WUWT readers may recall some articles we did years back debunking the alarm over the Petermann glacier calving off a large iceberg. In case you are unfamiliar, it’s what glaciers do. But, this particular event was seen as a bad omen of the planet, as this 2012 article in The Independent illustrates:
The whole Petermann glacier is the “canary in the coal mine” thing got started back is 2010, when a calving produced an iceberg 4 times the size of Manhattan Island. WUWT reported then:
There was all sorts of media caterwauling related to that. It all got started when activists scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) started making wild claims like “The Arctic is screaming“, and the “Arctic would be ice free by summer of 2012“. Those are some famously bad (and failed) quotes by NSIDC’s Mark Serreze [and Jay Zwally]. Serreze once famously said:
Serreze: I have yet to lose any sleep over what is talked about in WattsUpWithThat or any other similar blog that insists on arguing from a viewpoint of breathtaking ignorance.
Sure, whatever.
Meanwhile, Nature has been making a fool out of Serreze, because that darned ice just won’t melt, and he’s had to walk back some of his claims:
An article in Wired magazine recounts how sea-ice modellers are sharing data and methods and are learning from each other in the process. It’s not obvious whether the sea-ice community have actually made their data and code open to the world or whether this is just a case of sharing within the community, but it’s a step forwards at least.It’s also nice to see Mark Serreze apologising for his role in stirring up scare stories in 2007:
“In hindsight, probably too much was read into 2007, and I would take some blame for that,” Serreze said. “There were so many of us that were astounded by what happened, and maybe we read too much into it.”
If climatologists are now going to eschew scaremongering then that is certainly welcome.
And, inconveniently, and with little fanfare in the media, this happened at the Petermann glacier:
Growth of Greenland’s Petermann Glacier during the past five years as revealed by NASA/MODIS satellite imagery from a low point in August 2012 (left) to August 2017 (right) Image comparison by Paul Dorian.
Oh, critics will say, it’s only one year-to-year comparison. Alright, how about a trend? Surely if observed calving in 2010 and 2012 defines “global warming” action on the glacier, a few years of comparisons would be even better, right?
Meteorologist Paul Dorian of Vencore Weather has this to say about it:
While we are celebrating a chilly Thanksgiving Day in the Mid-Atlantic region, Summit Station in Greenland will experience high temperatures around -40°F which continues the very cold and well-below normal trend for the month of November. Summit Station (also known as Summit Camp) is a high-altitude (10,551 feet) year-round research station in central Greenland and its exact coordinates actually can change since the ice sheet underneath is often on the move. In addition to the bitter cold, snow and ice accumulation throughout Greenland has been running at the high-end of normal since the fall of 2016 – at times at or near record levels – and NASA/MODIS satellite imagery reveals significant growth in the Petermann Glacier from a low point reached five years ago. One of the important reasons for closely monitoring the snow and ice buildup on Greenland is that this region can be an important cold air source for the central and eastern US during the upcoming winter season.
The accumulated surface mass balance from September 1st to now (blue line, Gt) and the season 2011-12 (red) which had very high summer melt in Greenland. For comparison, the mean curve from the period 1981-2010 is shown (dark grey). Courtesy Danish Meteorological Institute
…
Greenland is a massive island country that lies between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans and is full of dozens of glaciers. The Petermann Glacier is a large one located in the far northwestern part of the country that connects the Greenland ice sheet to the Arctic Ocean near 81 degrees north latitude.
Significant additional snow is expected over Greenland during the next ten days; forecast map courtesy NOAA/EMC/06Z GFS
Given the buildup of snow and ice in the past year or so on Greenland, it may not be too surprising to see an expansion of the Petermann Glacier . As snow accumulates on a glacier, the glacier is pushed by its own weight outward or downward, towards the sea. In fact, this particular glacier has grown by several kilometers during the past five years as revealed by MODIS satellite imagery from its low point in August of 2012 to this past August.
Read his entire analysis here
Note: about 30 minutes after publication, the article was updated to reference NSIDC scientist Jay Zwally’s quote along with Mark Serreze.
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All they ever talk about is the glaciers. Doesn’t the snow offset the loss of ice due to the stupid glaciers calving ice bergs?
Isn’t Greenland well below freezing nearly everywhere nearly all the time? So how is it melting?
Steve,
Shhhhh!!!!! The climate concerned are hunting wabbits!
Correct.
Melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is mostly quite trivial, except at the edges in high summer. They remain rivers of ice, flowing to the oceans under the force of gravity. They melt after reaching the oceans. This will continue to be the case, but the alarmists are happy to allow most people to be misled by the media into thinking that they are at risk of premature melting everywhere, even though many projections are actually for net mass gain due to higher snowfall in a warmer more humid atmosphere.
When challenged about this, the next alarmist line of defense is that the ice sheets will start flowing more rapidly. This scenario has the ice sheets rapidly falling of the continents, a bit like Kim Kardashian’s a$$ will fall off when she hits the middle age “wall”. There is no good reason to believe this (about the ice sheets that is, not a supermodel’s derriere). The flow rates are in any case normally stop-start in a heinously unpredictable manner. The models are probably no better than those about cloud formation and their effects. The hardly measurable temperatures and pressures at the rock-ice interface may well affect flow rates, but the surface ice still always only melts at zero degrees Celsius, whatever temperature the atmosphere is. Thus any water flowing to lubricate the base cannot credibly be changed in temperature by atmospheric melting from above.
As long as you’ve been so kind to expound upon this issue, don’t the glaciers flow to the sea all year round? And doesn’t the air temperature Summer vs Winter have nothing to do with it? In other words doesn’t the flow of the glaciers to the sea have everything to do with the amount of snow that fell decades or centuries ago and not much else?
The flow is normally rather faster in summer, at least for warm-based glacier where melt-water decreases the friction. Some glaciers move extremely unpredictably “surging glaciers”, for reasons that are not well understood.
And I do think that glaciological models are somewhat better than climate models, though they too suffer from a number of simplifying assumptions and insufficient data for startup conditions.
Greenland does have a considarable melt zone in summer (up to about 5000 feet above sea-level in the south). It is really more of a temperate than an arctic glacier.
In Antarctica there is very little surface melting. The loss is almost exclusively through calving.
Every time I see one of these kind of articles it generates a mental image of hordes of the climate faithful gathered in a boreal deciduous forest glade in October, exclaiming in chorused dismay as each and every brown leaf detaches and flutters to the ground.
I sometimes wonder how these people manage to muster sufficient neurological function to draw their next breath. I also sometimes idly wish they wouldn’t.
This is a clear case of Russian interference and Vladimir Putin is clearly behind this. We had better get the US Intelligence services on the case!
They are, with their usual abundance of caution.
So once again skeptics are proven to be correct, and experts hyping the climate apocalypse gave demonstrated both ignorance and bad faith.
It is important to post these type of images because some day soon, the glacier will calve again and it will be …
… OMG, the size of Manhattan …
We can always go back to this article next time and point out how unscientific the alarmists are. Start using this word, “unscientific” when the alarmists get going.
“…… too much was read into 2007………I would take some blame … Serreze said. “There were so many of us that were astounded by what happened, and maybe we read too much into it.”
..”read too much into it”?
What an innocent phrase to use, “read into”.
Translation: “Serreze and “so many” deceitful people seized the opportunity to deliberately and purposefully pump fallacious assertions into it.”
They knew what they were doing.
And academia is full of these people who feel their mission justifies any behavior.
gets the grant money in so why not ?
Explanation: The LENGTH of the glacier has increased but the DEPTH has decreased.
Incompetent scientists. First class liars.
When a word gets over used ,like, catastrophic.
Then it will end up like bugger. LOL.
But .. the colour of the water has changed from green in 2015 to blue in 2017. All the plankton has died!!! Quick – tell David Attenborough while there’s still time to include it in Blue Planet 2!
It is more likely to depend on the amount of whitish moraine material (rock flour) in the water. Those famous green lakes in the Canadian Rockies are due to glacier runoff.
So here we gave a major outlet glacier with a floating glacier tongue. This grows until tides and currents break it off, and then a new tounge builds up as the glacier keeps flowing.
Big surprise. And about as frightening as watching paint dry for those not belonging to the CAGW religion. .
“its exact coordinates actually can change since the ice sheet underneath is often on the move.”
Not often, always. A glacier is defined as:
“a slowly moving mass or river of ice formed by the accumulation and compaction of snow on mountains or near the poles”.
A glacier that stops moving is known as dead ice.
How many Manhattans has Petermann glacier grown?
And how many kitten sneezes of energy has been locked in it?
Note to myself: soap-water is insufficient for cleansing CACA metaphor soil fingers.