You may recall the bogus claim of “97% of Greenland Ice melted”, that was dialed back (REP’s last story on WUWT). Now there’s more of the same sort of stuff. See this PR, and note my bold for the money quote.
From the City College of New York
Greenland melting breaks record 4 weeks before season’s end
Melting over the Greenland ice sheet shattered the seasonal record on August 8 – a full four weeks before the close of the melting season, reports Marco Tedesco, assistant professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at The City College of New York.
The melting season in Greenland usually lasts from June – when the first puddles of meltwater appear – to early-September, when temperatures cool. This year, cumulative melting in the first week in August had already exceeded the record of 2010, taken over a full season, according to Professor Tedesco’s ongoing analysis.
“With more yet to come in August, this year’s overall melting will fall way above the old records. That’s a goliath year – the greatest melt since satellite recording began in 1979,” said Professor Tedesco.
This spells a change for the face of southern Greenland, he added, with the ice sheet thinning at its edges and lakes on top of glaciers proliferating.
Professor Tedesco noted that these changes jibe with what most of the models predict – the difference is how quickly this seems to be happening.
To quantify the changes, he calculated the duration and extent of melting throughout the season across the whole ice sheet, using data collected by microwave satellite sensors.*
This ‘cumulative melting index’ can be seen as a measure of the ‘strength’ of the melting season: the higher the index, the more melting has occurred. (The index is defined as the number of days when melting occurs multiplied by the total area subject to melting.)
Dr. Thomas Mote, Professor of Geography at the University of Georgia and colleague of Professor Tedesco, confirmed that the cumulative melt in 2012 had surpassed that of 2010 using a similar analysis.
The August 8th record differs from NASA’s announcement of unprecedented melting in mid-July, reported by Professor Tedesco and other researchers. Then, they found that the Greenland ice sheet had melted over 97 percent of its surface.
“That event was exceptional in the sense that it was an extremely rare event,” said Professor Tedesco. “Imagine Rio de Janeiro under a layer of snow and you get the idea.”
The extreme melting detected in mid-July, on the other hand, generated liquid water that refroze after a few days. “This changed the physical properties of the snowpack – making a slushy layer that turned into an icy crust after refreezing – but very likely it did not add to the runoff of meltwater that makes sea levels rise.”
The cumulative melting index, on the other hand, does account for water flowing to the ocean. The same meltwater can affect ice dynamics by lubricating the base of the ice sheet and speeding its slide toward the sea.
This year, Greenland experienced extreme melting in nearly every region – the west, northwest and northeast of the continent – but especially at high elevations. In most years, the ice and snow at high elevations in southern Greenland melt for a few days at most. This year it has already gone on for two months.
“We have to be careful because we are only talking about a couple of years and the history of Greenland happened over millennia,” cautioned Professor Tedesco. “But as far as we know now, the warming that we see in the Artic is responsible for triggering processes that enhance melting and for the feedback mechanisms that keep it going. Looking over the past few years, the exception has become part of the norm.”
* The National Snow and Ice Data Center provided satellite data from the United States Air Force Defense Meteorological Satellite Program.
The NASA Cryospheric Sciences Program and the National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored this research.
Note: An upcoming paper submitted by Professor Tedesco and his colleagues examines the losses and gains that the Greenland ice sheet could experience, as projected through the end of the 21st Century according to different CO2-level scenarios.
Online:
Greenland Melting www.greenlandmelting.com
Video: Bridge destruction over Watson River, Greenland, likely a consequence of cumulative melting. (Filmed by M.Tedesco) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKjXKAatiIs
NASA Release: Satellites See Unprecedented Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Melt http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/greenland-melt.html
===========================================================
This quote…
“That event was exceptional in the sense that it was an extremely rare event,” said Professor Tedesco. “Imagine Rio de Janeiro under a layer of snow and you get the idea.”
In juxtaposition with this one:
“That’s a goliath year – the greatest melt since satellite recording began in 1979.”
…has to be one of the most ridiculous ones I’ve ever seen.
How rare? Well professor, show me the records of such melts prior to satellite monitoring and you might have an argument. Greenland melts every summer. How many summer in the past 1000 years have such levels of melt? I don’t think he can tell us. Is a 1 in 30 year event “rare”?
As for the reason, I think this figures in:
I refer you to this photograph of a Moulin in Greenland:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/03/greenland-ground-zero-for-global-soot-warming/
Image from National Geographic online slide show – Photo: James Balog – click for moreBalog writes:
In the winter a huge among of snow are accumulated on the Ice (2-3 meters, sometimes more) and we are not talking about 1 or 2 square-miles, it’s about 100.000′s of square miles (up to 1 million) on the Westside of the Ice cap and a similar picture on the Eastside… when the melting season starts in april-sep… the meltwater has to go somewhere, and for sure it goes downhill in huge meltwater rivers.
The black stuff on the bottom of the lakes is carbon dust and pollution in general… but not from one year, but several decades (the topographical conditions don’t change from year to year). On a flight over the Ice Cap a sky clear day, you can see hundreds of huge lakes with the black spot on the bottom.
See this experiment with soot on snow done by meteorologist Michael Smith of WeatherData where soot made a huge difference.
Per-Erik Aspling says:
August 15, 2012 at 3:40 pm
This is highly interesting. The black dust is named “krykonit” by Nordenskiöld. A search for “krykonit” in Bing gives among others a .pdf from 2002 by Frank T. Kyte “Tracers of the extraterrestrial component in sediments and inferences for Earth’s accretion history” http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20030062938_2003071760.pdf which cite the work of Nordenskiöld:
The black dust in the melt ponds on the Greenland ice-sheet has cosmic origin.
****
Theo Goodwin says:
August 15, 2012 at 3:46 pm
Yep! In Warmish nightmares, Greenland is a partially uncovered bowling ball and when the ice loses its grip – Kazaam!
****
When it melts, it’ll roll west into the Canadian archipelago & produce a seven-ten split.
Entropic,
Roger Harrabin is an eco-lunatic. He is the one pushing the human-cause runaway global warming hype, and you are a true believer in that ridiculous nonsense.
Here is an interesting story of the rescue of a B-17 aircrew off the Greenland icecap by the use of a PBY amphibious aircraft on an icecap “lake” during WW-2. Note the lake disappeared after the rescue.
http://www.ultimatesacrifice.com/my_gal_sal_history.htm
AnonyMoose says:
August 15, 2012 at 4:55 pm
“How many summer in the past 1000 years have such levels of melt?”
I’d ask for 2000 or 3000 years, because 1000 includes the Little Ice Age, and we don’t know how unusual that was.
Excluding this year, 4 times in the last 1000, 6 in the last 2000 and 12 in the last 3000. The peak was about 7000 years ago when it happened about every 25 years. The ‘once every 150 years’ refers to the average over the last 10000 years.
oMan says:
August 15, 2012 at 10:24 pm
Thanks. Two questions: (1) When the ice melts and refreezes, does the resulting surface have a higher reflectivity (reflectance? Shinier!) that might trick the satellites into thinking it is still melted?
Actually it gets darker, that’s how they can determine that it’s melted.
http://www.meltfactor.org/blog/?p=514
Smokey says:
August 16, 2012 at 7:26 am
Entropic,
Roger Harrabin is an eco-lunatic. He is the one pushing the human-cause runaway global warming hype, and you are a true believer in that ridiculous nonsense.
—————————————-
I think that qualifies as an ad-hominem attack, Smokey, unless you can display convincing evidence. I note the emotional trigger words:- eco-lunatic,true believer, ridiculous nonsense. You are back to those political lobbyist tactics again.
He’s right about the headlines, though. A number of comments on WUWT reacted to the headline announcing the July 12th surface melting without reading the report properly. This very post is headed “More hype on Greenland’s summer melt”.
Other examples on WUWT include:-
“What planet does Michael Mann live on”
“James Hansen’s cherrypick”
“Climate change and the tooth fairy”
“Warming alarmism spreads faster, like a virus.”
To provide balance,here’s a chance for you to mine the alarmist websites for similar hyped catastrophic headlines.
.
Tad says:
August 15, 2012 at 3:04 pm
How do the Greenlanders feel about this extra melting? Is it a bad thing for them?
They’re not too happy about this:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=78685
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKjXKAatiIs&feature=player_embedded
Richad Courtney is right about the updated physics of low frictiom movement over ice surfaces. I was unable to lay hands on the original paper, but this gives a summary of what he found.
http://www.exploratorium.edu/hockey/skating1.html
Ferdinand:
Thankyou for your response at August 16, 2012 at 6:03 am to my post at August 16, 2012 at 3:48 am.
It is always good to hear from you and – as we usually do – to ‘cross swords’.
Also, I noted your earlier post at August 15, 2012 at 3:35 pm which is also pertinent to my post. That earlier post of yours said
etc.
Your reply to my post says:
As I think you know, I agree your final point about the unreliability of Greenland ice cores due to volcanic contaminants.
But, as you also know, I strongly disagree with your assertion that “the air in the firn is sealed from exchanging with the atmosphere above”. The firn contains open porosity (i.e. it is not sealed) and variations in atmospheric pressure (i.e. weather) would pump air in and out of the firn.
However, those points are a distraction from the issue of the melts and re-melts.
The important point in direct relevance to my comment is stated by you when you say “remelt layers are readily observed in the coastal ice cores of Antarctica and in the Greenland ice core”. Indeed so. But that leads to two problems.
1. It cannot be known how many “remelts” happened but are not “readily observed”
and
2. The melting and refreezing must affect temporal resolution of the ice cores in unknown ways (i.e. annual layers are confused so cannot be resolved and must be ‘guessed’).
Richard
Steve R says:
August 15, 2012 at 2:59 pm
I hate to be so old school about this, but I see any evidence that we aren’t spiraling into another ice age as something to be optimistic about rather than something to dread.
===========================
Agreed! I had frost bite as a kid and almost froze to death walking home from the school bus so I have a great respect for what really cold weather can do.
Friends:
At August 16, 2012 at 5:42 am I pointed out that the troll operating under the title Entropic man had based an untrue argument on an untrue ‘urban myth’. Subsequently, at August 16, 2012 at 10:01 am, he/she/they says:
“Updated physics”?!
As damage limitation that counts as being somewhat pathetic.
My rebuttal of his/her/their nonsense included this paragraph.
Michael Faraday died on 25 August 1867. His work on the ice was completed more than 150 years ago.
Richard
As a PS, the troll was wrong that I had found his/her/their link. I did not know of it and I have posted on WUWT about the surface properties of ice in the past.
Richard
Can’t win here. Perhaps I should post as “The Warmist Troll” from now on, just to keep Richard happy. Kind of him to tell me about Professor Somorjai’s work. It’s something I missed.
The ice moves, nevertheless
REPLY: I thought the idea of science was to determine truth, not to “win”. – Anthony
You snuck into the climate science blog……please read JJ’s good
reply to your Warmist alarmism…… do repent, it is never
too late….
REPLY: I thought the idea of science was to determine truth, not to “win”. – Anthony
I’m not talking about the science, though all it can usually give is probability, not truth.
“Truth” is more the province of politicians and priests.
I said “I cant win” because there’s no point in my indulging in further debate with Richard from now on. His perception of me as a paid warmist troll will probably lead him to automatically dismiss any evidence I present, regardless of its quality
MonktonofOz says: August 16, 2012 at 5:01 am
Allan MacRae; add one more to your list. If impoverished nations are “discouraged” from using coal to produce cheap electricity they are being condemned to eternal poverty. Only with cheap power can such countries start to enjoy the benefits the West take for granted.
___________
Sorry Monkton, but increased cheap global energy supply is exactly what the radical enviros are trying to prevent. Please see the first three excerpts below.
Did you seriously think this was all about the phony global warming scare? That, apparently, is the smokescreen.
Skill-testing question for ALL:
WHAT IS THE REAL GREEN AGENDA?
Source:
http://www.green-agenda.com
___________
Excerpts:
“Complex technology of any sort is an assault on
human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to
discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy,
because of what we might do with it.”
– Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute
“The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the
worst thing that could happen to the planet.”
– Jeremy Rifkin,
Greenhouse Crisis Foundation
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the
equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
– Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
“The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another
United States. We can’t let other countries have the same
number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US.
We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.”
-Michael Oppenheimer,
Environmental Defense Fund
“Global Sustainability requires the deliberate quest of poverty,
reduced resource consumption and set levels of mortality control.”
-Professor Maurice King
“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue.
Even if the theory of global warming is wrong,
we will be doing the right thing in terms of
economic and environmental policy.”
– Timothy Wirth,
President of the UN Foundation
“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony…
climate change provides the greatest opportunity to
bring about justice and equality in the world.”
– Christine Stewart,
former Canadian Minister of the Environment
“The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations
on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.”
– Prof. Chris Folland,
Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research
“The models are convenient fictions
that provide something very useful.”
– Dr David Frame,
climate modeler, Oxford University
“I believe it is appropriate to have an ‘over-representation’ of the facts
on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience.”
-Al Gore,
Climate Change activist
“It doesn’t matter what is true,
it only matters what people believe is true.”
– Paul Watson,
co-founder of Greenpeace
“The only way to get our society to truly change is to
frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe.”
– emeritus professor Daniel Botkin
“The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and
spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest
opportunity to lift Global Consciousness to a higher level.”
-Al Gore,
Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech
“We are on the verge of a global transformation.
All we need is the right major crisis…”
– David Rockefeller,
Club of Rome executive member
“We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place
for capitalists and their projects. We must reclaim the roads and
plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams,
free shackled rivers and return to wilderness
millions of acres of presently settled land.”
– David Foreman,
co-founder of Earth First!
Entropic,
Let me be clear: Roger Harrabin is an eco-lunatic, a true believer, and he spouts ridiculous nonsense. Furthermore, the onus is not on scientific skeptics to provide “convincing evidence” of anything. That is the burden on those pushing the CAGW conjecture, and I have to tell you, they have failed. There is no convincing evidence for CAGW. But if you find any, be sure to post it here. Be prepared to defend your putative “evidence”.
Friends:
At August 16, 2012 at 3:08 pm and August 16, 2012 at 3:37 pm the troll who posts as ‘Entropic man’ complains that I am certain he is a paid troll. But he/she/they clearly hopes many don’t know the reason for my certainty. It is explained by posts on the thread at
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/14/why-we-need-debate-not-consensus-on-climate-change/
Below I copy two of my posts from that thread (which immediately followed one another in the thread) because they are especially informative and it saves people needing to find them.
Please note that Entropic man did not respond to these posts but must have seen them because he/she/they did make subsequent posts in that thread.
If Entropic man is withdrawing from WUWT it is probably because his/her/their paymaster has withdrawn funding following exposure of him/her/them. And one can assume he/her/they will be replaced.
Richard
——-
richardscourtney says:
August 16, 2012 at 6:00 am
Entropic man:
I see you are still trolling. Your post at August 16, 2012 at 3:58 am misquotes me as saying at August 16, 2012 at 1:04 am
when I actually wrote
Those falsehoods which you refuse to justify are your lies about the Stern Report. But you use your misquotation of me as an excuse to continue to refuse to justify those lies.
You are one of the worst slimey trolls it has ever been my misfortune to observe, and I am now convinced that you are paid to conduct your despicable trolling.
Richard
——–
richardscourtney says:
August 16, 2012 at 6:38 am
Friends:
I write to explain why I disbelieve the assertion of Entropic Man that he is not a paid troll.
At the listed time of August 16, 2012 at 1:04 am I wrote my post which Entropic Man answered. The local time here in the UK was 9:04 am: n.b. I made my post early this morning.
Subsequently, about 3 hours later At August 16, 2012 at 3:58 am Entropic Man made his reply. That would have been 11:58 am UK time: i.e. about noon. But in that post he says;
Clearly, he is claiming he resides in Europe and returned to find my post after having been out for the evening. But my post was in the morning and he replied to it before the evening (wherever he abides in Europe).
Obviously, Entropic man is a fake. He claims to be in Europe but he is not. He claims to have made a post in the evening but he did not. And he claims to not be a paid troll and I don’t believe it.
Richard
O H Dahlsveen says:
August 16, 2012 at 6:00 am
Tez says on August 15, 2012 at 2:34 pm :
“There was far less ice there when the Vikings were farming Greenland for a period of 500 years beginning approx 1000AD.”
============
Yes, nearly correct (let’s say possibly 250 years instead of 500) –
Let’s say: http://www.co2science.org/articles/V7/N22/EDIT.php
Entropic man says:
August 16, 2012 at 4:27 am
tty says:
August 15, 2012 at 11:23 pm
“Tez, the Vikings didn’t farm in Greenland for 500 years, not even close.”
You are on perilous ground here. One point of passionate argument on WUWT regards the existance, or non-existance of the Medieval Warm Period.”
I think these summarise the existence and world-wide extent of the MWP
http://pages.science-skeptical.de/MWP/MedievalWarmPeriod1024x768.html
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/22/more-evidence-the-medieval-warm-period-was-global/
I’ve no problem with the Medieval Warm Period. Recent tree ring confirmation of Roman period warmth equal to 20th century levels rather reinforces my own view that we are living in a period of long term cooling as changes in the Earth’s orbital eccentricity move us towards towards the next glacial period, accelerated in the LIA due to a temporary reduction in solar output, and reversed by cAGW from 1900 on.
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1589.html
While Dick Courtney and Entropic man argue the arcana of …. something or another, the thread topic of whether the reporting of the melt in Greenland is ‘hype’ or not seems to be getting lost.
The rate of melting in Greenland has already accelerated over the last decade, this even greater rate of melting this year comes on top of this. Claiming that pointing this put is ‘hype’ seems to be based on a desire to minimise the observed acceleration and reject the implications of even greater rates of melt this year.
Here’s the already increased base from which this years melt is an increase –
Eric Rignot1,*, Pannir Kanagaratnam2,*
Using satellite radar interferometry observations of Greenland, we detected widespread glacier acceleration below 66° north between 1996 and 2000, which rapidly expanded to 70° north in 2005. Accelerated ice discharge in the west and particularly in the east doubled the ice sheet mass deficit in the last decade from 90 to 220 cubic kilometers per year. As more glaciers accelerate farther north, the contribution of Greenland to sea-level rise will continue to increase.
So the record melt a month from the end of the melting season is on top of a doubling of the melt rate over the last decade.
All of this exceeds any computer modelling of possible ice-cap melting which is clearly underestimating the rate of ice mass loss and therefore the rate of sea level rise.
Smokey says:
August 16, 2012 at 5:20 pm
Let me be clear: Roger Harrabin is an eco-lunatic, a true believer, and he spouts ridiculous nonsense. Furthermore, the onus is not on scientific skeptics to provide “convincing evidence” of anything.
—————————–
We are not discussing cAGW at this point, we are discussing Roger Harrabin and I. We disagree with you on cAGW. This does not make us insane. Nor does it mean that we are of that opinion based on faith, rather than on our assessment of the evidence. Nor does you sceptical stance on cAGW make you insane or credulous.
To imply either is insulting and diminishes a debate which should be about the science, not the sanity of the debaters.
The graphic gives a totally misleading impression that Greenland is becoming ice-free – even where the ice is still 3km thick.
Entropic says:
“We are not discussing cAGW at this point, we are discussing Roger Harrabin and I. ”
We are discussing wild-eyed “hype”. Read the headline.
Since there is exactly zero scientific evidence for catastrophic AGW, to keep harping on it as if it actually exists is at least borderline insane. The rest of us are skeptical of CAGW because that is the default position when there is no supporting evidence. Occam’s Razor says that the simplest explanation – natural variability within long term parameters – is the correct explanation.