Antarctic ice is growing, not melting away

[morphius]

Dr Allison said there was not any evidence of significant change in the mass of ice shelves in east Antarctica nor any indication that its ice cap was melting. "The only significant calvings in Antarctica have been in the west," he said. And he cautioned that calvings of the magnitude seen recently in west Antarctica might not be unusual.
"Ice shelves in general have episodic carvings and there can be large icebergs breaking off - I'm talking 100km or 200km long - every 10 or 20 or 50 years."
Ice core drilling in the fast ice off Australia's Davis Station in East Antarctica by the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-Operative Research Centre shows that last year, the ice had a maximum thickness of 1.89m, its densest in 10 years. The average thickness of the ice at Davis since the 1950s is 1.67m.
A paper to be published soon by the British Antarctic Survey in the journal Geophysical Research Letters is expected to confirm that over the past 30 years, the area of sea ice around the continent has expanded.


http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25348657-401,00.html



News like this is going to make it harder for the carbon credit companies, maybe we'll need to bail Al Gore out next, lol. I'm all for getting away from oil and a cleaner enviornment, but the global warming scare group has been getting on my nerves for a long time.

[Stinger]

Someone needs to let Waxman know.

Waxman Won’t Compromise on 20% Carbon Cap in Climate Measure
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By Christopher Stern

April 17 (Bloomberg) -- House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman said he won’t compromise on his proposed 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gases over the next decade in the face of criticism from lawmakers who say the economy could suffer.

“I want to keep those caps in place,” Waxman said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt” airing this weekend. “It’s what the scientists are telling us we must do” to avoid a global catastrophe, he said.

Waxman, a California Democrat, said he would be willing to give ground in other areas of the measure, which comes up for its opening round of debate in Congress next week.

The four days of subcommittee hearings will follow the Environmental Protection Agency’s ruling today that greenhouse gases pose a danger to the public, a finding that opens the way for new U.S. regulation of cars, power plants and factories.

Waxman, 69, said he expects his climate bill, as well as health-care reform legislation, to clear the House before August.

He took issue with President Barack Obama’s plan to use 80 percent of the estimated $646 billion in revenue raised from carbon permits under a so-called cap-and-trade system to help fund middle-class tax cuts.

“I don’t think that’s the best use of it,” Waxman said. “By and large” it should be spent on green technologies, he said, and part of it could be used to “help consumers with higher energy costs” and hard-hit industries, “especially coal.”

Under the Obama plan only $120 billion would go to green technologies.

Support From Dingell

Waxman said Representatives John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat who once chaired the committee, and Rick Boucher, a Democrat from Virginia’s coal country, will support his 20 percent reduction even though they have previously called for a reduction of just 6 percent.

Dingell and Boucher may be willing to accept the higher reductions in part because of Waxman’s proposal for allocating the permit revenue.

Waxman said Congress, and not the EPA, should determine how to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions.

“I don’t think the EPA ought to be regulating carbon emissions,” he said. Instead, pollution should be controlled by his climate-change bill, which proposes a cap on the amount a company can pollute along with the ability of companies to buy and sell pollution permits.

Warning on Costs

Critics of the bill, including House Minority Leader John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, say the climate-change bill will dramatically raise energy costs, effectively levying a tax on consumers and industries.

Waxman said he’s concerned about the impact on the industrial areas of the country “in the short term.”

“That’s why we’re looking to use some of the funds generated by the cap-and-trade program to redirect it to help consumers with higher energy costs,” he said.

Waxman’s measure, intended to cut greenhouse gases by 20 percent by 2020 compared with 2005 levels, is more aggressive than Obama’s proposal for a 14 percent cut by 2020.

The plan’s centerpiece is the cap-and-trade system that sets limits on greenhouse-gas pollution, makes companies get permits for emissions, and encourages power plants and factories to switch to clean energy such as wind and solar.

Waxman’s plan leaves undecided whether some allowances for pollution would be given away. He said the subject is still under negotiation.

Justice Memos

On the Justice Department’s release of Bush administration legal memos on the treatment of terror suspects, Waxman said he supports the creation of a commission to investigate alleged abuses, with the possibility that the inquiry will lead to prosecution.

“It should to all the way to the top,” said Waxman.

Investigating the financial meltdown on Wall Street, often Waxman’s target in his former role as the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is no longer on his agenda.

“I’m much too busy,” Waxman said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Christopher Stern in Washington at cstern3@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: April 17, 2009 14:37 EDT

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aaE9Lr1448tM&refer=home#

[Saggysack]

the same Ian Allison said...

http://uk.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUKTRE53G3H820090417
Ian Allison is leader of the Australian Antarctic Division's Ice, Ocean, Atmosphere and Climate program and a researcher within the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Center.

He has been involved in Antarctic science for over 40 years.

HOW GREAT IS THE THREAT FROM ICE SHEETS MELTING?

"I think it is now unequivocal that warming of the world is occurring and I think the last IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) conclusively showed that a major cause of warming is greenhouse gas emissions from mankind.

We now know that the ice sheets are contributing to sea level rise and for the Arctic, at least, this is because the warming of this region is much greater than in other places on Earth.


shucks

[Guru]

This should be interesting.

[morphius]

the same Ian Allison said...

http://uk.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUKTRE53G3H820090417



shucks
LOL! I guess he is starting to learn the true facts then.

[mlyonsd]

Now that Obama's EPA has determined CO2 is going to kill all of us we'll all be riding bikes to work soon.

[Guru]

Now that Obama's EPA has determined CO2 is going to kill all of us we'll all be riding bikes to work soon.Wait that makes no sense at all. we produce CO2 by breathing. Cycling will make it worse.

[Stinger]

Wait that makes no sense at all. we produce CO2 by breathing. Cycling will make it worse.

That is the brilliance of the plan. We will have to pay more personal carbon credits that way so they get more money.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v250/stinger871/Brilliant.jpg

[SBK]

Either way we need to shoot pollution into the atmosphere and nuke Yellowstone stat.

[KILLER_CLOWN]

All but 1 poster in this thread has nailed it, I guess you actually get global cooling when the sun cools. What a novel concept.

[jAZ]

Old news...

http://articles.latimes.com/2005/may/20/science/sci-icecap20

As Climate Shifts, Antarctic Ice Sheet Is Growing
By Robert Lee Hotz
May 20, 2005


As glaciers from Greenland to Kilimanjaro recede at record rates, the central icecap of Antarctica has been steadily growing for 11 years, partially offsetting the rise in seas from the melt waters of global warming, researchers said Thursday.

The vast East Antarctic Ice Sheet — a 2-mile-thick wasteland larger than Australia, drier than the Sahara and as cold as a Martian spring — increased in mass every year from 1992 to 2003 because of additional annual snowfall, an analysis of satellite radar measurements showed.

"It is an effect that has been predicted as a likely result of climate change," said David Vaughan, an independent expert on the ice sheets at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, England.

In a region known for the lowest temperatures recorded on Earth, it normally is too cold for snow to form across the 2.7 million square miles of the ice sheet. Any additional annual snowfall in East Antarctica, therefore, is almost certainly attributable to warmer temperatures, four experts on Antarctica said.

"As the atmosphere warms, it should hold more moisture," said climatologist Joseph R. McConnell at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, who helped conduct the study. "In East Antarctica, that means there should be more snowfall."

The additional snowfall is enough to account for 45 billion tons of water added to the ice sheet every year...

They determined that the icecap appeared to be thickening at the rate of 1.8 centimeters every year. The ice is thinning in West Antarctica and other regions of the continent.

"The changes in the ice look like those expected for a warming world," said glaciologist Richard Alley at Pennsylvania State University. "The new result in no way disproves global warming; if anything, the new result supports global warming."

[jAZ]

Still "Old news".