What Fresh Hell Is This?

November 28, 2010

The Braintrust Spins on Climage Change. Again.

From today's Sunday Pops at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:
New research suggests that all those predictions of markedly higher sea levels because of melting Antarctic ice sheets are wrong. In fact, the research says sea levels will fall — because of decreased gravitational pull and the fact that the bedrock will rise as the weight of the ice drops. The study comes out of Harvard, much to the chagrin, we're sure, of the Chicken Little crowd. Honey, throw another log on the fire — it's still cold outside.
But let's take a closer look, my droogs.

Here's the study's nearly incomprehensible summary:
Climate change could potentially destabilize marine ice sheets, which would affect projections of future sea-level rise. Specifically, an instability mechanism has been predicted for marine ice sheets such as the West Antarctic ice sheet that rest on reversed bed slopes, whereby ice-sheet thinning or rising sea level leads to irreversible retreat of the grounding line. However, existing analyses of this instability mechanism have not accounted for deformational and gravitational effects that lead to a sea-level fall at the margin of a rapidly shrinking ice sheet. Here we present a suite of predictions of gravitationally self-consistent sea-level change following grounding-line migration. Our predictions vary the initial ice-sheet size and also consider the contribution to sea-level change from various subregions of the simulated ice sheet. Using these results, we revisit a canonical analysis of marine-ice-sheet stability and demonstrate that gravity and deformation-induced sea-level changes local to the grounding line contribute a stabilizing influence on ice sheets grounded on reversed bed slopes. We conclude that accurate treatments of sea-level change should be incorporated into analyses of past and future marine-ice-sheet dynamics.
You will note, of course, that the study does NOT deny Climate change. It doesn't deny the temperature rising. It doesn't deny the ice sheet melting. Scaife's braintrust only wants you to make an artifical connection: the sea water won't be rising even though the "hoaxers" have said so - this Harvard study thus undermines another part of "global warming hoax" so we can be even more skeptical of the rest.

But does the study say what the braintrust says it says?


Take a look at some of the press following the report. Like this one from New Scientist:



So this is a much more local thing than the Trib wants you to believe. Look again. The study is asserting something the Trib wants you to doubt: the temperature is rising.


rich10e said...

snore snore snore

EdHeath said...

Actually, good job on taking a complicated subject and showing how it's locally specific conclusions are being incorrectly and misleadingly generalized. Some people will catch and understand the truth, butt we shouldn't have to research newspaper stories or opinion pieces to find out the truth or any given situation.

Especially when the distortion is being used to further an agenda (and yes, this has to do with the Super Bowl domestic violence statistic as much as it has to do with Climate Change).