Global cooling back again?

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For example, I can easily understand and post this article:

Antarctica melting super fast omg!

Does that prove to you that it's true? Probably not, because I'm sure you have studies that say it isn't. And then I can show more studies that say your studies are wrong. Etc, etc, etc. This will only become a citation showdown, and I'll end up winning since more scientists believe in global warming.

I don't think Gech ever denied the increased melting of Antarctica, I think he actually mentioned that it's speeding up a bit. What he did state was that it's not caused by global warming.

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West Antarctic Glaciers Melting At 20 Times Former Rate, Rock Analysis Shows

ScienceDaily (Mar. 2, 2008) — Boulders the size footballs could help scientists predict the West Antarctic Ice Sheet's (WAIS) contribution to sea-level rise according to new research.
See also:
Earth & Climate

* Global Warming
* Ice Ages
* Climate

Fossils & Ruins

* Early Climate
* Fossils
* Origin of Life

Reference

* Antarctic ice sheet
* Ice sheet
* Greenland ice sheet
* Ice shelf

Scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS), Durham University and Germany's Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) collected boulders deposited by three glaciers in the Amundsen Sea Embayment -- a region currently the focus of intense international scientific attention because it is changing faster than anywhere else on the WAIS and it has the potential to raise sea-level by around 1.5 metres.

Analysis of the boulders has enabled the scientists to start constructing a long-term picture of glacier behaviour in the region. An urgent task is to put recent ice sheet changes into a historical context, and determine if these are part of a natural retreat since the end of the last glacial period (about 20 thousands years ago), or if they are a result of recent human-induced climate change.

Lead author Dr Joanne Johnson of BAS says, "Until now we didn't know much about the long-term history of this part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet because the region is incredibly remote and inaccessible. Our geological findings add a new piece to the jigsaw and will be used for improving computer models -- the most important tools we have for predicting future change."

Initial results show that Pine Island Glacier has 'thinned' by around 4 centimetres per year over the past 5,000 years, while Smith and Pope Glaciers thinned by just over 2 cm per year during the past 14,500 years. These rates are more than 20 times slower than recent changes: satellite, airborne and ground based observations made since the 1990s show that Pine Island Glacier has thinned by around 1.6 metres per year in recent years.

The scientists reached their conclusions by investigating how long the boulders have been exposed to cosmic radiation rather than being shielded by ice or sediment.

Co-author Dr Mike Bentley from the University of Durham said, "When rocks are left high and dry by thinning glaciers they are exposed to high energy cosmic rays which bombard the rock. This creates atoms of particular elements that we can extract and measure in the laboratory - the longer they have been exposed the greater the build-up of these elements. The discovery that we can place a fix on when rocks were left behind by the ice has revolutionised our understanding of how the Antarctic ice sheet has behaved in the past. "

Collapse of West Antarctic Ice Sheet?

The Amundsen Sea Embayment (ASE) lies on the side of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). It is an area that has always caused glaciologists concern, because here the bedrock beneath the ice is a long way below sea-level and the ice is only kept in place because it is thick enough to rest on the bed. Thinning of the ice around the coast could lead to glacier acceleration and further thinning of the ice sheet. Essentially, the ice sheet may be unstable, and the recent pattern of thinning could be a precursor to wholesale loss of the ASE ice sheet (implying a sea-level rise of around 1.5 m).

Complete collapse of the WAIS would result in a rise of about 5 m in global sea level. Most scientists working in the area think that complete collapse within the next few hundred years is unlikely, but even loss of one sector of the ice sheet would imply that projections of sea-level rise are at present too low.

Fieldwork

The ASE is a notoriously difficult place in which to undertake fieldwork, it is cold, windy and is more than 1400 km from any research station.

Using a helicopter from the German research vessel Polarstern during an expedition led by Karsten Gohl (AWI) BAS scientist Joanne Johnson and colleagues visited remote rock outcrops protruding from Pine Island, Pope and Smith glaciers on the vast West Antarctic Ice Sheet. They collected samples from boulders that have lain ice-free for thousands of years.

Pine Island Glacier is of great interest to scientists worldwide as it has been thinning at a rate of more than 1 m/year and its flow rate has accelerated over the past 15 years. The location at which the glacier starts to float on the sea also retreated at a rate of more than 1 km/year during part of this period.

Cosmogenic isotopes (eg Beryllium-10 and Aluminium-26) are created in rocks when they are bombarded by cosmic rays that penetrate the atmosphere from outer space. The accumulation of these isotopes within a rock surface can be used to establish its 'surface exposure age', i.e., how long it has been exposed to cosmic radiation rather than being shielded by ice or sediment.

Journal reference: First exposure ages from the Amundsen Sea Embayment, West Antarctica: The Late Quaternary context for recent thinning of Pine Island, Smith and Pope Glaciers by Joanne S. Johnson, Michael J. Bentley and Karsten Gohl is published in the March issue of the journal Geology.

Notice how it never mentions anything about global warming/climate change? That's because these scientists (and author of the article) understand what their research was based around, and didn't try to extrapolate it to another theory it had nothing to do with.

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By all accounts, if there really was a conspiracy concerning the pressuring of scientists, we would all think global warming is all a lie because the oil companies would've paid the higher dollar for the studies and produced copious amounts of them to inundate the scientific community. I mean for gods sake, the administration of the President edited out the "harsher" sections of government reports on pollution and the environment so it sound like everything was hunky dorrie. Do you really think the idea of a conspiracy against oil companies, which is basically what this is, makes any sense considering the track record of deception so far?

With the oil companies posting record profits, do you think they feel any need to fund research they don't even need? Look at Shell, they're actually using it to their advantage. They've just started an ad campaign about their natural-gas based fuel which is cleaner than oil.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

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I was addressing his "ice melting marginally... normal trend" comment. I wouldn't say that melting at 20 times it's former rate is a marginal increase. It's true they didn't say it was due to global warming because they were strictly studying how fast it's melting, not why. But if this article is to lend weight to either the "earth staying cool" or "earth getting warm" argument, which side do you think it would take?

I don't think it would take either side, since that's not what they're trying to study, nor do they want to make claims on. See, this is exactly where scientific studies being covered in the mainstream media starts to have problems. People want to take answers out of work that aren't actually there. Personally, I have little doubt if this was covered in an AP story on cnn.com there would be a paragraph at the end talking about how this ties into global warming due to carbon dioxide emissions.

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I don't think oil companies should fund that kind of research. The government should be doing it, not private businesses forced into doing it.

As though government agencies don't have their own biases? Right now in my field (materials science) the easiest way to get funding is to include the words "nanotechnology" and "biotechnology" in a proposal. People will stick those words on projects having to relevance to either subject, but that's just what has to be done in order to get funding. I have no doubt there's the same thing going on in climatology, geology, and all those other sub-fields that can tie their work into global warming. I mean, heck, if I want to do a killer proposal, I can write about making biocompatible piezoelectric nanowires that will harness the energy of a person's movements so they'll be less reliant upon fossil fuels and reduce their carbon footprint.

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My point was that if we compare the financial stability and political clout of oil companies to that of green energy companies, it's more logical to assume that oil companies are the potential bribers of science, not green energy.

The companies making record profits are in a more desperate position than those whose entire industry is based off of "feel-good" buyers and government subsidies?

Personally, I don't think there's anything malicious going on on either side of the aisle here; I think it's just people seeing what they want to see in some very, very fuzzy data.

There's nowhere I can't reach.