Junk DNA is the genome’s hedging instrument

May 19, 2014

I have always been somewhat confused by the manner in which the word “junk” has been attached to the repeating sequences of DNA in our genes which – as far as was known – had no function, and also for high risk securities which offer high returns.

There is a new paper in PLOS Genetics called The Case for Junk DNA (which is a little beyond me) but there is also an eminently readable commentary by Carl Zimmer. My take-aways from Zimmer’s piece are:

  • Genomes are the pattern for life.
  • Genomes contain genes.
  • Genes are made up of DNA.
  • Our DNA is a string of units called bases.
  • Our cells read the bases in a stretch of DNA–a gene–and build a molecule called RNA with a corresponding sequence.
  • The cells then use the RNA as a guide to build a protein.
  • Our bodies contain many different proteins, which give them structure and carry out jobs like digesting food.
  • The human genome contains about 20,000 protein-coding genes.
  • Protein-coding genes only make up about 2 percent of the human genome. 
  • In the 1950’s the non-coding 98% began being called “junk” genes.
  • Functions performed by some of these “junk” gene are constantly being found. The ENCODE project has assigned some bio-chemical function to about 80% of the genome.
  • Having large amounts of truly “junk” DNA is a protection against mutation (by making most mutations of the junk portion of no consequence). Evolution requires “junk”. A junk-free genome would be too vulnerable to mutations to survive (mutational meltdown). This suggests that humans need about 90% junk DNA to avoid mutational meltdown.
  • Junk portions are also important for evolution since protein-coding genes can evolve from these non-coding regions.
  • Much of our genome is made up of viruses, and every now and then, evolution has used those viral genes. 

From all of this I come to the layman’s understanding that about 2% of our genome is made up of about 20,000 active protein-coding genes, another 10 – 30% has some active bio-chemical function (such as switching genes on of off), some unknown portion is passive material which could feasibly be activiated and the remainder is the buffer material which both provides protection from rampant mutation and provides a pool resource for future evolution.

Junk bonds are risky investments, but have speculative appeal because they offer much higher yields than safer bonds. Companies that issue junk bonds typically have less-than-stellar credit ratings, and investors demand these higher yields as compensation for the risk of investing in them. A junk bond issued from a company that manages to turn its performance around for the better and has its credit rating upgraded will generally have a substantial price appreciation. 

Now as it becomes  clear that not all sections of non-protein-coding  DNA are entirely useless, I begin to see an analogy between “junk DNA” and “junk bonds”. A high – but manageable – risk but giving high yield on the one hand and a high – but manageable –  genetic redundancy giving high evolutionary appreciation on the other.

Junk DNA is the genome’s hedging instrument.

Vertical species evolution (rather than horizontal evolution for mere survival) is then probably dependent upon achieving some optimum  balance between genome size, coding DNA and junk DNA.

This is my attempt to apply a similar description to junk DNA,

Junk DNA are the genome’s hedge instruments and have evolutionary appeal because they offer a much wider range of evolutionary possibilities. Species that build up massive genomes with very high levels of junk DNA typically lie lower on the evolutionary hierarchy and evolve horizontally rather than vertically. When junk DNA in a species high up on the vertical scale (mammals) achieves a balance with the coding genes and the size of the genome, the species will have its rating upgraded and will generally have a substantial evolutionary appreciation. 

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Paid news and media extortion

May 18, 2014

The media like to portray themselves as a vital and necessary force for democracy. Attacks on the press – in any form – are considered fundamentally a strike against democracy and press freedom. If they break the law and get arrested they claim they were doing it for the greater good. They believe they are entitled to some form of press immunity.

But the reality is that “press freedom” is far too often used as an excuse for justifying criminal behaviour and  bad journalism. Accountability is not of any great concern.

But the media (print and broadcast and on the internet) are not averse to being paid for presenting what is essentially advertising as “news”. And even being paid for not publishing negative stories!!

The Election Commission in India are basking in the soft glow of having successfully conducted the massive, 10 phase voting by 550 million of an electorate of over 800 million over a 6 week period. They have the task of maintaining a “free and fair” election and have not been slow to pull up politicians who are transgressing. They have detected nearly 700 cases of the media transgressing the bounds of propriety.

But they have no authority over the media and the media – in their own judgement – can do no wrong.

DNA: 

As many as 694 cases of paid news – or news for which the media organisations took money to publish or broadcast – were detected by the Election Commission in this election, official said.

By the time the 10 phases of the polls ended to form the 16th parliament on May 12, thousands of cases of paid news were reported, according to EC officials. In 3,053 cases, notice was issued by the EC suspecting a foul play, an official said. 

“We served 3,053 notices, 694 of which were found to be genuine cases of paid news by our Media Certification and Monitoring Committee,” EC Director General Akshay Rout told IANS. “We define paid news as those items which are published as news but are advertisement in nature,” he added.

“There is no accountability in the media. While some candidates willingly pay for positive coverage, in most other cases candidates have to pay to prevent negative coverage. The media is getting increasingly criminalised, and acting as extortionist,” noted columnist and commentator Swapan Das Gupta told IANS. He added that media is acting as a reckless body, violating every known tenet of ethics.

… The Election Commission …. said it was not obliged to act against the TV news channels or print media indulging in such practices. “The media houses or publications are beyond the EC’s purview. We simply forward the cases of paid news to the PCI and the News Broadcasting Standards Association,” Dhirendra Ojha, Director in the EC, told IANS.

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MH370: The implausible is now certain

May 18, 2014

How quickly we forget!  Or is it that what we can’t explain we don’t want to think about.

Ten weeks now.

Still nothing.

The headlines have gone. The relatives still know nothing and are struggling to find closure. The Malaysian government wants to draw a line now and move on. Death certificates have been / are being issued. Malaysian Airlines losses have increased sharply. The discussion is shifting to how to ensure live tracking and preventing this happening again.

But preventing WHAT from happening again?

When there is no plausible explanation, the implausible is no longer implausible. In fact, some implausible explanation now becomes certain.

The latest implausible suggestion now is that the plane was accidentally shot down in the South China Sea by US/Thai jets and everything subsequently was disinformation to cover that up:

Daily Mail: Cawthorne makes the incredible assertion that the plane was shot down accidentally over the South China Sea by a joint US-Thai joint strike fighter team, and the searchers sent in the wrong direction as part of a cover up.

He describes how a man, while working on an oil rig in the ocean at about the same time the plane’s transponder went off, saw a burning plane and how this was right near the military exercise being conducted with personel from various other countries.

He claims that these countries may have then sent searchers in the wrong direction in order to cover their tracks.

‘After all, no wreckage has been found in the South Indian Ocean, which in itself is suspicious.’

But I am sticking with the most plausible implausibility that the plane was deliberately destroyed and “disappeared” to prevent certain cargo and certain passengers from reaching Beijing. That control over the flight was exercised remotely, that the crew and passengers were incapacitated by the excursion to 45,000 feet and the plane then sent on a flight to nowhere to disappear in as intact a manner as possible.

Maybe we will never know.

But somebody does.

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FIFA Presidential electioneering underway as Blatter blames Platini, France and Germany for selling 2022 World Cup to Qatar

May 17, 2014

FIFA Presidential electioneering for 2015 is underway as Sepp Blatter (who is Swiss) blames Michel Platini (who is French), France and Germany for selling the 2022 World Cup to Qatar. But this attack is just positioning by Blatter in case the 2014 World Cup in Brazil doesn’t go too well and Blatter will have to take that blame.

FIFA bows primarily to financial inducements (not political pressure as it sometimes appears). In many cases the financial inducements are just simple, straight-forward  bribery implemented in a very sophisticated manner. Even after the FIFA technical committee had clearly indicated that Qatar was unsuitable as a location for a World Cup tournament, the Executive Committee decided otherwise. That Qatar bought the 2022 World Cup is clear and it seems likely that the number of deaths per goal will be the highest ever by a long way in 2022.

Qatar 2022 will achieve more deaths than goals

Based on the track record of World Cup Tournaments, the Qatar 2022 championship will see between 100 and 180 goals – most likely around 150. But this number will be easily exceeded by the number of construction workers who have been killed by then. Already over 70 Nepalese workers have died since 2012 and the total number is probably around 200. By 2022 this number will exceed 1000.

Perhaps FIFA could introduce a safety performance index for the Qatar World Cup? Maybe to have less than 6 deaths per goal?

FIFA’s next presidential election is in 2015 and Sepp Blatter will be trying to retain his seat and Michel Platini will probably be opposing him. And so the electioneering has begun. This year’s World Cup is less than a month away and kicks-off on June 12th. The stadiums and infrastructure are still not quite ready. A fiasco in Brazil will be blamed on Sepp Blatter and will undermine his chances in 2015 of being President again. For some time now he has been trying to ensure that anything negative to do with Qatar is tied to Platini. Come 2015 Platini will have to deal with the Qatari dirt if he opposes Blatter.

A plague on both their houses!

November 2013: Sepp Blatter Now Blames France and Germany for 2022 World Cup Fiasco

Always looking to blame somebody else, Sepp Blatter hasn’t let us down by now blaming France and Germany for the 2022 World Cup mess in Qatar. According to theFIFA fool, these two nations are to blame for the ongoing turmoil regarding Qatar hosting the 2022 event. In addition, he believes they’re also accountable for some of the ill treatment of the migrant workers over there, along with the construction firms. 

Blatter said on November 22 that France and Germany exerted a lot of political pressure to grant Qatar with the World Cup because of their financial interests and they’re the two biggest economies in Europe. In Blatter’s own words, there was a lot of “political pressure from European countries…because there were so many economic interests. Two of these countries pressured the voting men in FIFA: France and Germany…I think the heads of state of these two countries should also express what they think of this situation.” 

March 2014: Only I Can Beat Sepp Blatter In FIFA Elections – Platini

“Only one person can beat Blatter,” Platini said at UEFA congress in Astana (quotes from Reuters). 

Platini told the UEFA Congress he would have more meetings with European football leaders in coming months before announcing whether he would stand for FIFA.

“I will give my answer after the World Cup. There will be a series of meetings with European federation officials. Maybe 99% of them will say ‘we prefer that you stay at UEFA’, that could also be an element of reflection” in the decision, Platini said.

Meanwhile, the Frenchman earlier blasted the world federation’s lack of action over secretive companies owning players as he stepped up a war of nerves with Blatter. Platini said the so-called ‘third party ownership’ of players is a “danger” to football.

May 2014: Sepp Blatter: awarding 2022 World Cup to Qatar was a mistake

“Yes, it was a mistake of course, but one makes lots of mistakes in life,” said Blatter, Fifa’s president, in an interview with the Swiss broadcaster RTS. “The technical report into Qatar said clearly it was too hot but the executive committee – with a large majority – decided all the same to play it in Qatar.”

… Blatter is believed to have voted for the USA to host the 2022 World Cup while his prospective rival for the presidency, Uefa’s Michel Platini, voted for Qatar and has been closely linked in the public mind with the controversial plans for the 2022 tournament.

The Fifa inspection team ranked Qatar as the only “high risk” option overall, yet it was still chosen by 14 of the 22 voting members of the executive committee in December 2010. ….. 

Platini and others have denied being influenced by their heads of state into voting for Qatar for business reasons. ….. 

“I will never say that they bought it, because it was political pushing. Really, both in France and Germany,” said Blatter, who has previously claimed there was “definitely direct political influence” on European executive committee members to vote for Qatar.

France’s foreign ministry said the assertion was “without foundation”, despite the fact that Platini has admitted to attending a high level meeting with former president Nicolas Sarkozy and the now Qatari Emir.

 

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Posted in Behaviour, Corruption, Football, Sport, World Cup | 1 Comment »

Half of Newton’s papers were on religion, 10% on alchemy and only 30% on science and math

May 16, 2014

Unlike Alfred Nobel who I posted about recently, Isaac Newton left no will when he died in 1727. But he left behind him a mass of papers estimated to run to about 10 million words. But most of the notes he left behind dealt with religious subjects and alchemy and his views were not just politically incorrect but potentially embarrassing if not dangerous to his heirs.

Wired has interviewed Sarah Dry who has just published her book on “The Newton Papers“.

Wired: He wrote a forensic analysis of the Bible in an effort to decode divine prophecies. He held unorthodox religious views, rejecting the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. After his death, Newton’s heir, John Conduitt, the husband of his half-niece Catherine Barton, feared that one of the fathers of the Enlightenment would be revealed as an obsessive heretic. And so for hundreds of years few people saw his work. It was only in the 1960s that some of Newton’s papers were widely published.

Now of course The Newton Project is putting all of his papers online and they have so far transcribed about 6.4 million words:

The Newton Project is a non-profit organization dedicated to publishing in full an online edition of all of Sir Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) writings — whether they were printed or not. The edition presents a full (diplomatic) rendition featuring all the amendments Newton made to his own texts or a more readable (normalised) version. We also make available translations of his most important Latin religious texts.

Although Newton is best known for his theory of universal gravitation and discovery of calculus, his interests were much broader than is usually appreciated. In addition to his celebrated scientific and mathematical writings, Newton also wrote many alchemical and religious texts.

Sarah Dry traces the history of the Newton papers and how they languished over the years. It was not perhaps by conspiracy but there was some clear apprehension that sorting and cataloguing them would be embarrassing because there was so much of a “heretical” nature:

Sarah Dry in Wired: There’s roughly 10 million words that Newton left. Around half of the writing is religious, and there are about 1 million words on alchemical material, most of which is copies of other people’s stuff. There are about 1 million words related to his work as Master of the Mint. And then roughly 3 million related to science and math.

…… one of the messages of the book is that getting too involved in the papers can be hazardous to your health. One of the first editors of the papers said an older man should take up the task, because he’d have less to lose than a younger man.

This is highly technical stuff. The alchemical stuff is technical, the scientific stuff is technical, the religious stuff is technical. I was more interested in the papers and the characters that worked on them. One person was David Brewster, who wrote a biography of Newton during the Victorian Era. He fought long and hard to resuscitate Newton’s reputation. But he was also one of these Victorians that had to tell the truth. So when he published his biography [in 1855], it included much of the heresy and alchemy, despite the fact that Brewster was a good orthodox Protestant.

…. When the papers came to Cambridge in the late 1800s, they were unsorted and chaotic. And the two men given to sorting them were John Couch Adams and George Stokes. Adams was the co-discoverer of Neptune. He famously never wrote anything down. And Stokes was just as great a physicist, but he wrote everything down. He in fact wrote 10,000 letters. So these two guys get the papers, and then they sit on them for 16 years; they basically procrastinate.

When actually confronted with Newton’s paper, they were horrified and dismayed. Here was this great scientific hero. But he also wrote about alchemy and even more about religious matters. Newton spent a long time writing a lot of unfinished treatises. Sometimes he would produce six or seven copies of the same thing. And I think it was disappointing to see your intellectual father copying this stuff over and over. So the way Adams and Stokes dealt with it was to say that, “His power of writing a beautiful hand was evidently a snare to him.” Basically, they said he didn’t like this stuff, he just liked his own writing.

There’s also Grace Babson, who created the largest collection of Newton objects and papers in America. She was married to a man who got rich predicting the crash of 1929. And Roger Babson [her husband] based his market research on Newtonian principles, using the idea that for every action there is an equal an opposite reaction. The market goes up so it must come down. Interestingly, he thought of gravity as an evil scourge.

Clearly people felt that tarnishing Newton’s image was a heresy in itself and they felt that publicising his stranger writings could do such damage to their icon. But the time since his death is critical here. Newton’s image  is now immune to such damage. I think that no matter how weird his views may have been about the Bible and prophecies and the occult and alchemy, they cannot – now – detract from his work on maths and physics and motion.

But his catalogers have a point. If one part of his work had been  debunked or ridiculed soon after his death, it could have damaged his reputation and even the credibility of his work in Physics and Maths. It is common practice now – as it was common practice then – for detractors to attack an opponent’s views on one subject obliquely, by denigrating his views or work in some other field. Wrong thinking in one field – by association – becomes wrong thinking in all fields.

It may have been different if they had TV in those days. For if Newton had lived in today’s world it could well be that his eminence in Physics and Maths  would have made him an instant TV pundit on all subjects. We would be suffering the pain of listening him to expound on his other weird and wonderful ideas. As we all must endure when we have to listen to actors pontificating about environmental science or psychiatrists excusing errant behaviour or politicians pretending they understand economics!!

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Indian Election: All over? Runaway victory for Modi as B/C ratio soars to over 4.6

May 16, 2014

It is definitely all over now. Narendra Modi will be the next Prime Minister and he will not have to depend on any allies for his majority. Even the Shiv Sena will be superfluous. Mamata in W Bengal and Jayalalitha in Tamil Nadu have had landslide wins but Modi will not need to be beholden to them. For the first time in 30 years a coalition will not be necessary. The Aam Admi party made a poor showing, reinforcing the view that they make a lot of noise but are scared of governing. Congress may get less than 50 seats (!!) and be reduced to little more than a rump.

1045: It is less than 3 hours since counting began and it is looking like a runaway victory for Modi and a melt-down for Congress. The B/C ratio is reaching stratospheric heights at 4.6 (318/69).

1030: B/C ratio soars to 4.05 (304/75). An absolute and a very comfortable majority for Narendra Modi is emerging. Post election haggling and sops to regional fanatics may not be needed. Varun Gandhi has won in Sultanpur. Rahul Gandhi is behind in Amethi. 

1015: B/C ratio now at 3.58 (301/ 84). Comfortable majority in sight for BJP. Profit taking apparent as Sensex comes off its euphoric highs. 

0945: B/C at 3.45 (287/83) while Sensex climbs 1400 points (5+%) today

0930: B/C ratio soars to 3.63. Leads Total: 436, BJP+ 243; Congress+ 67, Others 128. BSE Sensex up about 1000 points (4%)

0915: Leads: Total: 318, BJP+ 174; Congress+ 64, Others 80. B/ C = 2.72

0900 IST: Leads — Total: 296, BJP+ 165; Congress+ 61, Others +70. B/C = 2.7

The B/C ratio has been running at 2.5 – 2.7 through the first hour.

If the first hour of vote counting is representative of what is to come BJP will end up with around 2.5 – 2.7 times as many seats as Congress. So if Congress could end up with around 90 – 100 seats then BJP will get around 240 – 260. 

0800: Counting has begun. About 8,000 candidates, 1.8 million voting machines and about 550 million votes to be counted.

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How Sohlman and 3 white Russian stallions ensured the establishment of the Nobel prizes

May 15, 2014
Björkborn Manor (photo kkp)

Björkborn Manor (photo k2p)

Yesterday we visited the Nobel Museum at the Björkborn Manor and Estate in Karlskoga. Björkborn was Alfred Nobel’s last “residence” but he never really lived in it except as a sort of guest house. In fact he died at his villa in Italy. But Björkborn was critical in ensuring that the Nobel prizes even exist at all.  A visit I would now strongly recommend to any visitor to Sweden. For me personally it was memorable on many levels, but primarily for teaching me so much new and in such a dramatic fashion. Till this visit, I knew very little about Alfred Nobel’s last will and testament and what a close run thing it was that it was ever implemented.

This quite remarkable, but little known, story of Ragnar Sohlman and the 3 white Russian stallions which ensured that Nobel’s will could be followed and that the Nobel Foundation and its 5 prizes could be established was something quite new for me. Ragnar Sohlman who, at the age of 26 spent five years against formidable opposition in at least 3 countries to establish the Nobel prizes in accordance with Nobel’s wishes, is the real unsung hero of the creation of the brand equity which is today the hallmark of the Nobel prizes.

But more of Ragnar Sohlman later.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted in France, History, Norway, Science, Sweden | 2 Comments »

The Descent of Air India

May 14, 2014

I have just acquired the ebook “The Descent of Air India” by Jitender Bhargava and which was first published by Bloomsbury Publishing in October 2013. However Praful Patel the former Civil Aviation Minister sued the publishers for defaming him and applied pressure to prevent the distribution of the book. The publisher – without consulting the author – withdrew the book and apologised to Praful Patel.

So much for the courage of publishers.

DNA: Publishing giant Bloomsbury in a decision, unprecedented for its abject surrender, has withdrawn former AI top honcho Jitender Bhargava’s book The Descent of Air India, agreed to destroy copies of the book left in its stocks and tendered an apology to former civil aviation minister Praful Patel, who has been pilloried in the book as the man who caused the downfall of the airline.

I shall review the book in a few days when I have read it through.

Bhargava wrote on his Facebook page:

After the book, ‘The Descent of Air India’ was formally released on October 11, 2013 in Delhi, attempts were made by Praful Patel to obstruct its distribution. Besides ensuring that the books were not sold at airport book stores (he still appears to wield clout with airport operators); had TV channels to drop scheduled programmes relating to the book – in the case of one news channel even after the interview had been recorded; he served a legal notice, alleging that the book contents were defamatory.
He filed a case in the court of the metropolitan magistrate, Mumbai. While I told the judge on January 6, 2014, that everything stated in the book about Praful Patel is true, backed by documented evidence and will be duly justified and contested in the honourable court, the publishers, Bloomsbury, on whom also the notice was served, decided on not pursuing it, and instead agreeing to offer an apology to Praful Patel.
This decision of Bloomsbury was unilateral, and without discussing with me, as an author. Their stand thus naturally came to me as a surprise. And it may surprise you too when you see the apology of Bloomsbury published in the newspapers.
As everything stated in the book is true, based on documents, I will have the book, ‘The Descent of Air India’ reprinted either on my own or through a new publisher. Simultaneous action is being initiated to bring out ‘ The Descent of Air India’, as an ebook. I am told this can take up to four-five weeks.
Please bear the absence of the book from the book stores for a few weeks. I will be back soon because neither can I be bulldozed into submission nor can facts be allowed to be suppressed. In today’s environment, corrupt practices of all people, howsoever powerful, must be exposed.
I look forward to your understanding of the situation and support.

Through the 1970’s and 1980’s Air India was one of my preferred airlines. But since the early 1990’s it has been – for me – an airline to avoid.

 

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Never trust a politician who is “thinking about your children’s children”

May 13, 2014

My grandfathers died around 80 years ago. They could not have conceived of the world their grandchildren would live in and the challenges they and their world would face. They would surely have been able to recognise our behavioural characteristics but they would not have been able to imagine the society we live in. The values of current society would have been difficult for them to understand.

My father died 26 years ago. Not so very long ago. Yet he would not have been able to predict – let alone address – the kinds of challenges my children and the world they live in will face in the next 20 – 30 years. His values were those of having fought in WW2 and the hope of the 1950’s. He would not have been able to predict the pace of life and the networks maintained by my children. He could not have forecast the day-to-day problems they will face or the “big problems” their world will face over the next 50 or 60 years.

Around 100 years ago my grandfathers could not have foreseen the Second World War or the spread of easily available and affordable electrical power, or of the second industrial revolution or the digital revolution. Even if they could have foreseen the future they would have had the intelligence but not the knowledge or the technology to better address the challenges of today. In fact they would have been very stupid to have tried to forecast and then plan for their choice of problems to be faced by their grandchildren.

Our children’s children will live into the 22nd century. Any forecast I try to make of the development of technologies and knowledge and societies and values 100 years from now is going to be wrong. For the last 50 or 60 years we have lived with the perception of the problem of population rise and limitation of resources. Actions have been taken – and very successfully – to reduce the number of births, to improve food production and in finding new and alternate resources. In another 50 years populations will decline and the pressure on resources will decline further as new technologies are developed and new resources are found (who would have predicted the abundance of shale gas 50 years ago?).

We may expect that in the 22nd century, one of the major challenges will be that of population decline and aging. It will be a challenge faced and solved by the humans of a hundred years hence and it may or may not be a problem. I have no idea of what genetic and medical advances may bring or of how societies will develop and of the value systems that may prevail then. To use today’s knowledge and technologies and values to address these presumed challenges of the future is both ineffective and wasteful. These challenges – if challenges – will be faced by our children’s children using the knowledge and technology that will have become available to them.

It would have been ridiculous for my parents or my grandparents to have given up advances in their own well-being or their careers or their world – as they saw them then – for the sake of  some unknown problem that would be faced by their children’s children.

And so I am deeply suspicious of any politician or environmentalist who wants me to do something  – or not do something – against my current best interests as I see them – for the sake of my children’s children.

Our grandchildren will always be better placed to define their challenges than we can possibly forecast. They will be better equipped to solve the problems of their age with the tools and knowledge and technologies of their age. And they too would be stupid if they gave up their own well-being in order to solve a problem they choose to forecast for their children’s children.

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Alarmists wail – “Collapse” of Antarctic ice is nigh (but it could take 1000 years)

May 13, 2014

There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

The headlines would suggest an impending catastrophe. The Western Atlantic ice sheet is “collapsing”. Sea level could rise 1.2m.

The end of the world is nigh. And it is all due to global warming!!

Yes indeed – except that the melting has been going on for centuries. The so called “collapse” may take upto 1,000 years! Measurements over 9 years are projected over a millenium. Computer models have forecast that the loss of the glaciers is unstoppable and will occur sometime in the next 1,000 years.

The Guardian: Western Antarctic ice sheet collapse has already begun, scientists warn

BBC: ‘Nothing can stop retreat’ of West Antarctic glaciers

A collapse in very slow motion!

The alarmist headlines are are based on two papers. Note that one is based on 9 years of measurement and the other is a computer forecast about a “collapse” that is potentially underway.

1. E. Rignot, J. Mouginot, M. Morlighem, H. Seroussi and B. Scheuchl, Widespread, rapid grounding line retreat of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith and Kohler glaciers, West Antarctica from 1992 to 2011, Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1002/2014GL060140

Abstract: We measure the grounding line retreat of glaciers draining the Amundsen Sea Embayment of West Antarctica using Earth Remote Sensing (ERS-1/2) satellite radar interferometry from 1992 to 2011. Pine Island Glacier retreated 31 km at its center, with most retreat in 2005–2009 when the glacier un-grounded from its ice plain. Thwaites Glacier retreated 14 km along its fast-flow core and 1 to 9 km along the sides. Haynes Glacier retreated 10 km along its flanks. Smith/Kohler glaciers retreated the most, 35 km along its ice plain, and its ice shelf pinning points are vanishing. These rapid retreats proceed along regions of retrograde bed elevation mapped at a high spatial resolution using a mass conservation technique (MC) that removes residual ambiguities from prior mappings. Upstream of the 2011 grounding line positions, we find no major bed obstacle that would prevent the glaciers from further retreat and draw down the entire basin.

2. Ian Joughin, Benjamin E. Smith and Brooke Medley,  Marine Ice Sheet Collapse Potentially Underway for the Thwaites Glacier Basin, West Antarctica, Science,     DOI: 10.1126/science.1249055

Abstract: Resting atop a deep marine basin, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has long been considered prone to instability. Using a numerical model, we investigate the sensitivity of Thwaites Glacier to ocean melt and whether unstable retreat is already underway. Our model reproduces observed losses when forced with ocean melt comparable to estimates. Simulated losses are moderate (<0.25 mm per year sea level) over the 21st Century, but generally increase thereafter. Except possibly for the lowest-melt scenario, the simulations indicate early-stage collapse has begun. Less certain is the timescale, with onset of rapid (> 1 mm per year of sea-level rise) collapse for the different simulations within the range of two to nine centuries.

 

The Antarctic glaciers may well be retreating (as glaciers are often wont to do), but Antarctic ice cover is at an all time high and the processes being forecast are being projected over millenia. And there is absolutely no evidence that these processes have anything whatever to do with any man-made effects. That connection is inferred  or assumed.

Related: The Guardian’s Suzanne Goldenberg jumps the shark again – gets called out by NYT

 

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Posted in Alarmism, Antarctic, Climate | Comments Off on Alarmists wail – “Collapse” of Antarctic ice is nigh (but it could take 1000 years)

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