[Climate Change] Lake Erie up to 60% Covered in Ice

Well since we're talking about ice.
http://www.vox.com/2015/5/17/8617281/antarctica-larsen-b

This massive Antarctic ice shelf will be gone in just a few years, NASA says

n 2002, scientists at NASA were tracking daily satellite images of Antarctica when they watched in astonishment as a huge chunk of the Larsen B Ice Shelf splintered and collapsed in just a month.

This was an area of ice the size of Rhode Island — 1,250 square miles — and it just disintegrated before their eyes:

"This ice shelf has existed for at least 10,000 years, and soon it will be gone," said Ala Khazendar of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who led the study. The video below gives an overview:

While Larsen B is a particularly dramatic case, it's not an isolated one. As the planet warms up, a number of Antarctica's ice shelves have been melting dramatically in recent decades — with serious consequences for rising sea levels around the world.
Why collapsing ice shelves are a big deal

First, some terminology. Antarctica is covered by vast ice sheets that sit atop the continent. Many of these ice sheets flow, gradually, toward the ocean, where they form ice shelves that float on the water. Over time, chunks of these ice shelves break off — or "calve" — to form icebergs.

These ice shelves essentially keep the ice sheets behind them hemmed in — think of the shelves as a pie crust, preventing the filling from leaking out:

For thousands of years, this system was roughly stable. Ice would flow gradually into the oceans. But this was all counterbalanced by snow that was falling back on top of Antarctica and replenishing the ice sheets.

Over the last two decades, however, that's changed. As global warming has progressed, Antarctica's ice sheets are now losing 147 gigatons of ice each year, mainly from the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica. The system is no longer in balance, and Antarctica's ice is flowing more quickly into the ocean than before.

One reason for that? Those floating ice shelves that keep the land ice hemmed in have been thinning and at times collapsing. That's partly because water beneath the shelves has gotten warmer, eating away at the ice from below. Stronger winds have also pushed more of that warm water into the shelves.

A big 2015 study in Science estimated that Antarctica's ice shelves have thinned by up to 18 percent in the last two decades — mainly in West Antarctica but also around the bigger East Antarctica region. Meanwhile, some shelves have been collapsing entirely. Scientists watched the Larsen A Ice Shelf collapse in 1995. Then the Larsen B Ice Shelf in 2002. Then the Wilkins Ice Shelf in 2008.

When ice shelves collapse, they don't immediately affect sea-level rise much, since their ice was already floating in the water anyway. But the disintegration of these shelves allows the ice behind them to flow more rapidly into the sea — and that does have the potential to significantly speed up sea-level rise.

After Larsen A and Larsen B collapsed, the glaciers behind them began losing ice into the sea 300 percent faster than before. Overall, studies have found that the loss of ice shelves has contributed to a 59 percent increase in ice discharge from regions of West Antarctica. That's all helping to push up global sea levels.
So how high will sea levels rise?

This is the big question — and the one most relevant to coastal cities around the world.

For now, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects that global warming will cause worldwide sea levels to rise between 1 foot and 3 feet, on average, by 2100. That's partly because ocean water expands as it warms. But it's partly because more ice from Antarctica, Greenland, and other glaciers is melting and flowing into the oceans, pushing up sea levels:

Yet some scientists have argued that the IPCC's projections actually underestimated the possibility of major ice loss from Antarctica. If so, it's possible that future sea-level rise could be on the higher end of projections.

The ultimate amount of sea-level rise will depend partly on how much the Earth actually warms in the coming decades, and partly on local conditions in Antarctica. Increased snowfall in East Antarctica, for instance, could partially counteract the increased loss of land ice.

Over the longer term, however, Antarctica has the capability of raising sea levels much, much higher. West Antarctica's ice sheet contains enough ice to raise sea levels worldwide by 10 to 14 feet, on average. In 2014, two studies argued that a major portion of West Antarctica's ice sheet has now been destabilized irreversibly, and its slide into the sea over the next 200 to 900 years is all but inevitable. The only real question is how fast it will go.

Then there's the even more massive East Antarctica ice sheet, which contains enough ice to raise global sea levels by another 190 feet or so. Thankfully, this sheet appears far more stable, and it would take many, many centuries for all that ice to melt. Yet if even a fraction of that ice slid into the sea, it would alter coastlines and cities dramatically for generations to come.
Further reading:

By the way, there's another aspect of Antarctica's climate that wasn't discussed above — namely, the floating sea ice that forms in the ocean around the continent during the winter.

This sea ice has actually been expanding to record highs of late, even as the planet has warmed, and scientists are still debating why. It's a fascinating story. But it's also not very relevant to global sea levels, since this ice was already floating in the sea. When it comes to sea-level rise, it's land ice that matters most — and Antarctica is losing its land ice, on net.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/H2a3Oemo1e4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

Interesting post, except it somehow managed to avoid noting the following relevant information provided by the University of Texas at Austin Department of Geophysics:

Researchers Find Major West Antarctic Glacier Melting from Geothermal Sources

Thwaites Glacier, the large, rapidly changing outlet of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, is not only being eroded by the ocean, it's being melted from below by geothermal heat, researchers at the Institute for Geophysics at The University of Texas at Austin (UTIG) report in the current edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The findings significantly change the understanding of conditions beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet where accurate information has previously been unobtainable.

The Thwaites Glacier has been the focus of considerable attention in recent weeks as other groups of researchers found the glacier is on the way to collapse, but more data and computer modeling are needed to determine when the collapse will begin in earnest and at what rate the sea level will increase as it proceeds. The new observations by UTIG will greatly inform these ice sheet modeling efforts.

Using radar techniques to map how water flows under ice sheets, UTIG researchers were able to estimate ice melting rates and thus identify significant sources of geothermal heat under Thwaites Glacier. They found these sources are distributed over a wider area and are much hotter than previously assumed.

The geothermal heat contributed significantly to melting of the underside of the glacier, and it might be a key factor in allowing the ice sheet to slide, affecting the ice sheet's stability and its contribution to future sea level rise.

The cause of the variable distribution of heat beneath the glacier is thought to be the movement of magma and associated volcanic activity arising from the rifting of the Earth's crust beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Knowledge of the heat distribution beneath Thwaites Glacier is crucial information that enables ice sheet modelers to more accurately predict the response of the glacier to the presence of a warming ocean.

Until now, scientists had been unable to measure the strength or location of heat flow under the glacier. Current ice sheet models have assumed that heat flow under the glacier is uniform like a pancake griddle with even heat distribution across the bottom of the ice.

The findings of lead author Dusty Schroeder and his colleagues show that the glacier sits on something more like a multi-burner stovetop with burners putting out heat at different levels at different locations.

"It's the most complex thermal environment you might imagine," said co-author Don Blankenship, a senior research scientist at UTIG and Schroeder's Ph.D. adviser. "And then you plop the most critical dynamically unstable ice sheet on planet Earth in the middle of this thing, and then you try to model it. It's virtually impossible."

That's why, he said, getting a handle on the distribution of geothermal heat flow under the ice sheet has been considered essential for understanding it.

 

->

ok so everybody is even more f**ked. whoo

 

Antartic sea ice has been increasing for the past 25 years and is at record levels. The melting in the peninsula is a local effect due to geothermal activities (one of the largest active volcanoes on earth sit there). The warming of the West Antartic posited by Steig et al has been debunked by O'Donnell et al in a high profile academic clash some time ago.
The hiatus has now lasted for 18 years and the climategate cabal (Michael Mann, Kevin "missing heat" Trenberth and al) is caught in a right quadrandry of their own making: any attempt to explain away the hiatus via "natural variability" undermines the claim that CO2 is the primary climatic driver and ironically means that the late 1980s warming can actually be attributed to such natural variability.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/environm...a-ice-at-record-levels-despite-global-warming

What's the local effect in the Arctic?

 

Basically wind patterns and ocean currents such as the alaskan gyre and the ice transport through Fram straits. Sea ice has actually been increasing since 2012 in the arctic due to low transfer rate through Fram straits. From Cryosphere:


Also, how the hell can a global increase in temperature be affecting sea ice in diametrically different ways?

 

Warming doesn't happen evenly. Because the earth is a dynamic system, and temperature is controlled by currents (both ocean and air). a shift in weather pattern in a warming environment can actually make a place colder locally in the short term.

 

Not over nearly 30 years. And no, global warming does not lead to cooling.

 

Why not over 30 years?

Also, global warming models do predict localized cooling in some places and also in the upper atmosphere which has occurred.

That said it's very hard to predict impacts of global warming because of how complex weather and climate is in the world.

 

So it turns out that the whole thing about that pause.....

Global warming 'pause' didn't happen, study finds

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/04/global-warming-hasnt-paused-study-finds

 

They are saying there was not a hiatus.

 

It doesn't matter what the temperature is, carbon is bad and the tax man is coming.