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.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
A bit off topic, but AmazonGate gets some traction in one MSM source.
http://www.torontosun.com/news/canada/2010/07/12/14690796.html
The term “accelerating” seems troublesome until I realize that I experience acceleration of temperature change every morning. Acceleration is in every cycle. Everytime my heart beats, blood accelerates for a moment. Everytime I take a breath, the air speed in my nose accelerates.
Steven,
Good grief! Try the fact that you blatantly cherry pick data just after I suggest you are in the grip of Confirmation Bias?
I am aghast…
Words fail me…
Nearly…
You pick the year with the highest variation of +10mm and compare it to the one with the lowest variation of -1mm only because they are as far apart as it is possible to find two points on the same chart.
The fact that you then state that the change is the “exact opposite of doubling” displays a mind bogglingly poor grasp of mathematics.
If I, too, were to succumb to Confirmation Bias I could point to the fact that at one point in 1999 the annual change was -1mm and the latest figure shows +5mm, which shows the change is “more than doubling”. But I won’t, because I know that kind of comparison is totally meaningless.
I posted that image because it shows wild variation swings in a very short time scale (in geological terms) that cannot possibly be interpreted as a “decline” in the growth rate. Anybody with a tiny modicum of knowledge of statistical significance would be able to understand this. The fact that these changes have actually been shown to be correlated to global temperature anomalies means we might even be able to predict future changes in sea level caused by temperature changes – and so be able to attribute that proportion of sea level rise caused by ice melt.
Hopefully there are a few intelligent people here will understand this. In which case I would point them to SkepticalScience for a blog run by somebody who actually discusses the science rather than somebody who would rather make stuff up.
If I’m not mistaken, JAXA is now reporting the Arctic ice extent is already back above the 2007 level (for this date) and the 2006 and maybe 2005 as well. Of course that is just anecdotal and not a harbinger of what is to come in September.
Matthew L:
I find it very unconvincing.
What they’ve done is some curve-fitting in order to describe the apparent relationship between global temps and rate of sea level rise over the last ~100 years. So far, so good.
But then they’ve gone and extrapolated it into the future in order to predict future sea level rises – at which point it becomes complete nonsense.
Goddard,
I do agree that I shouldn’t have generalized about what glaciologists think. I just know that you aren’t presenting the full story.
Khan, S. A., J. Wahr, M. Bevis, I. Velicogna, and E. Kendrick (2010), Spread of ice mass loss into northwest Greenland observed by GRACE and GPS, Geophys. Res. Lett., 37, L06501, doi:10.1029/2010GL042460.
Maybe Southwest glaciers have slowed. But northwest glaciers have filled the gap perhaps?
Here’s some facts
Actual size/volume of the Greenland Ice Sheet
2, 850,000 Km3
Rate the BBC article staes/implies is catastrophic and will casue sea levelto go up xxFt
239 Km3/year
Number of years required to melt the Greenland Ice Cap at this rate ofr melting
11, 925 years
Matthew L:
As is any conclusion that it is accelerating. Even more so when you consider that it’s not shown any signs of accelerating.
Robert
Until someone balances the conservation of mass equations, I am not going to take their ice thickness measurements seriously. Increased melt has to mean an increased rate of sea level rise.
It isn’t happening – quite opposite in fact.
Matthew L
The trend line drawn in *your* graph is downwards.
http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/8536/sealevelchange.gif
Robert, thanks for the response. I am still puzzled, however, about the GPS sites. Here’s a link (sorry but I don’t know how to place a live link) that shows GPS on the actual Helheim glacier as well as bedrock sited stations. Is there a list that shows the location of all of the sites?
http://www.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://i251.photobucket.com/albums/gg311/johnnyrook1/GPSreceiversonHelheimGlacier.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/1/12/15463/0193%3Fnew%3Dtrue&usg=__uf1GzIfRuU-0YoEm1iMBXWEmN9s=&h=309&w=370&sz=78&hl=en&start=16&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=I06pI7mrKQsbzM:&tbnh=102&tbnw=122&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dgreenland%2Bgps%2Bsites%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26sa%3DN%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26tbs%3Disch:1
There is an epidemic of causality in the world today and skepticalscience.com is pathologically viral.
Premature ejaculation of ‘causal explanation’ is a serious problem. The excuse given by those who suffer from the condition is to claim that the problem was misconstrued at the outset.
It is a trade-off between being:
Sometimes it is better to hold back and just work with correlation. ‘Rationality’ cannot guarantee the cat’s meow.
richard telford says:
July 13, 2010 at 3:20 am
“[…]Europe (especially in the north) has been cooling through the mid-late Holocene because of orbital forcing. This is well known from multiple source of evidence (pollen, glacial reconstructions etc).[…]”
Oh. This means when it gets warmer now it’s just a return to a previous state. So why does anyone worry about AGW in the first place? Europe didn’t turn into Venus in the Holocene. Somebody tell Hansen.
Eastern Greenland has thousands of icebergs from calved glaciers. It does every summer. During the winter they float to the south and melt – and sometimes collide with ships.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wTlureUMP8&feature=youtube_gdata]
Most glaciers have been retreating for around 150 years. The world is now ~0.7 degrees C than it was 150 years ago.
As a geologist and like most other geologists s in the private sector, I would say nearly all that warming has been due to natural cycles, the equivalent of the F word to alarmists. Such cycles have happened millions of times before in the geological past and will continue to occur in the future.
Today, the reasons glaciers are melting today probably has much more to do with atmospheric soot and ash levels (at least these are caused by man, plus for the occasional irritating volcanic eruption) and periodic declines in precipitation, as has apparently occurred in Greenland over the past three years.
As alarmist scare stories on climate increasingly get shown to be complete BS, so they retreat into ‘Fortress Melting Greenland’. Eventually this will be battered down too, all Steve has done is to fire the first few rounds of the siege guns.
“Tell me then Steven, how is it that GIA can accelerate at the rate at which ice losses have been incurred. What is the physical mechanism which would cause what looks to be a doubling of ice losses in a 10 year period? Do you understand how long it takes GIA to occur and at what velocity and scale? Also tell me how you plan on refuting radar interferometry and altimetry data which show the same trends? ”
You still have not touched the problems with the temperature trend showing that Greenland may not be warming as much as YOU fear. You have also not discussed why sea level change is not corresponding to this “lost ice”.
Are you really sure there are ice losses with those 2 facts I just mentioned above? Or maybe there is something going on here that NONE of us understand… Go back to the drawing board and come up with a new hypothesis because your assertion that ice is being lost does not match other evidence, and you can’t just hide the temperature series and say “but its been rising the last x years.”
But that aside, this entire argument is not going anywhere just like the glaciers. Glaciers do not simply melt away in one life-time. The climate will change, that is one fact I can say with confidence. Glaciers will melt every year, they will advance, and they will retreat, and they will grow with more snowfall. Not sure we understand glaciers enough to make predictions about the future yet. Considering every temperature change using GCM’s have been wrong for local areas, I do not see how that can even be used to predict it.
Feel free to carry on. And reference every study and every measurement you can that supports your position while ignoring those that do not support it. The rest of us will continue to laugh at your quite impressive ego and let the future unfold as it may. I trust GCM’s just as much as I trust oracles and fortune tellers. I suggest you do the same. Even Al Gore seems to mistrust his own predictions and bought a house on a beach. What can I say?
Many people are getting duped. Some are mad about it. The rest of us will just go on our merry way with smiles on our face and live our lives without fear about Gaia, as I am sure she will be around much longer then humans will be. And if Greenland does melt….I do believe our planet will still be the third rock from the sun orbiting that same sun for many eons to come.
Isotasy goes both directions. Scotland rising. England sinking. (Not referring to football.)
—————–
And in which direction do you think Greenland is going?
Richard Telford:
Implements dating back to the MWP and the RWP have recently been uncovered on the Schnidejoch Pass in Switzerland – evidence that the pass was open and in use during those historical warm periods, and covered in ice outside of those periods.
Nick Stokes:
Sins of omission!
By omitting to mention that there was similar warming in the recent past, they’re clearly creating the misleading impression that the current warming is unprecedented.
Now this may have been unintentional … I couldn’t possibly comment.
“Until someone balances the conservation of mass equations, I am not going to take their ice thickness measurements seriously. Increased melt has to mean an increased rate of sea level rise.”
——————-
Steve,
In the graph you posted on sea level rise the margin of error was 0.4 mm per year in the rate of rise. If Greenland is losing 100 Gt of mass a year that would only be about 0.25 mm a year (roughly). So the effect of mass loss on sea level rise is below the margin of error in the measurements you site.
stevengoddard says:
Isotasy goes both directions. Scotland rising. England sinking. (Not referring to football.)
GeoFlynx – Not only will glacial rebound produce a positive trending anomaly, opposite that of ice loss, but due to the high viscosity of the Earth’s mantle, rebound changes toward isostasy are relatively slow (like soccer) compared to gravimetric changes in melting ice. The source of the gravitational changes seen by the GRACE instruments can therefore be distinguished from glacial rebound by both polarity and rate of change.
Bill Tuttle says:
July 13, 2010 at 4:41 am
So, if it was *not* warmer in the back-when, what’s your theory about how structures and vegetation wound up beneath the glaciers, only to be exposed by the glaciers’ current retreat?
—-
Please read what I wrote more carefully. I did not argue that is was not warmer in the past, but that as modern vegetation and glaciers are not in equilibrium with the climate – because of the short duration of the current warm period – one needs to be careful in ones conclusions.
The warm period of the early Holocene was several thousand years long. Given time under the current climate, trees will grow at progressively higher altitudes and latitudes.
Matthew L says:
Hopefully there are a few intelligent people here will understand this. In which case I would point them to SkepticalScience for a blog run by somebody who actually discusses the science rather than somebody who would rather make stuff up.
“SkepticalScience” is a pure climate alarmist blog, run by a climate alarmist and inhabited by the alarmist crowd. There is nothing skeptical about it.
Every honest scientist is a skeptic, first and foremost; their minds are open, but any hypothesis must be supported with convincing evidence. The CO2=CAGW conjecture has no evidence, convincing or otherwise, to support it. Yet SkepticalScience accepts the CO2=CAGW conjecture as its true belief system.
You are directing people to a blog with a name predicated on a lie. They are not skeptical, and they never were. They are climate alarmists.
And as alarmists, they are promoting the hype that something out of the ordinary is occurring. It is not; the Arctic and Greenland are regional areas that have gone through the same cycles many times during the Holocene.
The Greenland hype is not global. But it is all the alarmist crowd has — every other scare they have perpetrated has been debunked. This scare is in the process of being debunked. The question will then be: what will be the next alarmist scare that needs to be debunked?
richard telford
Greenland is a huge island and undoubtedly some parts are rising and other parts sinking. Just like Canada, Alaska, the US, Europe, Siberia, etc. etc…..
Matthew L:
Cherry-picking aside, what exactly does your graph show? It certainly doesn’t show any medium to long-term accelerating, nor does it show any trending towards acceleration.