According to NASA, Antarctica is actually gaining ice | Hacker News Reader

According to NASA, Antarctica is actually gaining ice

qz.com

42 pointsprostoalex72 comments

Previous discussion of the NASA release: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10487680

Some people appear to believe that if the average temperature of the globe increases by two degrees, then the average temperature in May in Munich must increase by 2.00 degrees, the average temperature in Timbuktu in June must increase by 2.00 degrees, the average temperature in Panjim in July must increase by 2.00 degrees, the average temperature in Valparaiso in August must increase by 2.00 degrees, and so on and so forth.

Then these people are astonished when it doesn't work that way. "Oh! Some places heat up more, others less, or actually don't heat up!" or "Oh! The summers and winters don't change in the same way?"

Depressing.

And some people refuse to give in when their theory was just disproven. Really depressing.

Which people? What theory was "just disproven"?

What theory? That every place on earth gets warmer? Yes if you've held that theory you have been disproven.

If you wish to learn about climate change, I'd recommend looking at the history of it. One key thing to look at is radiation balance.

The whole field of science was lot less hyped and corrupted before the 90's. And I haven't heard of any new findings that would dramatically change that picture.

Why did the narrative change from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change"? Because you can't prove the climate changes. The climate has been changing since the earth was created and it will continue to change. Can someone tell me when Miami will be underwater like you tell me it will be? Give me a date range...something specific. Since it's science and it can be "proven" then someone should be able to tell me that. And if that date comes and goes and it doesn't happen do you promise to back down or will you make up an excuse? Of course you won't back down. You'll just tweak your theories. Until then why take issue with taxing U.S. companies w/ carbon taxes or whatever you're calling it nowadays and focus on the real carbon polluters....China, Latin America?

Since when were there all these conspiracy nuts on HN?

Don't call people nuts, even when they're very wrong about things. All you accomplish by doing that is making people wonder whether this is a religious debate that they shouldn't care about.

You sound like you haven't ready any of the leading evidence or arguments for climate change at all.

What's sad is 60 seconds of googling would point him to a paper answering the exact question he believes cannot be answered: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/44/13508.full.pdf

>Analysis based on previously published relationships linking emissions to warming and warming to rise indicates that unabated carbon emissions up to the year 2100 would commit an eventual global sea-level rise of 4.3–9.9 m

I've heard different years and that's why I bring it up....because the "science" has been disagreeing on this point. Does this take into account the emissions deal w/ China? Because that should push that figure out a couple years or decades from that 2100 figure, no? How much? It's science.

Boils down to if you believe the authors are giving an unbiased viewpoint. They receive funding from someone, no? Do those sources benefit from taxing emissions?

https://www.skepticalscience.com/sea-level-rise-predictions....

The "narrative" hasn't changed. The terminology of "climate change" was actively pushed by Republican strategist Frank Luntz, however, so if that's what you are referring to, there is your answer.

https://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=326

BTW, we have been focusing on China; that's why the US brokered an emissions deal with China recently, which you would already know if you were seriously interested in the issue, as opposed to just being a troll.

When the global average goes up, the extremes get more extreme.

Temperature anomaly map: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/nmaps.cgi?sat=4&ss...

Btw. Increased temperature may be the underlying cause. Warmer temperature -> increased humidity -> more snow -> more ice.

Snow doesn't fall in warm places.

"Warm" is relative. -40 degree air can probably hold more water than -50 degree air. Warm air over water can evaporate more of the water, which can be carried to cold places.

Also, as a comment (iirc) on the Ars Technica take on thus story pointed out, the error bars on the study are so huge that it's unreasonable to conclude the ice is thickening without more accurate data.

Precipitation doesn't fall where it enters into solution with the atmosphere.

This is one of the biggest problems of the modern world. So much of what we know is based on science, but there is so little scientific literacy that it is very easy to convince people of incorrect things. For example, global warming deniers are all the time using cheap arguments like this. Because you need to have some understanding of logic to identify logical fallacies, it is increasingly easy to create bogus arguments to support things like creationism, conspiracy theories, etc.

If science has taught us anything, it's that Science is not a Revealed Truth but must be prone to criticism, testing, and new insights, not to mention the discovery of the unknown.

Using 'global warming deniers,' a not-so-subtle comparison to Holocaust deniers, to denigrate an entire body of scientists (scientists, not politicians) who disagree about the degree, level, impact or even nature of global warming, is doing science on a whole a great disservice.

Yes, logical fallacies are frequently used by all types to make cheap arguments. The point is no better made than in this comment.

Let's not relitigate the use of the word "denier" here. If we can never again use any word that's ever been used in the same phrase as the word Holocaust, what does that benefit us?

It rightfully shames tribal thought that attempts to masquerade as "scientific." There is value in shaming uncritical thinking.

Except, as has so often been pointed out, the "entire body of scientists" who reject AGW is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the entire body of climate scientists.

And every so often it comes out that one of the high-profile deniers is on the payroll of some company that benefits from the confusion they stir up!

You could probably find an "entire body of scientists" who believe in a flat-earth theory, and they too are worth ignoring or characterizing as "deniers".

Big leap to go from "global warming deniers" to "holocaust deniers". Talk about logical fallacies.

First off, I want to clear something up for you. Science is, in fact, all about the "revealed truth". It serves to reveal the actual truth about the universe around us, from the tiniest particle whose truths we are still struggling to discover, to the machinations of huge, massive bodies as they hurtle through the mostly empty space around them, interacting with other massive bodies from a gargantuan distance using forces we can now predict with relatively simple mathematics.

The "revealed truth" of our body of knowledge is just that: the truth of how things work, which is true whether or not we coax it into revealing itself to us through investigation and experimentation, but becomes revealed to us after the considerable effort of the scientists whose works you seem ready to dismiss because a handful of scientists don't agree with them. Is it also advisable to skip brushing your teeth because a commercial once said only "four out of five dentists agree: brush your teeth after every meal"?

These scientists you speak of are not persecuted geniuses who are just misunderstood, they're actually bad at science, and their arguments have, time and time again, been proven incorrect by actual science, their methods have been proven flawed by actual scientific method, and their epithets hurled at all the "establishment scientists" serve only to weaken their position because it comes from a position of emotion rather than science.

The comment to which you replied was clearly written by an impassioned observer who cares how science is applied, and yet you seem to confuse his position with that of actual climatologists. His comment is about the masses who do not understand how science reveals the truth of the world around us, and you literally stepped in to discredit his opinion statement by invoking the holocaust. It's shameful. And it's a shame, because your passion is better served by fighting for the pursuits of those seeking to reveal the truths hiding in plain sight, not arguing with concerned humans who just want the work to continue.

There is a big difference between scientists doing research, and possibly finding results that go against global warming, and deniers that are only using logical fallacies to support bogus claims. Scientists have no problems with serious research, whatever the conclusion. It is the second group of people that are making a big disservice to humanity.

I think you're the one making a comparison to holocaust deniers, with your frankly stinky rhetoric. Where I come from a denier is simply someone who denies something.

As for an entire body of science - yes, all six of them. That climate change isn't happening is not a serious, majority, or even realistic view. It's based on wishful thinking and there's a strong correlation between "scientists" who don't believe (what the hell has it got to do with belief?!) in climate change and those same scientists believing that a deity farted out the earth some 4000 years ago (young earth creationism).

You're now going to reply and tell me that we should carefully consider the evidence that dinosaurs are a hoax placed by satan, right?

> scientists believing that a deity farted out the earth some 4000 years ago (young earth creationism). You're now going to reply and tell me that we should carefully consider the evidence that dinosaurs are a hoax placed by satan, right?

Stinky rhetoric, indeed!

That's why we should really insist on talking about "climate change" rather than "global warming". I'm not a climate revisionist, but as a layman I do believe that climatology is about as good as economy when it comes to predict what will happen (well I'm a layman in economics too :-), and I do believe that instead of a global warning we might get an ice age. Or giant tornadoes all over the place 24/7.

On the other hand, I'm going to take that "belief" and weigh all those possibilities based on best current scientific likelihood. Ice age? Maybe. But I'm not putting any bets on an ice age, and I will bet, and ask my leaders to bet politically, on the sea level rise.

Obligatory disclaimer - I'm not arguing against anthropogenic climate change...

That having been said, I think that some of this seeming confusion on the part non scientists/casual consumers of mass media news sources makes a bit of sense. Science reporting is usually poor quality - it goes for the sensational headlines and it often doesn't do a good job of differentiating fact from theory from prediction so when new evidence/data gets brought in to the mix, it becomes all too easy for the casual news consumer to be confused and feel like "the story is always changing"...

And in some ways it is. That's what science does. It always builds on (or rejects) older ideas as better evidence becomes available.

In the case of climate change, the narrative was "global warming" which, to a casual news consumer, could sound like warming will take place across the globe. Incorrect, yes, but the confusion is partially understandable, imho.

It doesn't help that climate change activists seem to rely so heavily on science as a way to win arguments on policy. Science just tells us what is happening and gives a way of predicting the future. It is not some silver bullet for deciding policy or persuading people to change their habits. We need people to be far more literate about the environment in general and understand why it is in their self interest to protect it.

But there's the rub... by and large, it's not in my personal interest to stop global warming. Short-run gains matter more to a lot of people AND many people who could change won't see the return on their investment (or their bad behavior) in their lifetime.

(I should say, I'm not endorsing that thinking either... just noting that there's a challenge here, especially when one tries to frame climate change in terms of "self-interest")

This might be the one area where "think of the [grand]children" is a reasonable argument.

It also would seem to be an argument for governmental intervention. Industry is unlikely to do it for the same reasons individuals are unlikely to consistently make good environmental choices... If ever there were a case, this may be it, assuming all of the predicted outcomes are actually going to come to pass, otherwise.

That is why I said "environmental literacy" rather than just climate change. Take fossil fuel as an example. Burning oil and coal creates emissions that are toxic or carcinogenic to humans. Thousands of people die every year or endure suffering as a result. As if that wasn't enough gas is quite expensive for many. We should all want clean cars and power stations because they could actually be better.

But I agree that dry self interest is not enough, it needs to be backed up by some emotion. People need to feel ashamed of dirty technology and link it to the damage it causes. That is surely much easier when you focus on things less existential than climate change. Everyone knows someone who died of cancer, and fundraising for treatment is an ever present part of life. Completely destroying dirty fuel sources should just be an extension of that.

Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy has a good response to this story: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2015/11/03/antarcti...

What would it mean if this increase in ice was the beginning of a reversing trend? Similar to how a company loses money for years and then loses less and less and eventually turns a profit.

Check out the article linked by GP - it gives a bit more historical context to the original link.

Profit analogy aside, its clear we are pushing the planet into different operating realms. What is unclear is how it will respond. Contextually its called "Global warming" because the planet gets warmer, but the response could be a global glaciation. One of the early papers talked about increasing atmospheric and ocean temperatures leading to massive amounts of snowfall. (more moisture is held by the air and can be carried farther inland before dumping) leading to layers of inland snow that freeze into ice (glaciers).

Do you have any links for this? That would be interesting reading.

It's not -- as Plait points out, Antarctica is still losing ice, on the whole. The usual rush-to-write-a-click-worthy-headline effect happened, and the report that everyone's talking about doesn't actually say that there's an increase of ice over all of Antarctica.

The article says exactly what you say it doesn't:

"Using satellite data, researchers estimate the Antarctic ice sheet had a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice per year from 1992 to 2001. This net gain eventually slowed between 2003 and 2008 to 82 billion tons of ice per year."

which is lifted almost verbatim from the NASA discussion of the report: http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-of... and further goes on to say:

“Our main disagreement is for East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica – there, we see an ice gain that exceeds the losses in the other areas.”

The net gain is slowing but there is still a gain.

You're right, I didn't read the article carefully enough. In my defense, it has things like "rate of change: -134 billion metric tons per year" and "Antarctica is still losing hundreds of billions of tons of ice per year" and "if Antarctica was actually gaining ice" and so on ... when what it means is, Antarctica is still (net) gaining ice, but it's also losing ice more rapidly, and in the near future the loss will outpace the gain.

Really wild guess, but if Antarctica isn't the source of the rising ocean wouldn't it make sense to consider the Arctic as source?

Just to be clear: when floating sea ice melts, it does not change the ocean level. Usually land-based Arctic ice is enumerated as Greenland and other glaciers.

>Just to be clear: when floating sea ice melts, it does not change the ocean level.

Unless you consider thermal expansion due to albedo change. Sea ice is one of the whitest surfaces on the planet, and open water one of the darkest.

I don't know how much and a quick Google (and DuckDuckGo) didn't give me any results, but since you mention it. The arctic ice also partly covers land, not only of Greenland I think. Do you maybe know how much that amounts to?

And slightly related it's not pure ice. It contains all sorts of things. Again, not sure how much that is, but curious to learn if anyone has any numbers and maybe even is able to put them into relation.

Even prior to this, it was thought that Antarctica was only a small fraction sea level rise at present. Thermal expansion of sea water, melting mountain glaciers, and Greenland appear to contribute far more. The latest IPCC report (Chapter 13, table 13.1) has some good numbers representing the best we knew a couple of years ago.

The impact of this study is that the small mass loss attributed to Antarctica may be a small mass gain.

I was just in the process of summarizing that table, thanks for bringing it up. The QZ article does not really place this finding in context of what else is going on and what is already known. The current breakdown from IPCC's 5th Assessment Report:

    1.1  [0.8  to 1.4]  mm per year -- thermal ocean expansion
    0.76 [0.39 to 1.13] mm per year -- glacial melt
    0.33 [0.25 to 0.41] mm per year -- Greenland ice sheet melt
    0.27 [0.16 to 0.38] mm per year -- Antarctic ice sheet melt
    0.38 [0.26 to 0.49] mm per year -- land water storage change

    Sum: 2.8 mm/year
    Observed: 3.2 mm/year [1] [2]

As usual, Wikipedia has good entry level summaries [3] of the high-level info, for those of us that want to get right to the meat.

[1] http://imgur.com/vadnlXJ

[2] http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/uploads/WGIAR5_WGI-1...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise

Antartica is a source of water causing the oceans to rise. This paper demonstrates that snow is offsetting that loss in terms of total mass of Antarctica.

There is another article claiming that ice albedo changes in Greenland are caused by camera degradation over time:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015GL065912/full

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151030220525.ht...

This one isn't based on albedo though - it's grace2 data - gravimetric - and the paper is rigorous, even compensating for the minuscule crustal movement due to ice mass shifts.

Ah, phew. Let's start polluting again and de-vest in clean energies.

Na, know you are making a point here but let me jump off and make another point:

If you want to brimg the Fox News audience along to reach the goal try talking about conserving oil instead of talking about climate change.

A lot of people are deeply sceptical about agw without being neither stupid, paid by big oil nor wanting to destroy this planet. Some of us like me even want to stop using oil faster, -we just think this whole agw thing stinks fish when we see politicians arriving in private jet planes to climate conferences.

So again stop trying to sell agw to the fox news crowd and try sell conserve oil (for future generations or to be less dependent on the Saudis or whatever .)

(Full disclosure : I work in renewable energy now and has worked in recycling earlier and at some point I worked with communication and radar for oil and gas companies, helping them to save tons of fuel although imo that doesn't matter as it just meant more fuel to sell )

>> If you want to brimg the Fox News audience along

>> to the fox news crowd

Are you suggesting the Fox news audience are a generalized group of people who care nothing about the planet or the future?

Na again. I am rather suggesting that this is what the vast majority of HN and arstchnica.com commenters think.

Well Fox News did air a story last year during a major snow blizzard where the newscasters said this was evidence that global warming was not happening... So it's not hard to see why people have this perception of how Fox News deals with stuff like this.

I'll take the bait. Even if that were what he was suggesting, it wouldn't necessarily be wrong.

Fox News is as politically biased as the worst of left-wing media. Part of its bias is that "global warming remediation is bad for business". Emphasizing the continued use of cheap fossil fuels over continued funding for renewable energy R&D is a short-term strategy; it absolutely requires caring more about the now than about the future.

There are probably lots of people with similar beliefs who don't watch Fox News, and there are probably lots of Fox News viewers who don't share all the same beliefs, but as a generalization, it's no more wrong than any of the statements you see these days that includes the word "liberals".

Let's be clear: mainstream client change deniers are not "scientific skeptics." They are resistant to implement policies that upset the their monetary interests. If we examine the intersection between people who be deny evolution and people who deny anthropogenic climate change, this becomes clear. There is room for skepticism regarding the details and appropriate responses to climate change. There is no room for wholesale denial.

I can already see how this will play out on Fox News.

And I can see how it will play on CNN and MSNBC....with virtually no coverage. Bias plays both ways.

FWIW, here is a CNN story:

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/11/03/world/antarctica-ice-gain/

>However, this isn't good news for our climate necessarily. Authors of the study say the increasing loss of ice in the West Antarctic and the peninsula, plus slowing ice gains elsewhere on the continent, could mean that there will be overall losses of ice in the next 20 years.

>In fact, this may already be occurring, according to other research published as recently as this week, which suggests the West Antarctic ice sheet is destabilizing, which would more than overcome the ice gains and could result in 3 meters of sea level rise.

Yes you can:

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2015/11/03/new-study-finds-an...

“The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away,” Zwally said. “But this is also bad news. If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for.”

“If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate they’ve been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years - I don’t think there will be enough snowfall increase to offset these losses,” said Zwally.

Bet ya this is some climate change science the right-wingers won't be denying.

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