News from the Climate Change Front

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Group, generally considered to be climate change skeptics, funded a project to investigate global temperatures over the last fifty years.  Guess what?  Their results confirm what so many scientists have been saying!  Well, duh.  Facts is facts.  Temperatures have increased by 1.5 °F over the past fifty years and "essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases." 

It’s wonderful to see they went at this with an open mind, ready to accept whatever the data showed them.

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Way south, a huge, mile-deep rift valley was found under the ice in West Antarctica. It's about the size of the Grand Canyon:

That's a trace generated by ice-penetrating radar towed by a team of scientists on snowmobiles.  It’s thought this deep canyon may be channeling warmer ocean water to the bottom of the near-by Pine Island Glacier.  This can lubricate the underside, speeding its flow and hastening its melting.  This glacier is poised to calf a large chunk soon: 

The picture is from November, 2011.  The crack was about 19 miles (30 kilometers) long, 260 feet (80 meters) wide and 195 feet (60 meters) deep back then.  The giant iceberg that will result will cover about 350 square miles (900 square kilometers).  Yikes!

The current rate of ice loss from West Antarctica is thought to contribute about 10% to global sea level rise, currently at about 3.3 millimeters per year and increasing.  If the ice sheet there (West Antarctica, not the entire continent's ice) were to completely melt, sea level would go up by several meters.  Greenland losing its ice would add another couple meters. 

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That's it for now.  Don't go buying any beach-front property!