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Our huge glacial ice sheets are growing, not melting, Part II

| March 29, 2010 9:00 PM

Last week, we had a tremendous response from Part I of "Our Glaciers are Growing, Not Melting" by Robert Felix, www.iceagenow.com.

This week, in Part II, Bob covers the huge expanding ice sheets on Planet Earth.

In 2007, Antarctica set a new record for most ice extent since 1979, says meteorologist Joe D'Aleo. While the Antarctic Peninsula area has warmed in recent years, and ice near it diminished during the summer, the interior of Antarctica has been colder and the ice extent greater.

Antarctic sea ice is also increasing. According to Australian Antarctic Division glaciology program head Ian Allison, sea ice losses in west Antarctica over the past 30 years have been more than offset by increases in the Ross Sea region, just one sector of east Antarctica.

The Antarctic Peninsula, where the ice has been melting, is only about 1/50th the size of east Antarctica, where the ice has been growing. Saying that all of Antarctica is melting is like looking at the climate of Oregon and saying that this applies to the entire United States.

There was not any evidence of significant change in the mass of ice shelves in east Antarctica nor any indication that its ice cap was melting, says Dr. Allison. "The only significant calvings in Antarctica have been in the west." And he cautioned that calvings of the magnitude seen recently in west Antarctica might not be unusual.

"A paper to be published soon by the British Antarctic Survey in the journal Geophysical Research Letters is expected to confirm that over the past 30 years, the area of sea ice around the continent has expanded."

What about Greenland?

Greenland's ice cap has thickened slightly in recent years despite wide predictions of a thaw triggered by global warming, said a team of scientists in October 2005.

The 3,000-meter (9,842-foot) thick ice cap is a key concern in debates about climate change because a total melt would raise world sea levels by about 7 meters.

But satellite measurements show that more snow is falling and thickening the ice-cap, especially at high altitudes, according to the report in the journal Science.

The overall ice thickness changes are approximately plus 5 centimeters (1.9 inches) per year or 54 centimeters (21.26 inches) over 11 years, according to the experts at Norwegian, Russian and U.S. institutes led by Ola Johannessen at the Mohn Sverdrup center for Global Ocean Studies and Operational Oceanography in Norway.

Not overwhelming growth, certainly, but a far cry from the catastrophic melting that we've been lead to believe.

Think about that.

The Antarctic Ice Sheet is almost twice as big as the contiguous United States.

Put the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets together, and they're one hundred times bigger than all of the rest of the world's glaciers combined.

More than 90 percent of the world's glaciers are growing, in other words, and all we hear about are the ones that are shrinking.

But if so many of the world's glaciers are growing, how can sea levels remain the same?

They can't. The sea level models are wrong.

During the last ice age, sea levels stood some 370 feet (100 meters) lower than today. That's where all of the moisture came from to create those two-mile-high sheets of ice that covered so much of the north.

And just as the ice has been melting for 11,000 years, so too were sea levels rising during those same years.

But the rising has stopped.

Forget those IPCC claims. Sea levels are not rising, says Dr. Nils-Axel Mrner, one-time expert reviewer for the IPCC.

Dr. Mrner, who received his PhD in geology in 1969, is one of the greatest - if not the greatest - sea level experts in the world today. He has worked with sea level problems for 40 years in areas scattered all over the globe.

"There is no change," says Mrner. "Sea level is not changing in any way."

"There is absolutely no sea-level rise in Tuvalo," Mrner insists. "There is no change here, and there is zero sea-level rise in Bangladesh. If anything, sea levels have lowered in Bangladesh."

"We do not need to fear sea-level rise," says Mrner. "But we should have a fear of those people who fooled us."

LATE RUSSIAN FLOOD NOTE

Catastrophic floods are expected later this spring across much of Russia as the all-time record winter snowpacks melt following the harshest winter since World War II. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on Friday, "the ice is still several meters (yards) thick in Siberia and millions of acres of rich farmland will be flooded as rivers go over their banks."

NORTH IDAHO WEATHER REVIEW AND LONG-RANGE OUTLOOKS

We are finally seeing some increasing storminess and cooler temperatures from the Gulf of Alaska on the back side of an El Nino that's gradually weakening in the waters of the Pacific Ocean.

Snow levels will lower at times to near 2,500 feet, which could mean a few late-season spring flurries into early April in parts of North Idaho and the surrounding Inland Empire.

In the meantime, however, as of this Thursday morning, March 25 writing, our January through March total snowfall remains at an all-time record low level of just 2.7 inches, less than half of the previous record low total of 5.7 inches during the same period in 1944 toward the end of World War II.

I'm still looking far a cooler and wetter than normal spring in our part of the country followed by a HOTTER and DRIER than normal summer season with lots of 90-degree plus 'Sholeh Days.'

Major forest fires could occur later this summer into the early fall period. Stay tuned for further updates.

SPECIAL NOTE

As a weatherman seeking 'climatological truth,' I'm sometimes forced in my balloon into unfavorable currents of 'political hot air.' But, I enjoy soaring through the 'clouds of reason,' despite these risks to my reputation.

Happy 49th Anniversary, honey ...

Cliff Harris is a climatologist who writes a weekly column for The Press. His opinions are his own. E-mail sfharris@roadrunner.com