Will This Float Your Boat? - 2

Climate Change divides America

In the first post of this series we took a look at the overly "cautious" or overly "conservative" outlook scientists have traditionally had regarding the Eastern Antarctica Ice Sheet.

Why we need to take another look at it is twofold.

First, the dogma about that ice sheet has consistently been that it is solid as rock and is as immovable as the Rock of Gibraltar.

Second, since a new scientific paper came out very recently in the journal Nature --which indicates that the ice sheet is not as stable as once indicated --I thought we should revisit the dogma and reconsider the ramifications.

The abstract ends on this note:

We find that glacier change along the Pacific coast [of East Antarctica] is consistent with a rapid and coherent response to air temperature and sea-ice trends, linked through the dominant mode of atmospheric variability (the Southern Annular Mode). We conclude that parts of the world’s largest ice sheet may be more vulnerable to external forcing than recognized previously.

(Nature, emphasis added).  Other information concerning the Eastern Antarctic Ice Sheet picture can be read about here, here, here, and here.

And on the opposite pole, melt is increasing while volume is decreasing (Arctic Ice Sheet Lowest Volume Ever).

I would point out that when "science can divide a country" intellectually, that country was already divided to begin with (see e.g. Agnotology: The Surge and The Failure of Applied American Epistemology).

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.