The western chunk of Antarctica is losing 23 feet of its floating ice sheet each year. Until now, scientists weren’t exactly sure how it was happening and whether or how man-made global warming might be a factor. The answer, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, is that climate change plays an indirect role — but one that has larger repercussions than if Antarctic ice were merely melting from warmer air.

Hamish Pritchard, a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey, said research using an ice-gazing NASA satellite showed that warmer air alone couldn’t explain what was happening to Antarctica. A more detailed examination found a chain of events that explained the shrinking ice shelves.

Twenty ice shelves showed signs that they were melting from warm water below. Changes in wind currents pushed that relatively warmer water closer to and beneath the floating ice shelves. The wind change is likely caused by a combination of factors, including natural weather variation, the ozone hole and man-made greenhouse gases, Pritchard said in a phone interview.

As the floating ice shelves melt and thin, that in turn triggers snow and ice on land glaciers to slide down to the floating shelves and eventually into the sea, causing sea level rise, Pritchard said. Thicker floating ice shelves usually keep much of the land snow and ice from shedding to sea, but that’s not happening now.

That whole process causes larger and faster sea level rise than simply warmer air melting snow on land-locked glaciers, Pritchard said.

“It means the ice sheets are highly sensitive to relatively subtle changes in climate through the effects of the wind,” he said.

What’s happening in Antarctica “may have already triggered a period of unstable glacier retreat,” the study concludes. If the entire Western Antarctic Ice Sheet were to melt — something that would take many decades if not centuries — scientists have estimated it would lift global sea levels by about 16 feet.

NASA chief scientist Waleed Abdalati, an expert in Earth’s ice systems who wasn’t involved in the research, said Pritchard’s study “makes an important advance” and provides key information about how Antarctica will contribute to global sea level rise.

Another outside expert, Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, said the paper will change the way scientists think about melt in Antarctica. Seeing more warm water encircling the continent, he worries that with “a further push from the wind” newer areas could start shrinking.

These are “texts” that should be marked with an obelus, as writings of questionable value. They are, quite frankly, a sort of legerdemain. One thinks, too, of the famous dictum attributed to Tertullian: Credo quia absurdum (I believe because it is absurd.) Actually, the Church Father had written: credibile est, quia ineptum est (probability can be derived from improbability). Same difference. Climate warmists are the Tertullians of the modern age, extracting conviction from rank implausibility and offering their legendary computer models as proofs of the ineffable.

For Lord Christopher Monckton, who specializes in exploring scientific frauds, the reasoning of our climate extremists represents an instance of the logical fallacy known as the argumentum ad petitionem principii, where the premise is also the conclusion. “We tell the computer models that there will be strong warming if we add CO2 to the air. The models show there will be strong warming. Therefore the warming is our fault” (Financial Post, April 21, 2012). Monckton’s scathing and authoritative analysis, predicated on Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations, tears the anthropogenic thesis to wretched little shreds. (Aristotle’s volume is well worth consulting; as the philosopher points out in introducing his subject, “things made of litharge and tin seem to be of silver, while those made of yellow metal seem to be golden.” The application to the current form of “climate science” and its pseudo-scriptural psalters is obvious.)

The western chunk of Antarctica is losing 23 feet of its floating ice sheet each year. Until now, scientists weren’t exactly sure how it was happening and whether or how man-made global warming might be a factor. The answer, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, is that climate change plays an indirect role — but one that has larger repercussions than if Antarctic ice were merely melting from warmer air.

Hamish Pritchard, a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey, said research using an ice-gazing NASA satellite showed that warmer air alone couldn’t explain what was happening to Antarctica. A more detailed examination found a chain of events that explained the shrinking ice shelves.

Twenty ice shelves showed signs that they were melting from warm water below. Changes in wind currents pushed that relatively warmer water closer to and beneath the floating ice shelves. The wind change is likely caused by a combination of factors, including natural weather variation, the ozone hole and man-made greenhouse gases, Pritchard said in a phone interview.

As the floating ice shelves melt and thin, that in turn triggers snow and ice on land glaciers to slide down to the floating shelves and eventually into the sea, causing sea level rise, Pritchard said. Thicker floating ice shelves usually keep much of the land snow and ice from shedding to sea, but that’s not happening now.

That whole process causes larger and faster sea level rise than simply warmer air melting snow on land-locked glaciers, Pritchard said.

“It means the ice sheets are highly sensitive to relatively subtle changes in climate through the effects of the wind,” he said.

What’s happening in Antarctica “may have already triggered a period of unstable glacier retreat,” the study concludes. If the entire Western Antarctic Ice Sheet were to melt — something that would take many decades if not centuries — scientists have estimated it would lift global sea levels by about 16 feet.

NASA chief scientist Waleed Abdalati, an expert in Earth’s ice systems who wasn’t involved in the research, said Pritchard’s study “makes an important advance” and provides key information about how Antarctica will contribute to global sea level rise.

Another outside expert, Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, said the paper will change the way scientists think about melt in Antarctica. Seeing more warm water encircling the continent, he worries that with “a further push from the wind” newer areas could start shrinking.

These are “texts” that should be marked with an obelus, as writings of questionable value. They are, quite frankly, a sort of legerdemain. One thinks, too, of the famous dictum attributed to Tertullian: Credo quia absurdum (I believe because it is absurd.) Actually, the Church Father had written: credibile est, quia ineptum est (probability can be derived from improbability). Same difference. Climate warmists are the Tertullians of the modern age, extracting conviction from rank implausibility and offering their legendary computer models as proofs of the ineffable.

For Lord Christopher Monckton, who specializes in exploring scientific frauds, the reasoning of our climate extremists represents an instance of the logical fallacy known as the argumentum ad petitionem principii, where the premise is also the conclusion. “We tell the computer models that there will be strong warming if we add CO2 to the air. The models show there will be strong warming. Therefore the warming is our fault” (Financial Post, April 21, 2012). Monckton’s scathing and authoritative analysis, predicated on Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations, tears the anthropogenic thesis to wretched little shreds. (Aristotle’s volume is well worth consulting; as the philosopher points out in introducing his subject, “things made of litharge and tin seem to be of silver, while those made of yellow metal seem to be golden.” The application to the current form of “climate science” and its pseudo-scriptural psalters is obvious.)

ST. LOUIS

Naya, a brand of beautiful, comfortable women’s shoes that leave a softer footprint on the earth, will mark its two-year anniversary with the tree planting initiative. In the past two years the brand has planted 10,000 indigenous trees in the United States through the Plant-It 2020 program.

“The Naya brand is committed to helping preserve our earth through our partnership with Nordstrom for Earth Day. This gives our customers a way to give back by replenishing trees around the globe. We know women want beautiful, comfortable shoes that leave a softer footprint on our earth, and seek opportunities to do something good for the planet. With the selection of materials we use for Naya, this helps our mission of giving back,” said Marci Ranger, Vice President of Marketing for Naya Shoes.

The trees planted through Plant-It 2020 are placed in non-harvest locations on public land, and are protected by contract from being cut down. Plant-It 2020 selects trees with a high survival rate and if a maintenance plan is needed, one is set in place before the trees are planted.

Naya shoes utilize materials that are gentler on the planet, such as vegetable-tanned leathers and linings, natural cork, water-based cements and natural or recycled content fabrics. Naya shoes are packaged in boxes made with 80 percent recycled paper pulp and in reusable shoe bags and shoe forms. The footwear is available at Nordstrom and Nordstrom.com as well as many other retailers nationwide and in more than 20 countries within Asia, Australia and North America, including but not limited to: Canada, Germany, Greece, Japan and the United Arab Emirates.

“Gabi Hegerl, Chair of Climate System Science at the University of Edinburgh, said there is evidence that extreme heat events have become more common and more severe, including at the regional level in parts of the U.S. “This is consistent with observing more and stronger heat waves,” she said.”

“Hegerl said that in order to draw conclusions about global warming’s role in this particular heat wave, one would need to conduct modeling studies where you compare the odds of this event occurring with and without added greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide, “to see how much the warming has changed the odds.””

That’s not a very satisfying answer. But, then again, it’s a complicated topic. As the planet heats up, the odds of extreme heat waves increase. This isn’t terribly controversial. Indeed, it already appears to be happening. A 2009 study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research found that the ratio of record highs to record lows has been increasing in the United States over the past four decades. (During the 2000s, the United States saw twice as many record highs as record lows.) That’s a solid indication that, for all the ups and downs of daily weather, things are getting steadily hotter overall.

But it still remains very difficult for climate scientists to point to a particular heat wave and say that man-made global warming is responsible for it. After all, as Freedman details, quite a few things can cause March temperatures to spike — things such as high-pressure blocking patterns or a lack of snow cover. What we want to know is whether these record highs would have occurred without global warming. And, as Hegerl notes above, that takes time and effort to pin down.

Yet researchers are trying to answer this question; as I wrote in an earlier story, this is one of the cutting-edge areas of climate research. Last October, for instance, Stefan Rahmstorf and Din Coumou published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences that examined the heat wave in Moscow in 2010, when record temperatures killed hundreds. They examined more than a century of data and used statistical techniques to tease out natural variability. They concluded that there was an 80 percent likelihood that Moscow’s heat wave would never have occurred without man-made global warming.

That still, of course, leaves the challenge of sorting out just how much blame to assign global warming for any given freak occurrence. “Imagine you have a lot of historical data, and you’ve decided that a heat wave can never get bigger than 9°C,” Martin Hoerling of the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration told me. “That’s the biggest heat wave possible from natural factors. So then you find that, because of human influences, temperatures have warmed 1°C. And now along comes a 10°C heat wave. You can say that this never would have happened without human influence. But you could also say that 90 percent of it was due to natural variability.”

So why does any of this matter? Isn’t it enough to know that the planet is warming and that unseasonably sweaty conditions are the sort of thing we’re likely to see more and more frequently if we continue belching greenhouse gases into the air?

Perhaps. Although better attribution studies could shake up the legal landscape down the road. As Peter Stott of Britain’s Met Office Hadley Center has pointed out, it’s quite possible that we could see more lawsuits being brought against polluters for climate-caused natural disasters in the years ahead. In that case, he notes, “there would be a requirement for objective and scientifically robust information” on the causes of specific disasters.

Obviously no one’s going to sue over the fact that the cherry blossoms in D.C. are blooming earlier and earlier each year. But they might sue over deadly heat waves in Moscow. Or other disasters. The science of weather attribution isn’t quite at that point yet, but it’s progressing rapidly.

Kiribati President Anote Tong told The Associated Press on Friday that his Cabinet this week endorsed a plan to buy nearly 6,000 acres on Fiji’s main island, Viti Levu. He said the fertile land, being sold by a church group for about $9.6 million, could be insurance for Kiribati’s entire population of 103,000, though he hopes it will never be necessary for everyone to leave.

“We would hope not to put everyone on one piece of land, but if it became absolutely necessary, yes, we could do it,” Tong said. “It wouldn’t be for me, personally, but would apply more to a younger generation. For them, moving won’t be a matter of choice. It’s basically going to be a matter of survival.”

Kiribati, which straddles the equator near the international date line, has found itself at the leading edge of the debate on climate change because many of its atolls rise just a few feet above sea level.

Tong said some villages have already moved and there have been increasing instances of sea water contaminating the island’s underground fresh water, which remains vital for trees and crops. He said changing rainfall, tidal and storm patterns pose as least as much threat as ocean levels, which so far have risen only slightly.

Some scientists have estimated the current level of sea rise in the Pacific at about 2 millimeters (0.1 inches) per year. Many scientists expect that rate to accelerate due to climate change.

Fiji, home to about 850,000 people, is about 1,400 miles south of Kiribati. But just what people there think about potentially providing a home for thousands of their neighbors remains unclear. Tong said he’s awaiting full parliamentary approval for the land purchase, which he expects in April, before discussing the plan formally with Fijian officials.

Sharon Smith-Johns, a spokeswoman for the Fijian government, said several agencies are studying Kiribati’s plans and the government will release a formal statement next week.

Kiribati, which was known as the Gilbert Islands when it was a British colony, has been an independent nation since 1979.

Tong has been considering other unusual options to combat climate change, including shoring up some Kiribati islands with sea walls and even building a floating island. He said this week that the latter option would likely prove too expensive, but that he hopes reinforcing some islands will ensure that Kiribati continues to exist in some form even in a worst-case scenario.

“We’re trying to secure the future of our people,” he said. “The international community needs to be addressing this problem more.”

Tong said he hopes that the Fiji land will represent just one of several options for relocating people. He pointed out that the land is three times larger than the atoll of Tarawa, currently home to more than half of Kiribati’s population.

Although like much of the Pacific, Kiribati is poor – its annual GDP per person is just $1,600 – Tong said the country has plenty of foreign reserves to draw from for the land purchase. The money, he said, comes from phosphate mining on the archipelago in the 1970s.

When Sifrhippus first appeared in the forests of North America more than 50 million years ago, it weighed about 12 pounds.

The horse lived during the 175,000-year period of time called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, during which average global temperatures rose by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit. This temperature increase was caused by the release of huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and oceans.

During this period of global warming, about one-third of mammal species experienced significant reductions in size, researchers have found.

Fossilized teeth show that Sifrhippus shrank from about 12 pounds to about 8.5 pounds (a 30% reduction) during the first 130,000 years of the time period and then rebounded to about 15 pounds in the final 45,000 years of that era.

Temperature and body size linked

The findings offer new evidence of the cause-and-effect relationship between temperature and body size, and also offer clues to how animals might be affected by rising global temperatures in the near future, according to study leaders Ross Secord of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Jonathan Bloch of the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

In the study, published in the journal Science, the scientists performed an analysis of the oxygen isotopes in the fossilised teeth of Sifrhippus.

The results were “absolutely startling,” according to Bloch. “We looked at the curve and we realized that it was exactly the same pattern that we were seeing with the horse body size.”

He explained that for the first time, “going back tens of millions of years – we were able to show that indeed temperature was causing essentially a one-to-one shift in body size within this lineage of horse. Because it’s over a long enough time, you can argue very strongly that what you’re looking at is natural selection and evolution – that it’s actually corresponding to the shift in temperature and driving the evolution of these horses,” Bloch said.

Secord added: “This has implications, potentially, for what we might expect to see over the next century or two, at least with some of the climate models that are predicting that we will see warming of as much as 4 degrees Centigrade (7 degrees Fahrenheit) over the next 100 years.”

Birds shrinking too

Scientists studying birds have already started to notice a possible decrease in birds’ body size, Secord noted.

“One of the issues here is that warming [during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum] happened much slower, over 10,000 to 20,000 years to get 10 degrees hotter, whereas now we’re expecting it to happen over a century or two,” Secord said. “So there’s a big difference in scale and one of the questions is, ‘Are we going to see the same kind of response?’ Are animals going to be able to keep up and readjust their body sizes over the next couple of centuries?”

A year or so ago, some researchers at Cern, working at the Cloud experiment, made an interesting discovery: cosmic rays might affect cloud formation. More specifically, it said that cosmic rays could “nucleate”, or bring together, aerosol particles.

It was in response to suggestions by Henrik Svensmark, the Danish researcher, who had hypothesised that cosmic rays could nucleate particles, that those particles could seed more clouds, and that the extra clouds could cause cooling. He suggested that this meant that in times of high solar activity, the magnetic activity of the Sun would deflect more of the rays, so that fewer clouds would form. Fewer clouds, he thought, would mean less energy reflected into space, and so a warmer Earth. He also said that increased solar activity in the 20th century was behind the observed warming in that time.

Is he right? Has he been vindicated by Cern’s brave physicists, after years in the wilderness?

As always, no. As always, it’s an interesting piece of research which adds to our understanding of atmospheric behaviour. As always, it’s been leapt upon by “sceptics” who think all climate scientists are charlatans until those scientists say something they agree with, whereupon they’re modern-day Galileos being placed under house arrest for heresy by the Church of AGW.

So let’s look at what the research actually found. It did, as Svensmark predicted, find that cosmic rays could cause aerosol particles to form. But what it didn’t find was that this leads to cloud formation; nucleation may lead to cloud formation if the particles are large enough, but it has not, yet, been shown that they are. As the Cern authors say themselves in the paper: “The fraction of these freshly nucleated particles that grow to sufficient sizes to seed cloud droplets… remain open questions experimentally.”

And if it did lead to cloud formation, that would not necessarily lead to cooling. Clouds don’t only cool the planet: they reflect sunlight, but they also prevent heat from escaping from the Earth. Higher clouds and clouds further from the equator have a cooling effect; lower ones and ones near the equator tend to warm the planet. So even if cosmic rays make enough cloud to have a noticeable effect on the climate, it’s far from clear which way it will go, or whether the two will cancel each other out. The authors are extremely clear that it is far too early to make any claims: “This result leaves open the possibility that cosmic rays could also influence climate. However, it is premature to conclude that cosmic rays have a significant influence on climate until the additional nucleating vapours have been identified, their ion enhancement measured, and the ultimate effects on clouds have been confirmed.” All of this, incidentally, is why the director-general of Cern, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, said that people should be careful of over-interpreting the results.

So there’s more to learn. But we can confidently assume that whatever the findings are, they won’t be particularly groundbreaking, for the very basic reason that if cosmic ray cloud formation was a big deal, we’d expect to see some correlation between solar activity and global temperature. But cosmic rays and solar irradiance have been essentially stable over the last 35 years, while the world has been steadily warming (and, yes, it’s still been warming since 1998: 2001-2010 was the hottest decade on record). This study suggests that the Sun cannot acount for more than 14 per cent of global warming since 1956, and that will be due to direct solar activity, not cosmic rays. So while I await more findings from Cern with great interest – and have emailed the Cloud experiment’s spokesman to find out a bit more – I’m comfortable in saying that cosmic rays aren’t what’s making the world get warmer.

By Tom Chiver

The group says the world has not been heating up in the past decade and that there’s no urgent need for action to tackle global warming.

But the group’s view is being rubbished by Australian climate scientists who say action to curb carbon emissions is urgently needed.

Hayden Cooper has our report.

HAYDEN COOPER: The Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal added petrol to an already flaming debate on Friday when it printed the headline: “No need to panic about global warming”.

The article that followed was a letter signed by 16 scientists who believe the rush by governments to act is a mistake.

WILLIAM KININMONTH: Well, a number of us have been discussing this issue over many years, the fact that there is this alarmism about global warming which we believe is unjustified and so the opportunity came to put something to the Wall Street Journal which we did and we are quite happy to put my name with it.

HAYDEN COOPER: William Kininmonth is the former head of the National Climate Centre at the Bureau of Meteorology.

He’s one of the 16 voicing their dissent.

WILLIAM KININMONTH: We are certainly not against climate research. What we are suggesting is that the alarmism that is being put out about carbon dioxide is unfounded.

HAYDEN COOPER: William Kinninmonth’s opinion isn’t newly formed – he’s long been sceptical of the scientific argument on global warming.

In this letter he and his colleagues argue that carbon dioxide won’t destroy civilisation and that in the past decade the temperature of the globe in fact hasn’t been rising.

WILLIAM KININMONTH: That is certainly one of the points in the letter that over the last decade there has been no significant change in temperature of the globe.

HAYDEN COOPER: But 2010 and 2005 were the warmest years on record weren’t they?

WILLIAM KININMONTH: That depends on which sort of numbers you take. The set that was initially established by the intergovernmental panel on climate change which is from the climate research unit certainly show that 1998 was still the warmest year in their records.

HAYDEN COOPER: Is it true that 2011 was the 35th year in a row in which global temperatures were above the historical average?

WILLIAM KININMONTH: Well, the fact is we’ve had warming over the last century. There is no doubt about that and so one takes the end of that trend-line, yes, you’ll find that it is a warmer year. But that doesn’t mean to say that the trend is going to continue on forever.

TIM FLANNERY: Well, it clearly has warmed. The science is incontrovertible on that. Anyone can look at the figures and see that the world is warming and continues to warm and that is just observational data.

HAYDEN COOPER: Tim Flannery is Australia’s chief climate commissioner – the man appointed by the Government to prosecute the case for cutting pollution.

TIM FLANNERY: The essence of their argument is that if you are an elected politician, you don’t need to worry about acting on climate change and it is not surprising again to see that coming out in the middle of a Republican race when there is a chance that one of the Republicans may decide that climate change doesn’t need addressing. There has been no rethink on the science of climate change. There is broad public acceptance globally of the need for action.

You know it is only in Canada, the US and Australia that there is even a political debate really at all.

HAYDEN COOPER: As ever in this perennial dispute there’s the none too subtle barb directed at the qualifications of the opposition. This time by Tim Flannery.

TIM FLANNERY: They are not all scientists. There are some engineers, there are astronauts. It sort of a bit of mix actually as well as a lot of retired scientists in there so no, this sort of thing doesn’t really surprise me.

ELEANOR HALL: That is Australia’s chief climate commissioner, Tim Flannery ending that report by Hayden Cooper.