Thursday, December 27, 2012

Eli Goes Photoshopping for the New Year



The Sueddeutsche Zeitung had a feature showing how the Vernagtferner glacier is in the Ötztaler Alps is shrinking, using  pictures from the Bavarian Academy of Sciences who set up a camera in 2000.  Eli created an animated GIF using Photoshop, so the bunnies can look forward to a lot of pain in the new year.

While pictures from the fixed location only date back to 200, the Vernagtferner, the largest glacier in the Eastern Alps, and about 150 km south of Munich in Austria, has been observed for many more.  The figure below shows the mass loss (blue) and the altitude of the ice line (red).



15 comments:

CapitalClimate said...

Did you actually try this? The image seems to only partially load.

Steve Bloom said...

Works for me. Sometimes these things stick part-way through, but refresh generally does the job.

Anonymous said...

Everyone knows this is caused by undersea volcanoes.

Anonymous Etc.

Anonymous said...

"pictures from the fixed location only date back to 200"

Did they have digital back in Roman times?

~@:>

Richard Mercer said...

Steve Bloom

I keep running into that argument about undersea volcanoes, at MSM article on global warming. Do you know of and article explaining why it is wrong?

Or can someone comment on it?
Thanks

EliRabett said...

Among other things the temperature and pH profiles are wrong. The excess is coming in from the top.

CapitalClimate said...

Image not loading on Firefox. Don't know about Internet Exploder.

EliRabett said...

Works on Eli's PC under XT on Firefox and Chrome, and on the MAC under OSX 10.6 on Firefox and Safari.

Anyone else have a clue??

John Mashey said...

if one likes this sort of thing, a fine website is Swiss Glacier Monitoring Network.
Its a well=presented website that lets you see overviews and then drill down. It also well illustrates the signal-processing behavior of glaciers of different lengths.

a_ray_in_dilbert_space said...

Richard Mercer,
Do the math. How much energy does it take to melt a couple of trillion tonnes of ice? How much energy will an average volcano put out? One of these numbers will be much, much bigger than the other. That ought to give you the answer--namely that anyone who trots out the undersea volcano argument is dumber than owlshit.

Steve Bloom said...

Richard, IMO the easy argument is that the surface above the mid-ocean ridges, which are the where the action really is for ocean volcanism, shows no trace of heat whatsoever. The same applies to individual volcanoes.

Jim Eager said...

Not just melt the ice, a_ray, it first has to heat the entire water column between these undersea volcanoes and the ice, and that's an even larger number.

As you say, dumber than owlshit.

mitch said...

Actually there is a trace of heat at about 200 m above the mid ocean ridges that can be traced away-about 0.01 deg. If there were near-human CO2 release at the mid ocean ridges , this would show up as a massive pH anomaly. It isn't there.

Richard Mercer said...

Thanks for all the replies to my question. I pretty much figured it was nonsense. Akin to the chemtrails and HARP mantras that I see in comments so often, at places like Yahoo.

I can report that the tide has turned, regarding the comments on climate change articles, at least in my experience. I used to get so many thumbs down at Yahoo, that my comments were often hidden, like 1 up to 10 down. Now it is nearly the opposite ratio, and there are many more commentors now, debunking the myths.

There was a marked change after this summer's drought and heat waves, and more so after Sandy.

a_ray_in_dilbert_space said...

Richard,
I wish I shared your optimism. Popular opinion still changes with the weather--literally. And while the weather has favored us and on average will continue to trend in favor of our position, it will change, because that is what weather does. Ultimately, people have to become a whole lot less stupid or they will become extinct.