Global Warming

Maybe this has been done before. I wouldn't have been too interested, because I didn't know much. However, recently I came across two completely opposed views through the media, and I had to do some research to find out who's lying to me (or passing on their own deception to me).This seems a great place to test out what I'm finding.The EPA's web site says that the following things are known about global warming (wording condensed by me):1. Human activities have increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere.2. A warming trend of roughly 1 degree fahrenheit occured during the 20th century.3. Greenhouse gases like CO2 stay in the atmosphere, so they'll continue to accumulate.4. Increasing greenhouse gases tend to warm the planet.Not very specific, really. The more moderate anti-global warming people like Richard Lindzen (moderate as compared to say, Rush Limbaugh) could agree with all this. I agree with all this.However, here's some specific things I think I'm finding. I've researched only the Antarctic Ice Sheet, the Greenland Ice Sheet, and sea levels (and Mt. Kilimanjaro specifically):1. Only melting land ice raises sea level. Melting sea ice does not.2. There are really three major land ice sheets talked about in the web sites I've looked at: The Greenland Ice Sheet, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.3. The Greenland Ice Sheet is not losing any mass, so it is not contributing to rising sea levels, despite all the hype about it. (From the EPA.) This isn't certain because of difficulties of measurement, but every study since 1968 listed on their site says it's the same or increasing.4. The West Antarctic ice sheet is losing mass (NASA news release, March 2, 2006 and a Science Daily news release). This was only enough to raise global sea level about 0.2 or 0.4 mm/yr, about half the thickness of a sheet of paper or less.5. The East Antarctic ice sheet is apparently gaining mass (Nature's web site news release).6. The Antarctic Peninsula, which is a small part of West Antarctica, has increased in temperature by 4 or 5 degrees fahrenheit since 1947. This has caused much or perhaps almost all of the West Antarctic melting. NASA felt free to say that this temperature increase has no apparent link to global warming, but is localized, and "the jury is still out" as to whether the melting will continue.7. The East Antarctic ice sheet contains 76.5% of the world's ice (85% of Antarctica's, which is 90% of the world's - from the Gulf of Maine link in point 8 and the Nature link in 5).8. The highest prediction of global sea level increase I saw that looked remotely scholarly was 1 meter, attributed to "some scientists" by the Gulf of Maine Research Institute here. They add that "some scientists" say that warming could result in more snow in the Antarctic and thus reduce sea levels. Finally, they say that "most scientists" caution that it is very hard to predict what will happen.My conclusion from what I've seen.Greenhouse gas accumulation is very real. It causes global warming. How much is uncertain. What its effects have been to date is uncertain. Prediction of future effects is difficult.The doomsayers, however, are wrong about some things.1. Sea levels will not rise 15 to 20 feet in the near future, nor in this century.2. The antarctic has lost a relatively small amount of mass, and the major part of Antarctica is gaining mass.3. Greenland's ice sheet, the only other major ice sheet in the world, does not appear to be losing any mass.I think that's nothing but an honest look at the data, but then, I'm not a scientist.You are welcome to talk about other points, but these are the ones I'm checking on.

I have no history with which to choose my authorities, so I had to do the best I could. I tried to avoid, in whatever way I could, using far left or far right sources. Global warming seems to be as much a political issue as an environmental one (sadly).I chose the EPA's climate change web site, because it just listed information, and I felt okay with it, because environmental web sites seemed to refer to it a lot. It's the anti-Sierra club type people who speak against the EPA's committee on climate change, not the environmentalists. The EPA's web site had links to the IPCC, which the right wingers seem to think is evil, so I figured all that was safe. If you can give me reasons not to, besides calling it a Bush EPA, I'd be glad to hear them. I don't think I displayed a bias. I think I chose the EPA for the reasons above. I chose the Nature web site because they're the publishers of Nature. I chose Science Daily and that Maine Gulf Institute, because they seemed to use real figures that everyone was using, and I used NASA, because it was a government organization. Sorry, my experience on health issues (especially research on herbal issues) makes me more comfortable with government web sites than private ones, because on health issues, they are easily the most honest. They don't hide research. Okay. The first link produced a fisherman's opinion that one iceberg is smaller. The second produced a bunch of comments about what "scientists" say and a vague reference to "this week's Nature" that gave no specifics as to what they got from it. The first line in that article says "Greenland's massive ice sheet could BEGIN to melt this century."There's a "could" and a "begin" in that sentence, which means despite all the rhetoric in the rest of the article, there's no statement that Greenland is melting currently.Finally, the third one, from a college--I like those web sites, too, as long as they're giving the author and why the author is writing on the subject, which they often do--gives melt extent data.That data is newer than what I'd been able to find, so that's good, and it shows a steady increase since 1980.The fourth is BBC World News. While it's just a news story, it at least names the scientist and quotes him on pertinent subjects (it's amazing how rare that is). None of this is really quantified or tied to sea level rise.Ah, here we go. That GRACE observatory from NASA is cool. Real numbers. What's funny is that they list 39 cubic miles as higher than all previously published estimates for melting, while this site says 57 cubic miles for 2002-2005, and that's also based on GRACE. Strange.One more comment about biasI specifically skipped all the anti-global warming, right wing sites. That means I mostly run into left-wing bias, not right-wing, and all bias is somewhat irritating to me. Take the following statement, from the web site I just linked:"Although earlier evidence using other techniques appeared to show that the East Antarctica ice sheet was actually thickening, satellite data gathered by Isabella Velicogna and John Wahr at Boulder found that melting -- primarily from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet -- had turned at least 36 cubic miles of ice to fresh water each year from 2002 to 2005."Using other techniques??? The only evidence I found for the thickening of the East Antarctic ice sheet was from GRACE, the very same technique. And this paragraph doesn't contradict that. It drops this hint that the data saying the East Antarctic ice sheet is thickening is flawed, then never actually gives any evidence it's flawed. And it does more than hint that it's using a different technique, it actually says so, and it's not true.I have to spend a lot of my time dodging those kind of intellectual land mines, and I don't have a history in science to help me do that. I just have to stay on my toes as I read.That all said, it appears Greenland's ice sheet is melting at roughly the speed West Antarctica's is, and it's increased from 2002-2005.Reasonable estimates of future sea level rise still seem to be at 1 meter max in a century, even from those sites I just looked at.

It means there's a net loss, but that table you were quoting (the second table on my link) was about Antarctica. It's older data, too, and so it's error margins were huge, bigger than the net loss. (There was a page explaining the tables that I didn't link to, sorry.)We have GRACE data, too, which seems to be winning for reliability. That's all new since 2005, though.Let me also address your post 5: This seems to be the real potential danger amount. 1 meter per century. That would be about 5 or 6 times what it was the last century. This was one of the more interesting things I found. Apparently, scientists were surprised to find that the ocean waters around West Antarctica had warmed by around 1 degree, uh, Fahrenheit, I think, since 1947. (I don't know why they were surprised. The report just said that climate models said the waters should be cooler.) This apparently must be the major contributor the breakup of the Ross Ice Shelf, because despite Antarctic Peninsula temperature increases, the Ross Ice Shelf air temperatures have actually been cooler.