Long-time WUWT reader Dave Burton writes:
I’ve seen no official pronouncement from DMI, but here are their graphs for Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS) surface mass balance (SMB), for the 2016-2017 glaciological year (Sept. 1 – Aug. 31), and for the 2017-2018 glaciological year. That’s the ice sheet mass balance before accounting for ice lost through glacier calving & submarine melting. (The fonts look a bit oddly stretched, because the two original graphs on the DMI site are scaled differently, and I resized them with IrfanView so that the two graphs would be the same size.)
DMI’s report on the 2016-2017 glaciological year says that,
“Greenland on average loses around 500 Gt of ice each year from calving and submarine melt processes. If we subtract this from our figure of 544 Gt for the SMB it would suggest Greenland gained a small amount of ice this year.”
From eyeballing the graph, it appears that the GIS ended this glaciological year (2017 – 2018) with a SMB of about +520 Gt. Subtracting 500 Gt for iceberg calving and submarine melt suggests a very small gain of about +20 Gt of ice.
That’s completely negligible with regards to global sea-level, since it takes 362 Gt of meltwater to raise the oceans by 1 millimeter. But if it were a loss of 20 Gt I’ll bet the press would report it as “22 cubic km of ice,” or “more than five cubic miles of ice,” or perhaps, “more than 8400 times the volume of the Great Pyramid of Giza.”
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Life expectancy stopped growing in the UK after 2015.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-45638646
That’s bad – it’s still lower than in several countries.
One reason given was high numbers of flu and other winter deaths in the last three years.
It won’t be long before the MSM start blaming this on climate change.
Rising winter deaths. Hmm – I wonder what kind of climate change could be causing that?
After the much ballyhooed Greenland ice sheet surface melt event of 2012, a buddy of mine predicted that all the ice would disappear in five years. Last year I refrained from reminding him of that forecast.
I told him it would take tens of thousands of years for the GIS completely to melt at the dreaded two degrees C higher temperature than today’s.
The GIS probably didn’t completely disappear even during MIS 11 between 424,000 and 374,000 years ago, probably the longest interglacial and at least among the hottest.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318254204_MIS-11_duration_key_to_disappearance_of_the_Greenland_ice_sheet
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014AGUFMPP31F..05R
Opinions differ. My take is that the Southern Dome probably did melt during MIS 11, but much of the Northern Dome must have survived.
I should have said probably the longest since the mid-Pleistocene transition, which began about 1.25 Ma.
Actually interglacials were shorter before the mid-Pleistocene transition.
According to PBS Newshour, 90% of the Greenland ice mass already thawed in just one month.
http://archive.is/Orlhs#selection-1259.0-1259.125
Excerpt:
Dave,
The link to the alleged source in the article doesn’t work.
Hard for me to imagine what thawing of 90% the GIS’ mass in July could mean.
It could mean that of the total melting for the year 90% of it occurred in July.
Ceres,
Yes, that must be it, since it references the rate of thaw.
Thanks.
It is odd that the link didn’t work for you, John. It still works for me.
Anyhow, Google will find it for you; just search for the quoted text, like this.
What it means is that when PBS NewsHour needed to hire a “Reporter/Producer on Science and Climate Change,” they chose a young girl with a fresh BA degree in Film Studies, and an emphasis on Feminist Criticism. Her senior honors thesis at UNL was entitled, “Unzipping Gender: Gender Stereotypes, Identity, and Power.”
She’s probably the best PBS could do. They probably couldn’t find a science & climate change reporter/producer who knew any actual science, and yet was sufficiently worried about global warming to qualify for the position. And pretty enough.
Perhaps she doesn’t know what the word “mass” means, and doesn’t know how it is different from “surface area,” but inserted the word mass because it sounds “sciencey.” Or maybe she really thought that 90% of the ice mass had melted. Who knows?
If 90% of Greenland’s ice mass had actually melted, the oceans would have risen about 18 feet. The correct percentage was less than 0.01%. But the story is still on the PBS web site, 5½ years later, still uncorrected. Apparently none of their editors has ever realized there was anything wrong with it.
Here’s an excerpt from another PBS report, the same day, on the same subject:
Apparently, either Pretty Young Thing got her “90 percent” figure from that report, or they both got it from the same source.
Here’s a map, illustrating the “90 percent,” on the blog site of climate propagandist “Robert Scribbler” (a/k/a science fiction writer Robert Marston Fanney):
As you can see, the Greenland “melting” percentage was supposedly surface area. However, even that was grossly exaggerated. It was calculated by counting surface area “grid elements,” mapped by satellite, which were thought to contain some meltwater within the grid block: transient puddles, ponds, lakes, and streams of liquid water, on the ice sheet.
But that doesn’t mean that 90% of the area was actually covered with liquid water. Even in the dark red “melted” areas, most of the surface was still actually solid ice. You can see that in this photo of a particularly large lake on the ice sheet:
http://www.livescience.com/images/i/000/030/019/original/greenland-supraficial-lake.jpg
PBS subsequently reported that their Reporter/Producer on Science and Climate Change (a/k/a feminist film critic) is a “STEM Superstar.”
Brought to you by PBS — the same folks who assure us that “it’s okay to be smart.”
That is a quite beautiful piece of lying by what you don’t tell.
Normally melting of the icecap starts the last week in May and continues until late August. This year it didn’t start until almost midsummer and ended by mid-August. So, yes, 90% of the (small) melt was probably in July.
So how about “the fastest rate observed”? Well, not exactly a lie. If you look at the DMI chart you will notice that the melt for a single day in late July was actually the highest recorded for that particular date:
Studies of IRD (ice-rafted debris) off the East Coast strongly indicate that the northern and southern dome separated during MIS 11, but that the southern dome probably did not melt completely since some IRD from southernmost Greenland occurs throughout MIS 11, but not IRD from the “saddle area”:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature13456
The northern dome apparently has not melted for about 2.5 million years.
Must be due to all that liberal hot air adding weight to the ice.