Good News from New Satirist

The alleged science-magazine New Pscientist continues to publish articles which, though at times droll, are seemingly meant to be taken seriously; read, for instance, “Greenland ice in no hurry to raise seas”, by Michael Marshall:

Good news is rare when it comes to the Greenland ice sheet.  Yet a model that accurately mimics the way the ice responds to rising temperatures by slipping and sliding into the sea suggests the resulting rise in sea levels may be smaller than feared.

In its 2007 forecasts of sea-level rise, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change famously excluded contributions from the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets because the physics were too poorly understood and complex to model.  As a result, the IPCC’s estimate that seas could rise by 18 to 59 centimetres by 2100 is almost certainly too low.  Indeed, levels are already rising faster than the models predicted.

Using data from the last decade, Stephen Price of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has shown that his modelled ice sheet moves in the same way as the real one does.  In particular, the model accurately reproduces how disruptions to the edge of the ice sheet leads to a large initial movement, which is followed by several decades of smaller movement.

Price has calculated that changes which the ice sheet experienced between 1997 and 2007 in response to a thermal disruption in the early 2000s will eventually lead to a rise of 0.6 centimetres.  Assuming that similar thermal disruptions happen every decade, the moving ice sheet will raise sea levels by about 4.5 centimetres by 2100.

That is about half of a widely quoted previous estimate of 9 centimetres, calculated by Tad Pfeffer at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and colleagues. But Pfeffer's study was a worst-case scenario, in which all the processes driving sea-level rise were pushed to their absolute limits (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1159099).

Pfeffer says Price’s study is a more plausible estimate of what might actually happen.  “They use a much more realistic scenario,” he says, “and their model is really grounded in physics.”

Notice that levels “rising faster than the models predicted” inevitably lead “to a rise of 0.6 centimetres.”  Oh, no!  Notice too that Tad Pfeffer admits that his own, alarmist, exaggerated predictions were not “really grounded in physics.”  Actual observations, of course, shew that the seas have not been rising—and will not rise—by anything near as much as the semi-illiterate hacks of Pseudo-Scientist and other alarmist publications have been shouting and fearing all these years.  See the post, “No Acceleration of Global Sea-Level”, below.

See also “Fake Sea Level Rise Approved by NASA in Climate Fraud”, by John O’Sullivan:

NASA researchers admit adding fake inches to sea level rises.  Skeptics denounce desperate attempt to salvage government global warming policies.

In a disturbing development in the ongoing global warming fiasco the U.S. government-funded Sea Level Research Group has been given a green light from NASA to exaggerate sea level rises [... so] policy makers can falsely blame humans for adding to natural rises in sea levels.