Is Antarctica Gaining or Losing Ice? Hint: Losing.http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronom ... mob_tw_top"A new study just published in the Journal of Glaciology is causing some buzz in climate circles, because it appears to claim that Antarctica—long thought to be losing ice at extremely alarming rates—is actually gaining ice.
However, note the word appears. The reality is more complicated, and in the end the important aspect of this is that the study only talks about part of Antarctica, and only used data up to 2008. Both of these points are critical."
"There’s more. They looked at data going from 1992–2008. Starting right around that time, mass loss due to melting ice in Antarctica (mostly in the west) has accelerated. It’s actually been speeding up for some time, but in recent years it’s really kicked in. Every year, about 6 billion more tons of ice are lost than the year before. In the past two decades, the loss rate has doubled.
This is enough to easily outpace the mass gained by snowfall over East Antarctica. Using data taken by the Grace satellites (which measure how mass underneath them changes over time), we know that overall, Antarctica is currently losing more than 130 billion tons of ice per year, and again, that number is increasing every year. Since 2002 it’s lost about 2 trillion tons of ice.
Mind you, this isn’t including Greenland, which is losing ice at an even more staggering 280 billion tons per year, and has lost well over three trillion tons over that same time period.
So no matter how you slice it, Antarctica is losing ice, and losing it fast."
AGW is causing higher atmospheric moisture, which itself is a marginal positive feedback. The open ocean warming of the Arctic from AGW is rapidly leading to Arctic methane clathrate self-release, in a range from 2020-5. That is when real, seeable and feelable exponential AGW starts. The southern hemisphere lags by a number of years, and the oceans a little longer.
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