Jump to content

PhillipS

Members
  • Posts

    1,210
  • Joined

  • Last visited

About PhillipS

Profile Information

  • Gender
    Male
  • Location:
    Austin, TX
  1. Apologies if I'm splitting hairs, Bluewave, but August didn't see an increase in Arctic SIV, it saw a decrease in the anomaly. Arctic SIV continued to drop, albeit at a slower rate.
  2. It's easy to just focus on the recent melt seasons but I got a jolt when I looked at the PIOMAS sea ice volume plot. The SIV is currently around 6.75K km3, just behind 2012 as ORH reported above, but the 1979-2001 average for this time of years is almost 17,000 km3, more 10,000 km3 greater than today - a loss I find sobering.
  3. Remember that Dr Muller was selected to head the BEST project by the Koch Brothers - so he isn't a 'Warmist' by any stretch. The methodology they used for their research has been open and transparent - so critics have had years to critique their approach. But the so-called 'skeptics' haven't done that, have they? And their findings have been peer-reviewed and published in the scientific literature - so critics have had years to refutes any or all of their findings. But the so-called 'skeptics' haven't done that either, have they? Your attack by innuendo is meaningless in a technical discussion. If you have some peer-reviewed research which refutes the BEST findings then by all means share it. Otherwise you're just trolling.
  4. More open Arctic ocean -> increased evaporation -> increased water vapor -> increased precipitation. But GIS Surface Mass Balance is only half of the situation. It does not include dynamic GIS processes such as glacial calving, basal melting, or meltwater runoff. Look at the Total Mass Change data for the complete situation. As you can see, the GIS has lost around 3,600 km3 (3,600 Gtons) of ice since 2003.
  5. Keeping in mind that SMB is only half of the mass balance equation, it looks like 2016 was the fifth worst melt season of the instrumental period, and the second greatest season for runoff. Just eyeballing the graph it looks like there is a long-term decline in snowfall but I don't know if that's due to less precipitation overall or more precip falling as rain. Here's the GRACE plot of total mass balance since 2003. I expect that 2016 will have a net mass loss of around 300 Gtons (300 km3).
  6. Here in central Texas, the installed cost for solar is around $1.80/watt ($1,800/kW). Which is why the West Texas solar farms can make a profit selling power at $0.04/kWh, the contractual price Austin Energy just signed for solar power. For a 2,000 ft2 home, you can get a ball-park cost by looking at your utility bills and adding up your total energy usage, in kWh, for a year and dividing by 1,500 (the approx annual kWh produced per kW of installed capacity) to get the size of the solar array to offset your power consumption. A more detailed and precise estimate of your solar potential is easy to produce by using the PVWATTS calculator created by NREL [link] It takes into account array location and weather for that location when calculating solar energy production.
  7. That article is from Dec 2014, and has been superseded by more recent research. Since you like USAToday here is their more recent article on this topic [link[ But there is peer-reviewed research out there, too. The Diffenbaugh et al 2014 paper from PNAS is a good start [link]. It's abstract: California ranks first in the United States in population, economic activity, and agricultural value. The state is currently experiencing a record-setting drought, which has led to acute water shortages, groundwater overdraft, critically low streamflow, and enhanced wildfire risk. Our analyses show that California has historically been more likely to experience drought if precipitation deficits co-occur with warm conditions and that such confluences have increased in recent decades, leading to increases in the fraction of low-precipitation years that yield drought. In addition, we find that human emissions have increased the probability that low-precipitation years are also warm, suggesting that anthropogenic warming is increasing the probability of the co-occurring warm–dry conditions that have created the current California drought.
  8. Greenland saw a steep, but brief, resurgence of surface melting DMI shows the 2014 -2015 GIS melt season (which runs Sept through Aug) as being about 75 gigatons below the long term average, and about 250 gigatons above the record surface melt in 2011 - 2012. So it was a strong, but not exceptional GIS surface melt season. The overall net mass balance hasn't been announced yet - but with recent large calving events reported I would estimate a net mass loss for 2015 of between 300 and 400 gigatons.
  9. Bethesda Boy is intellectually incapable of manning up and admitting when he's wrong - he'll just play semantic games and torture the English language forever. I have no idea whether his issues stem from his admitted substance abuse, or underlying congenital flaws - but I hope that at some level he understands that he is his own worst enemy, and that he is solely responsible for his credibility these days being too low to measure.
  10. It will probably go on until you man up and admit you were wrong. As shown by your own words. I know that accepting responsibility for your actions is not your strong suit, so carry on with your semantic games and weasel wording - the credibility you trash is only your own.
  11. Peter Sinclair has an interesting post up at ClimateCrocks on the effect of increased rainfall on the GIS. [link]
  12. Thank you for the correction - the mistake in the estimated area was mine alone. I should of checked my numbers before I hit Post.
  13. Here is a comment on the recent Jakobshavn glacier at Nevins. And a Washington Post article that includes quotes from Jason Box and Richard Alley And last, but certainly not least, is the NASA Earth Observatory post. There is a lot of uncertainty in the estimates of the size of the calving event, but this size of event will have a big impact on the net mass balance analysis for the 2015 melt season. Many estimates put it at around 125 12.5 km2 in area, so if the glacier is 1,000 meters thick at the calving site, that would mean a loss of roughly 125 12.5 Gtons of mass in four days. And the calving goes on all year, unlike the surface melt.
  14. Since the SMB is only one component of the GIS net mass balance, and not even the biggest component, it's a bit early to declare it a bust. The DMI calculates the GIS melt season as Sept through August, and typically DMI posts a melt season summary late in the year that combines all factors. Here is the current accumulated SMB In my estimation, 2015 will be a net 275 - 325 km3 mass loss for the GIS, well below the record in 2012 of around 400 km3.
×
×
  • Create New...