NASA Mission Takes Stock of Earth's Melting Land Ice

[palsing]

Changes in ice thickness (in centimeters per year) during 2003-2010 as
measured by NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE)
satellites, averaged over each of the world's ice caps and glacier
systems outside of Greenland and Antarctica.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-036&cid=release_2012-036&msource=12036&tr=y&auid=10266783

-or-

http://tinyurl.com/87tnznw

[Brad Guth]

On Feb 8, 2:01 pm, palsing <pnals...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Changes in ice thickness (in centimeters per year) during 2003-2010 as
> measured by NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE)
> satellites, averaged over each of the world's ice caps and glacier
> systems outside of Greenland and Antarctica.
>

> http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-036&cid=release_20...
>
> -or-
>
> http://tinyurl.com/87tnznw

Ice melts and land erodes or migrates together, although for every 2
km3 of melted ice there’s perhaps only one km3 of eroded soil that’s
going into the drink. The other contributing factor of rising ocean
levels is the fact as the Greenland ice melts and offloads, it allows
the bedrock of Greenland to float higher, and that too as a solid
volume displaces our oceans.

There's simply lots of renewable energy that's relatively clean,
failsafe and doesn't create CO2, SO2, CO, NOx and otherwise disperse a
slew of other nasty toxins, as well as not releasing precious helium,
but those options are not nearly as profitable nor worth going to war
over. There’s also numerous methods of utilizing our energy a whole
lot more efficiently and making it more reliable at the same time.
For some reason Steven Chu and others of our previous, current and
future administrations do not feel the need nor having any personal
motives for changing a damn thing.

Global CO2 is more of an indicator rather than any singular cause of
AGW, just like smoke or soot is a good indicator of fire.

Solar variations are truly minimal, whereas the end result of whatever
internal fusion within our sun (regardless of the internal time delay
from start to exit) is still going to become the hot surface or
photosphere radiated energy, and a great deal of science has long
since proven when the sun has been measurably hotter or cooler, as
such hasn't offered any strong link as to what Earth has to work with,
such as when we try to deductively figure out GW and AGW science.

Try to remember, that by going only 0.1 km (100 meters) below the
surface, the +/- solar energy is nearly meaningless, because day or
night is practically meaningless. As for going any deeper than a km
under the surface, whereas even if the sun varied by +/50% would not
make any significant difference. Should that sun entirely vanish
would not measurably affect the bedrock that’s any km+ deep, however
the lack of tidal modulation would be measurably noticed as a measured
reduction in global heat.

On the annual cycle basis, most of our glacial ice thaw has been
melting from the bottom up. This is not to say that our AGW and its
global dimming isn’t working its magic from the top down.

The amount of stored heat, including fission generated heat and tidal
modulated heat from within Earth is considerably greater than any
solar heat influx. The extra 296 TW of thermal imbalance is just the
amount humans manage to contribute via mostly hydrocarbons, fission
and hydroelectric energy.

“According to calculations conducted by Hansen and his colleagues, the
0.58 watts per square meter imbalance implies that carbon dioxide
levels need to be reduced to about 350 parts per million to restore
the energy budget to equilibrium. The most recent measurements show
that carbon dioxide levels are currently 392 parts per million and
scientists expect that concentration to continue to rise in the
future.”

So, go right ahead and specify or declare what scientific quantitative
part of the estimated .58 w/m2 or 296 TW worth of global thermal
imbalance are you buying or not buying into?

296 TW of AGW (42.3 kw/person) doesn’t seem so bad, unless your local
area drought and/or weather/storm extremes are either draining your
bank account or otherwise killing you.

I would actually doubt that any 42 ppm reduction in CO2 by itself can
cancel out the .58 w/m2 of global energy imbalance, especially when so
much of the global imbalance of 296 TW isn’t strictly CO2 related.
However, if we can manage to cut the global CO2 by an average of 42
ppm, it stands to good reason that many other reductions in our soot,
CO, NOx, SO2, CH4 and a host of other released elements (including
helium) is going to get reduced at the same time. The accumulative
affect is going to be positive and otherwise beneficial to all known
forms of life, even terrific if it only accomplishes a 10% improvement
(.058 W/m2 or 29.6 TW), but none the less it's certainly a terrific
start in the right direction.

Actually, a mostly ice-free Greenland isn’t such a bad idea,
considering how much higher above ocean levels that little continent
gets, and the terrific exposed area of dry land becomes habitable,
with no shortages of inland fresh water. Importing a million trees
per year would be another good thing, along with topsoils for those
and everything else to grow from. With any luck, Greenland could
become the new Eden for us.

Greenland with another 50% loss of ice (-1.45e18 kg and say exposing
another 25% of its continent as ice-free land, worthy of 5e11 m2),
should actually turn out as being a very good place to live. As is,
Greenland is only 19% ice-free, or 4.1e11 m2 out of 2.166e12 m2,
although most of that ice-free land isn’t desirable to live on.
However, together that’s 9.1e11 m2 of ice-free land, with unlimited
hydroelectric and all the fresh water you could possibly want (after
exporting more than half of the 365e9 gallons of ice and compacted
snow melt per year, at the wholesale value of $1/gallon).

Outdated science: “Greenland's ice-free area increased by 16 percent
between 1979 and 2002” is a rate of roughly 0.7%/year, which by now
has likely increased to near 1%/year.

Btw; ice cores of Greenland’s compacted snow which becomes ice seem
to also track our industrial use of lead. Obviously even such heavy
elements of metallicity do carry themselves into the atmosphere, and
return to the surface as precipitation or snow.
http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=397988&section=3.1

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