BBC Focus Magazine

[Shadowwolf]

The Greenland and West Antarctic ice caps are melting at half the speed previously predicted, according to analysis of recent satellite data.

The finding is the result of research by a joint US/Dutch team from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Delft University of Technology (TU Delft, The Netherlands) and SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research. The scientists have published their work in the September issue of Nature Geoscience.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100906085152.htm

[M Paul Lloyd]

So in effect the rate of melting is not appreciably greater than would be expected as we continue to emerge from the last ice age that ended a mere 10,000 years ago and so nor does it now fit with AGW predictions. It also helps explain where all the melt-water has been going to, because it wasn't actually there in the first place.

Interesting stuff Mr.S, so perhaps we are not as utterly doomed as was once thought?

[Flakkarin]

So in effect the rate of melting is not appreciably greater than would be expected as we continue to emerge from the last ice age that ended a mere 10,000 years ago and so nor does it now fit with AGW predictions. It also helps explain where all the melt-water has been going to, because it wasn't actually there in the first place.

As far as I can see the article doesn't actually say anything like that anywhere? Or did you get that from somewhere else?

[M Paul Lloyd]

Sorry Flakkarin those were merely my own observations based upon what I had read in the article, I should have made that clear from the outset.

You may well recall I was rather concerned about where all the melt water was going to given that so much ice was supposedly melting and at an accelerated rate?

I had previously read on the Met Office website that the ice sheets were melting faster due to global warming (this was presented as a statement of fact by the way) and the subsequent increased rate of melting was causing sea levels to rise at a proportionally greater rate than previously (also presented as a statement of fact) but try as I might I could find no actual evidence to back this up, all over the world sea levels are only rising at the rate that they have been doing since the end of the last ice age and now I know why, because the ice isn't melting as fast as predicted.

[Flakkarin]

Sure, I was just wondering about this part specifically:

all over the world sea levels are only rising at the rate that they have been doing since the end of the last ice age

Since the article makes no statement like that, rather that the melting is lower, but still on the order of 150+ gigatonnes a year form Greenland and Antarctica combined. That still has to go somewhere

[M Paul Lloyd]

Indeed it must be going somewhere but I am a loss to explain where, other than being locked up in a possible increase in vegetation perhaps?

Certainly I can find no evidence of unprecidented sea level rise which suggests, to me at least, that large though the amount of melting ice is it is possibly not as problematic as was once feared?

[Shadowwolf]

Certainly I can find no evidence of unprecidented sea level rise which suggests, to me at least, that large though the amount of melting ice is it is possibly not as problematic as was once feared?

Does that mean you found evidence that there was a rise?

The sea is very, very large so even that volume is not going to translate into meters, but it will mean some change. Besides was that not media generated scare stories of flooded cities and inundated coasts?

[M Paul Lloyd]

Actually I can find no evidence of any current rise in sea levels but I have been assured that they did after the last ice age and current melting would seem to be in line with that.
I found this quite interesting, but note the graph shows no current rise only a predicted 'trend'.
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/gornitz_09/
It would seem to me that rapid melting of ice sheets is nothing new.

[M Paul Lloyd]

I also found this quite interesting.

In the last two years, several teams have estimated Greenland is shedding roughly 230 gigatonnes of ice, or 230 billion tonnes, per year and West Antarctica around 132 gigatonnes annually.
Together, that would account for more than half of the annual three-millimetre (0.2 inch) yearly rise in sea levels, a pace that compares dramatically with 1.8mm (0.07 inches) annually in the early 1960s.
But, according to the new study, published in the September issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, the ice estimates fail to correct for a phenomenon known as glacial isostatic adjustment...................
With glacial isostatic adjustment modelled in, the loss from Greenland is put at 104 gigatonnes, plus or minus 23 gigatonnes, and 64 gigatonnes from West Antarctica, plus or minus 32 gigatonnes.

So as I read it (and I may well be wrong and please do not hesitate to explain why) there is now insufficient ice melting to account for rising sea levels?
More here.
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/afp/20100908/t ... b2fc3.html