INFOGRAPHIC: Receding Arctic ice unlocking fathomless mineral resources

god bless and good luck sir

This post is a triumph of misrepresentation and misunderstanding. The Danish data that you are quoting shows surface mass balance, not total ice mass. This data does not account for iceberg calving so just because it is positive doesn’t mean that the ice sheet isn’t shrinking; it has been positive throughout the recorded history and yet the ice sheet certainly isn’t growing. You are also playing the old fudger’s game of taking one year and comparing it to an average. Again, this is the sort of disingenuous practice that people like to employ to make it sound as though they know what they are talking about, while actually propagating rubbish. The climate is a natural system; it varies on both short term and long term time scales. If you want to understand where things are going you absolutely have to look at long term trends, not a single snapshot. The long term trend, again drawn from the Danish Meteorological Institute, is that while yearly snowfall is not changing, melting and run-off is steadily rising. Replenishment of the ice sheet is reducing. In the last ten years we have had four of the five greatest melting years on record. In seven of those ten years run-off was higher than for any one of the 35 years between 1962 and 1997. The very Tedesco & Monahan study that you cite begins with the sentence “Scientists have observed large increases in melting on the Greenland Ice Sheet in recent decades.” So yes, it is melting.

I see that you are citing Parkinson’s study from 2000. That study shows there may be many reasons why ice area is shrinking, but it does most certainly show that there is shrinking going on. The ‘recent reversals’ that are studied in that work may well have been due to fluctuations in ‘major oscillatory patterns’, but they were shown to be overprinted onto a monotonous long term downward trend. Since then, the downward trend has reasserted itself, that was 16 years ago after all. Did you know she also published a whole heap of new data since then? No? Well how about you try out her 2008 study on long term trends. That data shows that between 1979 and 2006 the Arctic lost an average of more than 45,000 square kilometres of ice EVERY YEAR. Note, this is data, not belief. Data that show an area of ice about the same size as New Jersey and New Hampshire, combined, disappearing each year. For an international perspective, that about the same size as Estonia, and there are 66 entire countries smaller than that.

That brings me on to your attempts to use Antarctic data to support your untrue claims about the Arctic. This attempt is seriously flawed for one major reason: they are fundamentally different systems. For a start, the Antarctic is significantly colder then the Arctic. Again, your T&M citation makes very clear that the Antarctic is getting warmer. However, as they also point out, most of the warming is happening in the spring and fall, both times when the temperatures are still well below zero, not during the summer when most of the melting happens. Ice doesn’t really care whether the temperature is -20 or -10 °C, it isn’t going to melt too well. That doesn’t mean that climate change isn’t happening down there. And again, far from supporting your claim that the Antarctic ice sheet is growing, T&M make very clear that the long term ice volume trends down there are “negligible”. The ice is neither growing nor shrinking.

You can cut-and-paste as many fancy words from Zwally and Giovinetto’s work as you like, but their final conclusion is that Antarctica lost an average of 31 billion tonnes of ice EACH YEAR, between 1992 and 2001. So, no, that study does not support your statements. The fact that I have been able to take apart your fatuous, propagandist claptrap using mostly sources that you claim support your arguments shows just how badly you have misrepresented and misused their information. I do not ‘believe’ in climate change, there is no need. To believe in the retreat of Arctic ice would be like believing in the mail man; it’s happening, it is supported by a huge amount of hard data, and it will continue to be there whether you believe it or not. I work up in the north; I have walked on rocks in glacial valleys that have never been exposed to the sunlight before, in valleys that my predecessor’s could hardly get even half way up to where I was stood. You can bellow that the sky is green for all you like, but the joke’s on you.