 2007 the amount of Arctic sea ice shrank to 39 per cent below its average for 1979-2000, leaving the lowest amount since satellite monitoring began in 1979.

The report also found the Greenland ice sheet was shrinking at a faster rate than predicted by scientific models. If the entire ice sheet were to melt, sea levels would rise by a devastating 7.3 metres.

Dr Dan Barlow, WWF Scotland's acting director, said the report into Arctic melting showed urgent action was needed.

"These findings underline the need for action from governments across the globe to tackle climate change," he said."

"While small collapses are normal for the Antarctic, such a spectacular failure is highly unusual. The Larson A ice shelf collapsed similarly in 1995."

"Scientists who study the warming seas and complicated climate and ice trends around Antarctica got a big jolt in recent days as yet another great fringing, floating ice shelf jutting from the Antarctic Peninsula began to disintegrate.

The Wilkins Ice Shelf appears to be following a pattern seen in other parts of the peninsula, which has warmed markedly in recent decades and shed other fringing ice shelves. In each case, the removal of ice around the periphery seems to allow inland ice to move more readily toward the sea."

"Antarctic ice sheet decline startles scientists ... towards Argentina, began melting rapidly after the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf in 2002."

When the Larsen B, an Antarctic ice shelf the size of Rhode Island, collapsed in 2002, “it was a big glaring clue that something not natural was happening,” said Hugh Ducklow, director of ecosystems for MBL Laboratories in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. “The geological evidence suggested that was stable for at least 10,000 years, back to the last ice age. And it literally disintegrated in three weeks.”

"The ice shelves collapsing in western Antarctica bring glacier melting there, pouring as much water into the sea as Greenland. Eventually, the giant frozen continent of eastern Antarctica, so far insulated from the rest of the warming planet, may begin to melt. The thermohaline ocean circulation pattern begins to slow."

You are definitely entitled to reasonable doubt (although what this has to do with liberals, I don't know).  I don't see any two facts in your question that support your position, only the statement that you found "many..many" references claiming the the Antarctic ice is growing.  How about sources for some of those?.

I think perhaps you fit the definition of the optimist who falls off a 70 story building, and at each floor he says "So far, so good".

Answer 3

Global warming may not be to blame for the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelf

"Ice shelf collapse is not as simple as we first thought," he said.

"Because large amounts of meltwater appeared on the ice shelf just before it collapsed, we had always assumed that air temperature increases were to blame.

"But our new study shows that ice shelf break-up is not controlled simply by climate.

"A number of other atmospheric, oceanic and glaciological factors are involved. For example, the location and spacing of fractures on the ice shelf such as crevasses and rifts are very important too because they determine how strong or weak the ice shelf is."

The study is important because ice shelf collapse indirectly contributes to global sea level rise.

Prof Glasser said: "Ice shelves themselves do not contribute directly to sea level rise because they are floating on the ocean and they already displace the same volume of water.