| >Your argument is misleading because it assumes uniform ice loss across the continent I'm not assuming that. "Average" and "uniform" are two different things. I never said anything about "uniform". Take a look at the ice loss visualization [1] from NASA's website. On the west side there are ice losses as high as 300m (dark red), on the east side some ice gains of about 100m (light blue). All those losses and gains are estimated with some instruments. If you are in one of the areas where the ice loss was estimated to be about 100m, you look at your initial elevation, final elevation and take the difference. Will you elevation difference be -100m, or -98m? There will be some measurement uncertainty. Overall, uncertainties from different instruments tend to cancel out, that't the law of large numbers. Overall, I doubt we have that many numbers (or so little individual measurement uncertainty to begin with) to end up with a final measurement uncertainty that is so small. Take a look at article [2] about the estimation of precipitations in Antarctica. It was published in March 2018 in the journal "Polar Science" owned by Elsevier, which as far as I can tell does not publish junk articles. The general tone is that there are large uncertainties in the estimation of precipitation in Antarctica. "The study of Antarctic precipitation has attracted a lot of attention recently. The reliability of climate models in simulating Antarctic precipitation, however, is still debatable" "The current method of data collection relies on measurement with limited temporal basis, with distances between measurements exceeding 1300 km (Knuth et al., 2010). This makes instrumental-based measurement of precipitation in Antarctic highly unreliable (Genthon et al., 2003)." Of course, such an article does not get much press. How would one report it? "New research shows large uncertainties in our understanding of the mass balance in Antarctica" ? [1] https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/30880 [2]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187396521... |