Antarctic glaciers melting faster than thought

An opportunity to judge for yourself the adequacy of today’s climate science

an excerpt

1. Have the authors of Steig 2009 made their methods and data available to the public?

Nature, like most professional journals in the Sciences, has clear policies requiring supporting data to be available to the public. See section 4 below for details. How well have Steigand his co-authors complied with these?

(1) Email from co-author Eric Steig to Steve McIntyre on January 23 (source):

“I have always intended to provide all the material on line; I wasn’t allowed to do this before the paper was published. I would have done it already but have been busy answering emails. I should have these up on line next week.”

(2) From Josefino Comiso (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), in reply to request for data by McIntyre on January 23 (source):


“Thanks for your request for AVHRR [satellite] surface temperature IR data. I am actually planning to have the entire data set archived in the near future and as soon as I get the associated document that describes the data and discusses the errors and caveats completed. The data are indeed on a gridded monthly basis. I will let you know how to access them in the web as soon as they are archived and ready to be downloaded. Best Wishes”

*** The first two replies said that the data would soon be available. But then the story changes from “will be made available” to “the data was available.”

any questions? i found another passage quite intriguing, too:

The primary complaint of skeptics has been about the availability of data and methods used to produce the results on which advocates urge major public policy changes. Without this replication is impossible for scientists or interested “outsiders” to the establishment.

The response has been a gruding release of data, often partialand poorly documented. The battle has been surprisingly difficult because most journals’ require documentation and release of this information at publication. Even more striking, much (most?) of this research is publicly funded — and hence keeping it secret usually violates regulations of the funding agencies.

again and again, the double standard becomes as plainly visible as broad daylight. if anyone else pulled off such nonsense wrt documentation, they'd be fired in a heartbeat. the only logical conclusion is that, in climate science, the Ends justify the Means.

What are the Ends?


disclaimer: political piece, it's a blog, i'm well aware of that.

[edit on 2009.3.3 by Long Lance]

Originally posted by Long Lance
An opportunity to judge for yourself the adequacy of today’s climate science

Your source is a blog - the blogger is Fabius Maximus - and his sources are other blogs, not scientific journals. Steig bears the brunt of the attack, which is nothing more than an attempt to discredit the science by assassinating the man.

I googled pubmed for Steig's publications. Pubmed is the NIH database; nothing gets listed until it has been peer reviewed up the wazoo.

Results 1 - 10 of about 732 for +climate +steig +pubmed.

From the first page:

Warming of the Antarctic ice-sheet surface since the 1957 International Geophysical Year

Climate change: The south–north connection

Synchronous Climate Changes in Antarctica and the North Atlantic

ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE: Sprucing Up Greenland

Ice cores record significant 1940s Antarctic warmth related to tropical climate variability


.

Might as well forget about this one and plan on moving to higher ground.

But I just heard of something ever worse, the Sun is going to burn out, and we must stop everything else and try and figure away to refuel the Sun, before this terrrible thing can happen.
Maybe push Mars or other planets into Sun, come on we must work together on this, it's only matter of time.

reply to post by ANNED


What the heck kind of crazy comment is that? "Notice it's always in a remote area and we have to take their word for it".

Well go live on a damn glacier then...

reply to post by Long Lance


You'd have been better off NOT posting a link to that "source". Wordpress?

[edit on 3/3/2009 by Irish M1ck]

Yes another thing they said the polar ice caps on Mars have already melted, so the inhibatants of Mars are finshed, so they won't mind.

Has anyone looked at Venus lately, they are saying it is 3000% brighter than 40 years ago, so they must also be fried by now.

I have some nice Ocean front property I will let go real cheap.

reply to post by soficrow


i'm well aware what this guy is, what he writes and that he's a GW debunker.

there are dozens of cross-referencing links embedded in this blog and it is most defintiely not the purpose of this post or the blog itself to undermine the scientific credibility of anyone, because then we'd all have to be climatologists to even say a word on any climate issue.

i strongly suspect that standing wouldn't matter either, if the position was wrong, the one who voices it would get grilled. best example so far: guess who got two Nobel Prizes ? Linus Pauling. Guess why his name is mostly restricted to conspiracy boards? he advocated a high volume approach to micro- and other nutrients, which was enough, it seems, Nobel Prizes be damned.

iow, i'm not going to ask a priest for an opinion on religion, because that wouldn't yield any new information, would it?

these people are flip-flopping and it's not the first time either. how did GW turn into climate chance again? which year was the warmest on record again? 1998 or 1934? it adds up and if i sound jaded it's because i am. being conned isn't fun, especially if it happens to convey a totalitarian agenda.

==============================================

Originally posted by Irish M1ck

You'd have been better off NOT posting a link to that "source". Wordpress?

i'm well aware of that fact but i won't censor anything, just because it might make me look bad. seriously, the most wacko GW stance can be posted with impunity, but biased debunkers of an issue have to be shunned? sorry, what's good for the goose...

[edit on 2009.3.3 by Long Lance]

Originally posted by Long Lance

guess who got two Nobel Prizes ? Linus Pauling. Guess why his name is mostly restricted to conspiracy boards? he advocated a high volume approach to micro- and other nutrients, which was enough, it seems, Nobel Prizes be damned.

Actually - Pauling was censored because in 1950 he described the misfolding of the actin protein (it's A and B conformations). Pauling's censorship, along with a totally inappropriate and misleading focus on the double helix and genetics, set our understanding of modern disease back by more than half a century.

FYI - a word for misfolded protein is "prion" - the infectious agent linked to Mad Cow disease, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and more every day.


RE: GLOBAL WARMING and CLIMATE CHANGE

The science shows that the earth's climate is indeed changing; the planet's glaciers and ice caps are indeed melting. The theory is that global warming is linked to, perhaps triggers, ice ages.

Whatever the cause, humanity clearly must deal with and plan for major climactic change.

The difficulty I see on this Board is that many people seem unable to separate the fact of opportunistic 'development' strategies from the fact that there is a problem. Many contradict themselves saying, "The earth is not warming, the whole solar system is, not just the earth. It's just a conspiracy to get grant money."

The real question is not, "Is there really a problem?" but rather, "What should be done about this problem to better serve mankind and life on earth?"

.

The science shows that the earth's climate is indeed changing; the planet's glaciers and ice caps are indeed melting. The theory is that global warming is linked to, perhaps triggers, ice ages.

of course it is, it isn't supposed to remain stationary, is it? warming appears to be limited mainly to the Northern hemisphere, for whatever reason, the South pole itself is most likely undergoing a cooling trend, overall - how else would you explain the three week increase of the duration of pack ice seasons?

posted last time at www.abovetopsecret.com...

visibleearth.nasa.gov...

as well as

www.timesonline.co.uk...

averaging change rate of a day per year, this development is hard to miss, isn't it?

it would seem that pack ice, unlike glaciers, which are dependant on precipitation along with appropriate temperatures, is a seasonal phenomenon and therefore a much more reliable indicator of temperature alone, for what it is worth.

Whatever the cause, humanity clearly must deal with and plan for major climactic change.

The difficulty I see on this Board is that many people seem unable to separate the fact of opportunistic 'development' strategies from the fact that there is a problem. Many contradict themselves saying, "The earth is not warming, the whole solar system is, not just the earth. It's just a conspiracy to get grant money."

The real question is not, "Is there really a problem?" but rather, "What should be done about this problem to better serve mankind and life on earth?"

the news i can't seem to grasp. people have always had to cope with their surroundings, this is nothing new, is it? extraordinary measures require extraordinary reasons, which so far either haven't been delivered or are either pipedreams or complete fabrication. take the sea level discussion as an example, figures mentioned in scientific papers, or even the IPCC are a fraction of what's been sold to the public.

www.realclimate.org...

Many media articles and weblogs suggested there is good news on the sea level issue, with future sea level rise expected to be a lot less compared to the previous IPCC report (the Third Assessment Report, TAR). Some articles reported that IPCC had reduced its sea level projection from 88 cm to 59 cm (35 inches to 23 inches) , some even said it was reduced from 88 cm to 43 cm (17 inches), and there were several other versions as well (see "Broad Irony"). These statements are not correct and the new range up to 59 cm is not the full story. Here I will try to clarify what IPCC actually said and how these numbers were derived. (But if you want to skip the details, you can go straight to the critique or the bottom line).

88cm, 59cm, what on earth are these people fretting about? your average hurricane would displace more people than 59cm sea level rise, wouldn't it?


pollution and land (ab- and mis-)use pose a much more severe problem than carbon dioxide, so why can't people stick to more relevant topics? politcs, maybe? i'm certain there lies the answer and since i'm a bit hard pressed to pull a (new) rabbit out of my hat on every occasion someone posts 'OMG we're D00MED' and cites a sinking island as a reference or somesuch emotional drivel, i'll either have to constantly repeat myself - or try to undermine their efforts at a political level. this is the Breaking News section, after all.

dishonesty is strong medicine in political discussions...


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Originally posted by soficrow

Actually - Pauling was censored because in 1950 he described the misfolding of the actin protein (it's A and B conformations). Pauling's censorship, along with a totally inappropriate and misleading focus on the double helix and genetics, set our understanding of modern disease back by more than half a century.

i had heard of Paulings work on proteins, but did not connect the dots. i figured the Lysine/Ascorbare + general supplementation regime to prevent or reverse CVD ('Pauling therapy') would have been enough to get supressed, but then again the story always gets more complex the closer the look.

Originally posted by ahnggk

I know about the average sea levels rising, it's no conspiracy, I've interviewed many people who lived near the sea about this.

I just left the ocean, I was there for a better part of a year. I lived less than 100 yards away from it. The only time it rises is during high tide or storm surges. I assure you, it is not up anymore then it is supposed to be.

Even the marshes and lagoons are exactly where they are supposed to be.

Originally posted by xstealth

I just left the ocean, I was there for a better part of a year. I lived less than 100 yards away from it. The only time it rises is during high tide or storm surges. I assure you, it is not up anymore then it is supposed to be.

Even the marshes and lagoons are exactly where they are supposed to be.

Just to restate and confirm,

You are willing to accept anecdotal evidence from any source.





[Back to you later Long Lance. ]


[edit on 4-3-2009 by soficrow]