NOTE: Another related story posted here
By Steve Goddard
A popular AGW cottage industry from 2003-2007 was to make press releases warning that the Greenland ice sheet was melting down. Some fine pieces of journalism were produced, like this one from the BBC.
The meltdown of Greenland’s ice sheet is speeding up, satellite measurements show. Data from a US space agency (Nasa) satellite show that the melting rate has accelerated since 2004. If the ice cap were to completely disappear, global sea levels would rise by 6.5m (21 feet).
This one from New Scientist
The Greenland ice sheet is all but doomed to melt away to nothing, according to a new modelling study. If it does melt, global sea levels will rise by seven metres, flooding most of the world’s coastal regions.
NASA’s Earth Observatory even has a regular section named “Greenland’s Ice Alarm.” In their August 28, 2007 edition they included the map below, which shows Greenland warming at 3°C per decade.
One has to wonder where their data comes from, because GISS shows that Greenland has not warmed at all over the last 90 years.
GISS temperature trends since 1920
Below is the GISS temperature graph for Godthab, Greenland. It was warmest around 1940, and the only recent warm years were from (you guessed it) 2003-2007. The Godthab pattern is fairly typical for Greenland and Iceland.
NASA’s Earth Observatory generated their 3C/decade trend by very carefully cherry-picking their start and end points. Tamino must be incensed by NASA’s behaviour, because he hates cherry-picking.
But you don’t hear so much about Greenland melting down any more.
Vol. 323. no. 5913, p. 458
FALL MEETING OF THE AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION:
Galloping Glaciers of Greenland Have Reined Themselves In
Richard A. Kerr
Ice loss in Greenland has had some climatologists speculating that global warming might have brought on a scary new regime of wildly heightened ice loss and an ever-faster rise in sea level. But glaciologists reported at the American Geophysical Union meeting that Greenland ice’s Armageddon has come to an end.
Greenland warming of 1920–1930 and 1995–2005
Petr Chylek
M. K. Dubey
Los Alamos National Laboratory, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA
G. Lesins
Department of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
We provide an analysis of Greenland temperature records to compare the current (1995–2005) warming period with the previous (1920–1930) Greenland warming. We find that the current Greenland warming is not unprecedented in recent Greenland history. Temperature increases in the two warming periods are of a similar magnitude, however, the rate of warming in 1920–1930 was about 50% higher than that in 1995–2005.
Below is a video I took flying over Greenland from east to west on August 10, 2008 (peak melt season.) On the east side there were lots of icebergs and little evidence of any melt. As you traverse to the west side, you see a few melt ponds.
Temperatures have been running well below normal in Greenland this summer.
It is mid-summer and temperatures in the interior of the Greenland ice sheet are currently minus 16F. Temperatures never get above freezing for more than a few minutes there. Meanwhile temperatures in the interior of the East Antarctic ice sheet are close to minus 100F.
Every good citizen knows that the poles are melting – because they have been fed a continuous stream of gross misinformation. The press loves to print this stuff, but never makes any serious attempt to set the record straight later.
They can always recycle the ice shelf fracturing melting story a few more times.
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The Idol Of Science Has Fallen.
Great Is The Fall Of It.
…-
“Diabetes Drug Maker Hid Test Data on Risks, Files Indicate
In the fall of 1999, the drug giant SmithKline Beecham secretly began a study to find out if its diabetes medicine, Avandia, was safer for the heart than a competing pill, Actos, made by Takeda.
Avandia’s success was crucial to SmithKline, whose labs were otherwise all but barren of new products. But the study’s results, completed that same year, were disastrous. Not only was Avandia no better than Actos, but the study also provided clear signs that it was riskier to the heart.
But instead of publishing the results, the company spent the next 11 years trying to cover them up, according to documents recently obtained by The New York Times. The company did not post the results on its Web site or submit them to federal drug regulators, as is required in most cases by law. ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/health/policy/13avandia.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss
Villabolo
If all this landlocked ice near the poles is melting enough to be alarmed about we should see it in global average sea level. The oceans don’t lie. Water is incompressible. If the melt rate is accelerating we should see an accelerating rate of sea level rise.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_noib_global_sm.jpg
There is no acceleration evident in satellite measurements of sea level change since 1994. The trend is 3.2mm rise per year (about 12 inches per century) and steady.
Perhaps you can help me reconcile the fact that GRACE satellites implied the rate of ice loss more than doubling from 2002 through 2009 while satellites that measure sea level failed to show any acceleration in the rise rate.
Good luck. I await your explanation with bated breath.
Please please please.
To settle this whole debate is simple…
Could somebody do a chart comparing average, 12-month rolling (so smoothed out) actual temperatures, versus the range of forecasts driven by alarmists.
Since this whole AGW thing came about decades ago forecasting end of the world by 2000, we now have REAL temperature data! If it is much higher forecasts for 1980-2010 than actual temparature, the models are worthless!
Again, GRACE does not measure ice, it measures gravity anomalies. There are many things which affect gravity anomalies, particularly elevation of the ground underneath the ice. No one has any way to accurately measure isostatic movement under the Greenland ice sheets, so the claims made based on gravity anomalies are bogus.
We know that rates of sea level change have slowed some in the last five years – a clear indication that ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica has slowed.
When will it come out the new computer game “Climate Change/Global Warming”?
These guys are losing a big opportunity to make bigger money than they receive from the UN related sources.
doomed to melt away to nothing, according to a new modelling study
Sera says:
July 12, 2010 at 10:45 pm
“Every good citizen knows that the poles are melting…”
Apparently from the bottom up. Current air temps are -26.4°C and current water temps are +5.2°C for the north pole.
http://coolwx.com/cgi-bin/findbuoy.cgi?id=25595
You’re not reading the water temp correctly. Water temp is in the column to the right of millibars pressure (10XX.X). That would be -0.5C for the hour you were looking at.
The 5.2 you show is under the column Wvht in meters (waveheight?).
With all due respect Goddard, this is the third time that you have posted a post which correlates melt with ice loss on ice sheets yet ignores dynamical glacier and ice stream responses such as accelerations which are in fact occurring in these regions. I must point out though that you quoted glen’s flow law to me before and said it’s the reason that high velocities couldn’t occur where the previous grace maps showed losses from Chen et al. 2009 yet now suddenly you’ve “seen the light” and realize the way flows increase towards the coast. Interesting nevertheless. And don’t call the previous grace maps showing losses on the “interior” as I already told you Allison et al. 2009 and Rignot and Thomas (2002) show high velocities in those regions due to channeling and basal lubrication through insulation. If you want to talk condescending to me as if I’m under the level of a 1st year community college student that’s your choice. I don’t really care what you think my credentials are, but I can tell you that assumptions can come back to bite you.
The two types of studies that deal directly with Greenland ice mass, the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) and the GPS-based studies of vertical uplift of bedrock [see for example, Nature Geoscience 3, 404 – 407 (2010)] are both elegant and accurate approaches to measuring change in the mass of the ice sheet. Very impressive experiments indeed! The fact that they both show an accelerating rate of loss of ice mass is powerful evidence for the melting phenomenon.
Suggesting that the ice sheet is not melting is just plain silly and based more on what Steve Goddard would like to believe rather than on what is actually happening.
Steven Goddard said:
I did not make any such assumption. In fact I make this statement:
My analogy is simply to demonstrate that gravity will push ice in a glacier from a higher elevation to a lower one if there is nothing to stop it at the periphery, and that the whole glacier will move simultaneously. And if you remove an obstruction (or reduce the friction) at the periphery then the whole glacier will “slump” faster.
Glaciers fracture in all directions both horizontally and vertically due to the force of gravity acting on the ice pushing it down and out of the interior. If the bottom of a glacier is prevented from moving laterally by a mountain range then, if the weight / height of ice above the mountains is great enough, it will fracture horizontally above the top of the mountain range and the top layer will carry on moving. In effect you will get a glacier moving over the top of a depression of static ice.
It is not just “the weight of winter snow” that causes it to move. It is the weight of ice above sea level. If all winter snow were to stop suddenly, the glacier would still move towards the sea under its own weight until the friction of the ice on the ground (or static ice) is enough to counteract the force of gravity pulling it down and away from the centre.
An ice cap is created when snow accumulates in winter faster than it melts in summer. The Greenland ice cap is there because for millions of years more snow has fallen in the interior than has melted away at the periphery. There is nothing to say that the reverse might not happen. And there is some evidence to show that it may already be happening.
If I were you I would await further research or data before dismissing this possibility so firmly.
This is what happens when people not trained in geology start trying to interpret geological events.
What exactly do AGW types think happened to the Titanic? Did it slam into a supercomputer? The Greenland coast is chock full of thousands of icebergs, formed by glaciers breaking off into the sea. That is what large glaciers do – they flow to the sea. Look at the first few slides below – thousands of icebergs.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=151MZrZW5eo]
Goddard says,
Actually they have put quite a few GPS on bedrock in Greenland to measure the uplift rates. Another thing you have to note is that GIA is not accelerating yet ice losses do. Although in response to the accelerating ice the GIA can accelerate. Therefore when you see an acceleration it is undoubtedly the ice. All the factors that affect the gravity that Grace measures, which of them can accelerate to the point that they explain all the ice losses? Lets see where your explanation for the findings of Gunter et al. (2009) using icesat elevation changes or Pritchard et al (2009) using icesat or the radar interferometry flux methods? We see ACTUAL accelerations with Differential Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar, explain that? When you can see with speckle tracking all these increases caused by ice dynamics?
Also,
Cazenave et al. 2009 actually use the sea level budget to make estimations about the contributions of the ice sheets. Do note there was an unresolved portion of SLR that they didn’t know where it originated, well now they know that its the ice sheets.
You know, when you have 3 methods in virtual agreement, trying (and failing) to refute 1 does not mean ice losses are not occurring. Maybe you should attend some “community college physical geology” or maybe some Cryospheric Remote Sensing courses would be of more use.
Adrian says: … If it is much higher forecasts for 1980-2010 than actual temperature, the models are worthless!
But Adrian, climate “scientists” don’t forecast – they backcast! (And they don’t even do that very well)
I think the UK Met Office has learnt the hard way from 9/10 yearly global forecasts that were high that if you make testable forecasts then those nasty sceptics will just try and compare them to the actual temperature and try to suggest they can’t forecast for toffee when they are shown to be useless.
Far better to stick to forecasts that can only be checked long after they retire!
Steven Goddard:
and Dave Springer:
Here is the actual data for people to make up their own mind:
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_ib_global.txt
and a graph of the change from the Climate4You web site.
http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/8536/sealevelchange.gif
The trend may well be 3.2mm per year (actually I make it about 3.08mm since data became available in 1992) but it is far from steady, ranging between -1mm to +10mm and is currently +5mm. The variation is closely linked to sea surface temperatures (which is logical) as can be seen from the el nino spikes in 1998 and last year. It will take a while yet for a discernable trend to show up, accellerating or not, so your conclusion that it is not accellerating is premature.
Re Raving Above… I Concur.
stevengoddard says:
July 13, 2010 at 5:37 am
Again, GRACE does not measure ice, it measures gravity anomalies. There are many things which affect gravity anomalies, particularly elevation of the ground underneath the ice. No one has any way to accurately measure isostatic movement under the Greenland ice sheets, so the claims made based on gravity anomalies are bogus.
We know that rates of sea level change have slowed some in the last five years – a clear indication that ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica has slowed.
__________________________________________________________
I don’t think so;
http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_hist_last_15.html
Also GRACE measurements have been validated against DGPS measurements, the GRACE data are real, your beliefs are not real.
John Cook,
Your post on your web site is a total straw man. Sea level is rising, and has been since the end of the last ice age. This is due to the ice sheets melting. Everyone understands this.
What is not happening is a “meltdown.” I am assuming that you have some competence with English? Are you honest enough to admit your error?
R. Gates says:
July 12, 2010 at 11:09 pm
. . . .
And by the way (Steve), it’s clear, sunny, and showing a warming trend at the N. Pole right now, and despite your dire warnings last week that the melt ponds were freezing over, they are sparklin’ in the bright sunshine:
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/latest/noaa2.jpg
Umm . . . am I missing something, because the ice-melt ponds in the photo you linked here are clearly iced over. ? . . .??
Just asking.
Matthew L
Your links clearly show that the rate of sea level rise has decreased, with the exception of the El Nino spike. What is your point?
Each and every claim of catastrophic global warming proves to be either flat out fabricated or a gross overstatement of the actual conditions.
Robert
Actually, there is very little exposed bedrock in the interior of Greenland. Almost none, because it is buried under ice. Taking lots of measurements around the coast tells you nothing about what is going on under the ice sheet.
Look at the satellite photo of Greenland. There is almost no rock exposed in the interior.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gj0BpiVHDy4]
Goddard says: This is what happens when people not trained in geology start trying to interpret geological events.
Geology is not the same as Glaciology Goddard. Glaciologists are much better trained for studying the world’s ice than a geologist.
Mr. Goddard, since you are quick to dismiss the world’s glaciologists as unable to interpret geological events, are you ready to show us your credentials in the field of glaciology and cryospheric remote sensing?
Matthew L says:
July 13, 2010 at 6:34 am
. . .
Here is the actual data for people to make up their own mind:
. . .
and a graph of the change from the Climate4You web site.
http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/8536/sealevelchange.gif
. . . . The variation is closely linked to sea surface temperatures (which is logical) as can be seen from the el nino spikes in 1998 and last year. It will take a while yet for a discernable trend to show up, accellerating or not, so your conclusion that it is not accellerating is premature.
. . .
Have you looked at that graph? This graph seems to represent roughly 15 years of data, and the rolling average is clearly declining over the period of the data. Anybody who would characterize the sea level rise as accelerating is simply missing the boat. Not accelerating would be as good a description as any, an unstable decline would be another good one.
A conclusion that it is not accelerating is clearly warranted in that the 15 year trend line would appear to be decreasing rather than increasing at an increasing rate. What it’s doing is sort of the opposite of accelerating at an accelerating rate.
If you look just at the current state, it’s on the increase. Something about weather vs. climate comes to mind. You cannot look at the last two years of data and say anything meaningful about long term trends regarding sea level or climate. If you choose to go there, you’ve lost any and all AGW arguments period.
Jack Simmons put it best: Scientific curiosity overwhelmed by physical appetites. How perceptive.
Steven Goddard:
Er, no they don’t. Are you looking at the same data as me?
The data shows that the rate of sea level rise is highly variable dependent mainly on the change in sea surface temperatures. In the last 18 years the annual rate of sea level change has varied between +10mm and -1mm with an average change between 3.1mm and 3.2mm depending on how you calculate it. The moving average shown in the graph is fairly meaningless. It would be more useful to show the change in the moving average rather than the moving average of the change.
I am sure you could “cherry pick” within this data to show you what you want to see, and no doubt you will, as you seem to be in the suffocating grip of Confirmation Bias.
Robert has already pointed to a study which has shown how virtually all of the change in sea levels can be attributed either to sea temperature changes or ice melt. I have read that paper and it is very convincing. I suggest you do the same.
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/51/21527.full.pdf
I think it is fair to say that there is no proof, yet, that sea level rise has accelerated during the period that the satellite record has been available (although there is strong evidence from other sources that it has in the past) but there is certainly no indication at all that it is slowing down, and if the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet mass reduces, we will quickly see its signature in rising sea levels.
“”” This one from New Scientist
The Greenland ice sheet is all but doomed to melt away to nothing, according to a new modelling study. If it does melt, global sea levels will rise by seven metres, flooding most of the world’s coastal regions. “””
So what is it that I am missing about water seeking its own level. Surely if all of Greenland’s ice melts it would flood ALL of the world’s Coastal Regions; not just most of them. Are not ALL of the world’s oceans simply parts of a single large ocean; so the sea level would have to rise everywhere and flood ALL of those coastal Regions.