ugh, should read Antarctic ice is about 26 million cubic kilometers. :(

Don't forget ice doesn't convert directly to water as ice is less dense. An easier to grasp reference might be that Antarctic ice is about 26 million cubic meters, so the 300 lost is 0.001% of all the ice in Antarctica.

True, of course we could maintain zero increase in temperature out till nearly 2030 before we'd get outside the error margins, making the notion of disprovability a bit tenuous.

For ice trends it's important to note if you are talking Arctic versus Antarctic as well as land versus sea ice. Here's a link for sea ice extent in both Arctic and Antarctic from NASA. Shows pretty clear downwards trends in Arctic and upward in Antarctic. Incidentally, the IPCC first report in 1990 estimated warming would reduce Arctic sea ice, but precipitation changes would increase overall ice mass in Antarctic...

I don't know about the parent's sources for interior ice, but here is a link from NASA for sea ice extent and area of both the Arctic and Antarctic. Pretty clearly shows a downward trend since 78 for the Arctic and upward since 78 for Antarctic. Pretty much in keeping with the IPCC original predictions back as far as 1990 expecting warming to reduce Arctic sea ice, and resulting precipitation to increase accumulations in Antarctic.

That's not really new though either. It's not like scientists in the 90's didn't already understand all that. More over, the abstract notes the observed melting as constituting a major fraction of Antarctica’s contribution to rising sea level. It looks like a more detailed look at Antarctica's contribution to sea level rise. It doesn't seem to be calling into question the larger macro of Antarctic contribution to sea level rise or overall ice loss?

My point is more simply the article seems less interesting in the sense of changes to the current general understanding of climate change, it seems more confirmation of the basic effects we already know about. The new worthiness IMO is then less than the opportunity to bait slashdotters into endless rounds of noisy and angry debate...

My link shows the IPCC admitting that 111 of 114 models failed to predict the actual trend since 1998. I thought you'd be more into that.

I know, it says nothing of other predictions having been right or not, but you seemed the type that'd be interested in a failed prediction too, particularly one the IPCC agrees was inaccurate and worth investigation.

LOL, your a real piece of work, aren't you. Try reading my post again.

Easy.

Many posters have noted before that the IPCC has highlighted many good predictions from models over the last while. The CMIP5 temperature projections for last decade for example, you can find their assessment of the models here. They compare climate model runs against observed temperature and here's the summary:
an analysis of the full suite of CMIP5 historical simulations (augmented for the period 2006–2012 by RCP4.5 simulations, Section 9.3.2) reveals that 111 out of 114 realizations show a GMST trend over 1998–2012 that is higher than the entire HadCRUT4 trend ensemble.

The HadCRUT trend is the observed record and as you can see 111 of 114 model runs had a trend since 1998 that was way higher than the observed...

Oh, I guess I did that wrong and may have made your point for you...

Not sure how this is news for nerds. Warming oceans are melting ice. That's not a surprise, it's not something new. We already know the oceans are warming. We already had a pretty good idea that warmer water meant ice would melt. We already know sea level is rising, meaning ice is melting.

The news part would be if this was unexpected or otherwise faster than expected, which really doesn't seem to be the case, so yawn. I suppose it does open a platform for people to yell catastrophe, denier and other none sense back and forth though, so there is that.

You kind of do need to if you want to make claims like the one made by the GP that I was responding to. Specifically saying:Never before in history has the temperature changed with more then 1 degree over 100 years.
According to the proxy data that shows that historic stability, the temperature hasn't changed by that much since 1900 either. That is a very important observation to make as it shows the claim is lacking in substance.

Yes, Mann's paper from 2007 notes the same problem you mention. The calibration phase has a consistent problem with early calibration late verification. If you calibrate to the instrumental record from 1900-1950 and then verify the resulting proxy data from 1950 onwards you get observed evidence for a systematic bias in the underestimation of recent warming. Mann's words, not mine. The proxy data isn't registering the recent warming that we see in the instrumental record. I suppose that's no reason not to continue assuming that the same proxy data would have picked up similar warming in the past in your opinion. I'm less convinced. If you look closer at Mann's paper, he also observes the EIV methodology is least susceptible to the bias, and is thus the best method, again in Mann's opinion, not mine. If you check the reconstruction graphs though the EIV goes higher than the 1850-2006 average in 600AD, 1000AD and 1400AD. Mann doesn't graph the EIV from 1900 onwards, but in the calibration problem discussion he shows some portions of it, and it sits no higher than the 1000AD records for EIV from 1950 through 2000. It's all there in Mann's paper and please correct me if I'm in any way misrepresenting things. I've been trying to follow and understand this correctly for a long time now.

As I noted above, I've done searches on that and come up with the observations above. The literature basically agrees that the proxy data, for reasons unknown, has a systematic bias in the underestimation of recent warming.

Forgive me for pointing that out when people make the claim that the historic record shows the last century is an anomaly. The instrumental record is anomalous compared to the proxy data. Attributing that entirely to climate change and not the fact those are entirely different data sets and methodologies is dishonest in the extreme. There's a reason the scientists writing the papers have a lot of caveats on the results regarding this, dropping those to make a blanket statement to scare folks is misrepresenting the facts.

You'd think so wouldn't you. Do yourself a favor and go on google scholar and lookup the proxy reconstructions of temperature of the last 10k or even 2k years. The big names you'll want to check for papers by are Mann et al, Moberg et al and Esper et al. Look at the reconstructed temperatures and try to find anyone that has reconstructed temperatures after the year 1900. I can't find a single one yet that includes those years from out of their proxy data, and I've been looking for awhile. I even dug enough to find Mann had included some of his raw proxy data, and the proxy data does extend past 1900. Interesting thing is the raw proxy data looks like pseudo random noise, most importantly that there is nothing distinctive happening in the raw data after the year 1900.

You know what does get graphed though? The proxy reconstructions up till the year 1900 are graphed, and then the instrumental record is graphed from the year 1900 onwards. As you have observed, it makes for a very, very scary and compelling looking graph. Starting after the year 1900 the trend radically changes, so much you would almost wonder if there was a methodology change starting at that point on the graph... Then you realize it's not just human emissions that started roughly then, but the methodology cut over. And Mann has been selling that straight faced to people for over a decade now.

Don't take my word for any of this though. As I urged from the start, go to google scholar and read the actual work from Mann and his peers doing the reconstructions and check it out for yourself. If you find proxy reconstructed results past the year 1900 please point me to them as I'm still looking myself,

The trouble is water vapor is more complicated than that. Depending on conditions water vapor can be both positive and negative as a feedback. What precedes the rain you note, is clouds and heavy cloud cover obviously blocks a lot of radiation. If you take a look at the CMIP5 studies the impact of water vapor in them is still very poorly modelled and a, if not the, major source of uncertainties. The IPCC notes as severe a difference that the sign of clouds as a feedback is still uncertain, with different models disagreeing on the sign. The current consensus looks to be that the resolution of current models isn't fine enough to accurately model cloud effects.

The fact that energy imbalance has remained constant while CO2 has risen like mad suggests something else in the natural part of the system is offsetting things. Water vapor and clouds would be strong candidates, but we'll have to wait and see as newer models start trying to include those effects in a better way.

Agreed, but arguing with the insane walks the line of joining their insanity.

The CBC article does poorly actually, but if you meant the linked actual journal article then you are correct. In either case you missed my sarcasm, apparently with a good number of mods keeping you company.

Wow that's a lot of down voting. I must have succeeded in angering both sides.