From LiveScience
By Stephanie Pappas, Live Science Contributor | December 5, 2018 02:00pm ET
Each summer, large rivers emerge on the surface of Greenland, swiftly sending meltwater from the ice sheet into the sea.
Credit: Sarah Das/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Greenland is melting faster today than it has at any time in the last 350 years, and probably much longer, new research finds.
Surface melt from the icy island has increased 50 percent in the last 20 years compared with the early 1800s, before the industrial era, researchers report today (Dec. 5) in the journal Nature. The runoff alone is now contributing about a millimeter to the global average sea level per year, said study co-author Sarah Das, a glaciologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
“Climate change has hit Greenland very hard recently, and the ice sheet is responding quickly,” Das told Live Science. [Stunning Photos of Greenland’s Supraglacial Lakes]
Dire straits
Scientiststracking Greenland’s ice by satellite and on the ground have seenincreasingly dire ice loss. Greenland loses ice both when icebergs calve off glaciers and when ice on the surface melts and flows to the sea as water. The meltwater flow is how themajority of the ice vanishes, and that’s what Das and her colleagues focused on.
The researchers analyzed ice cores drilled from the high-elevation center of Greenland, where each year’s snowfall melts a little bit and refreezes before being covered by a new season’s worth of snow. This layered pattern allows researchers to estimate how much melt took place each year, going back about 350 years. The team was then able to use modern, precise measurements of melt and correlate those measurements with the pattern seen in the ice cores, which allowed them to estimate what melt at lower elevations across the island would have looked like in each year recorded in the high-elevation cores. [Images: Greenland’s Gorgeous Glaciers]
The numbers weren’t good. The last two decades of melt show an increase in the rate of melting of 250 percent to 575 percent compared with the preindustrial baseline from before the mid-1800s. The researchers found that the rate translated to a 50-percent increase in the runoff of meltwater into the sea compared with the preindustrial era. Over the 20th century alone, the runoff of meltwater increased 33 percent.
“We show that although melt started to increase around the pre- to post-industrial transition, it really stayed fairly low and stable until about the 1990s,” Das said. “So, it’s really been in the last couple of decades that we’ve seen this exceptional rise.”
Read the full story here.
HT/Clyde Spencer
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Here’s what I read:
“Dire Straits”
“dire ice loss”
The rest was just filler to support these emotional terms.
… klimate kool-aid alamism made with Greenland meltwater — yum !
“money for nothin’ and the checks for free ?”
How ironic, and stunning, that the Danish Meteorological Institute has just release a report to the effect that Greenland’s ice sheet contains the 6th highest amount of ice on record, some 150 billion tons above the average of the last 30-or-so years. Here I thought that the Danes would know something about that since they own the place, but if ” Nature ” says different, it must be so, right? Right.
I just did a quick smell test. Google says Greenland has a surface area of 836,300 sq-miles. If the island was circular shaped the radius would be 516 miles. An island with half this area has a radius of 364 miles. Picture 2 concentric circles with these radii. The difference between these 2 radii is 152 miles. If we are considering only ice loss from a warmer climate (not from basal melt and assuming sublimation is equal across the entire surface and wind born snow is negligible, and glacial calving will be accounted for in a below comment) all of each seasons new snow would have to melt completely in the outer ring while all of each seasons new snow in the inner ring would remain frozen for there to be no net difference.
As I understand it, the interior of this island never gets above freezing. The coastal capital city Nuuk has above freezing average temps for only 2 month per year. (That golf course sure looks sweet) So does that mean warmer ocean air reaches in toward the island center 152 miles each summer and melts all new snow? Pictures from Google Earth show a different story. Otherwise, surface snow and ice on the interior has to melt at temperatures below freezing!
The same is true for glacial calving. Is half each years accumulation equivalent ice mass discharged each year? I can’t see how. Is the total area of the island connected to a discharging glacier? Are there places where ice accumulates and does not flow down hill eventually to the ocean? There must be other larger forces like the earth melting the 3km thick ice from below. If there is a net loss, it must be a warmer earth below. Not a warmer climate above.
So although this was just a smell test, the odor of bs is strong. Or did I miss something obvious?
The press release claims that the “runoff alone is now contributing about a millimeter to the global average sea level per year”. Since the surface area of Greenland at 2.17E6 km^2 and the surface area of the oceans is 3.16E8 km^2, the average height of the Greenland ice sheet would need to be dropping by ~167 mm/year, or about 6.5 in / year, neglecting the difference in density between water and ice. This should be directly measurable. Is there any indication of this?
They could be right. Enough melt water could be flowing flowing into the ocean to raise SL 1 mm, if only the same amount of water equivalent didn’t also fall as snow in Greenland each year.
SR
Rate of sea level rise has not changed in over 150 years.
That assertion is pure made up BS.
I’m impressed thar this website still exists. The alarmist camp exerts such a power now that I often think that the site will be outlawed. We need more of them.
I have only one friend who doesn’t buy the alarmist stuff, and who doesn’t think I’m a ‘conspiracy nut’.
Even my wife actually told me she’s seriously worried about me. She says she would rather believe David Attenborough than me because he’s been in the business of Nature for so long.
My son doesn’t want to talk to me because of my beliefs about climate change ( which I have had since about 2005).
This site has excellent content. Truth does exist ! (Our post modernist world prefers opinion to fact.)
Sceptics can use this echo chamber all they want to deny glacier melt and SLR but the evidence is now unmistakeable. Get real! No-one is listening to or believes you except your very small community of fellow US sceptics.
http://mankindsdegradationofplanetearth.com/2018/12/07/climate-change-study-shows-off-the-charts-melting-of-greenlands-ice-sheet-cnn/
Ivan,
What SLR? You mean the one that started in 1900, and is not accelerating? If you look at any of NOAA’s long-term tide gauges you see no acceleration of sea level rise, which on average is about 3mm/year, which is the thickness of three pennies laid flat and isn’t alarming. There’s no acceleration of sea level rise since the earliest tidal records around 1900, and if sea level has been rising steadily through the mid-1940’s warm period in the US and the ensuing global cooling scare of the 1970s, then it seems that it’s just rising steadily regardless of minor temperature fluctuations.
The problem is one of causation. Why is sea level rising? If it’s because of CO2, then why has it been rising steadily even before the period when it’s agreed that CO2 effects would begin to be seen, which is around 1950? It makes more sense to say that sea level is rising in response to the general warming that followed the Little Ice Age, which ended in about 1850. What caused the LIA? Lack of CO2? I doubt it; it’s generally acknowledged that the Maunder Minimum of sunspots was responsible. What caused warming after the LIA? CO2 rising? I don’t think so, as it makes more sense to see this as a resumption of sunspot activity. In any case if we look around we can pretty much say that it wasn’t CO2.
The actual evidence is telling us that CO2 is having a very minor, even barely detectable, impact on the troposphere, and this is supposed to be where we’d be seeing the most impact according to the mainstream theory of CO2 warming. We must conclude, then, that the basic theory of CO2 warming, although internally consistent, does not correspond to our observations, and therefore the theory must be modified or even discarded.
A legitimate question to ask is, are we in an era of Oreskianism, wherein dissent outside the mainstream consensus isn’t tolerated? If your answer is no, then why do proponents of the mainstream view, such as Oreskes and Santer, argue against any audit of climate science, while at the same time arguing that climate science is transparent? Why is it that skeptics are barely heard in the mainstream media, and that if you try to argue in a supposedly rational forum like skeptical science or the Huffington Post, you’ll be shut down in a hurry? Why is it that in a recent opinion piece the economist Paul Krugman argued that skeptics were depraved? Why is it that we assume that good, honest scientists who agree with the consensus view that CO2 does have an effect, but that that effect is very minimal (and this is by far the most prominent skeptic view,) why do we assume that these scientists are paid off or anti-science? Why is it that we hear the debate is over when there are so many complexities to the climate and so many uncertainties, and yet everything is supposed to be irrefutable? Why is it that the general public does not know what all climate scientists know, and that is that the tropical troposphere isn’t warming nearly as much as models predicted, and that the predicted water vapor rise, which will amplify CO2 warming and is the real driver behind catastrophic warming, isn’t rising as predicted either? Why did the IPCC obfuscate this fact in a series of virtually unreadable graphs?
No, this scientific attitude has much in common with eugenics and with Lysenkoism. The entire basis for the perpetuation of the theory of catastrophic CO2 warming is to silence opposing views, either by calling them paid-off, anti-science, or mentally deranged, or else by doctoring the facts to ensure that they conform to the consensus view. The theory cannot survive without silencing opposition! It cannot survive without cherry-picking evidence, and then working to marginalize anyone who opposes what was done!
Most people have no idea what the skeptic position is; instead, they know what their reaction to skeptics must be: ignore them! Think about it. You are being conditioned to ignore any views that oppose the mainstream consensus. Is this open-minded scientific debate, is this open and transparent inquiry, is this an open debate in a democratic society, or is this a dangerous form of Lysenkoism? Why are consensus scientists so afraid of allowing dissenting voices, and why do they argue so strenuously against this? Why do they argue so strenuously against any scrutiny of the science and maintain that only consensus scientists can be the keepers of the transparency under which climate science supposedly operates?
This is not science. This is Lysenkoism. Some of us are tired of it.
Don132
I have no idea where you get your stats from but they are simply incorrect – 7cm in the last 25 years. You need to rely in valid sources: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2680/new-study-finds-sea-level-rise-accelerating/
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/
Check out long-term data for NYC, Honolulu, Newlyn, or any other place where you find longer-term data. Where do you find this supposed acceleration in the tidal data? I don’t see it. This is long-term data whereas satellite data only goes back to 1992.
Is NASA cherry-picking evidence to “prove” that CO2 warming must be happening? Is real data being subverted? Are we seeing Oreskianism at work? As a counter to NASA’s take on things, I invite you to read this http://file.scirp.org/pdf/IJG_2016112814065672.pdf and this http://21sci-tech.com/Articles_2011/Winter-2010/Morner.pdf.
In the second link, note the sentence: “We had to do so, otherwise there would not be any trend.” Note the context.
I do not ask you to believe me. I ask you to look at both sides of the story because there are ALWAYS at least two sides to the story, and Oreskianism, like Lysenkoism before it, wants to erase one side of the story so that you’ll believe in their theory, and more importantly, act upon it. I suggest that we give this theory careful scrutiny before we start acting on it, and doing so would be the proper application of the precautionary principle, which is so carelessly invoked these days. Yet careful scrutiny is exactly what the Oreskianists oppose, as they have stated clearly numerous times: transparency is only open to members of their club.
Don132
Eric van Damne, the meteorologist at CNN, does a great job at explaining climate change.
When it comes to the Greenland ice sheet melting this will contribute to SLR. If sea ice melts it does not contribute to SLR – just like ice cubes in your drink. However, if land ice melts this is a major contributor to SLR.
2 metre rise by the end of this century will affect our children. Big impact on coastal communitiies around the world – India, Bangladesh, China, Indonesia in particular.
Before we swallow the sea rise catastrophe narrative, we should weigh what those scientists say who disagree with the consensus, and decide who makes sense.
The scientists-priests should not simply be taken at their word, with the assumption that we mortals can’t understand. The truth is that if you can’t state your theory and your evidence clearly and distinctly so that any rational person can understand, then you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Once again, look at NOAA sea level records. Where exactly is this accelerating sea level? It simply isn’t there. This should be enough to make us stop and question why we’re being told that sea level rise is accelerating, and why this contradicts tidal records. No doubt some twisted reasons will be found for discarding one data set and going with the one that supports the consensus theory, but in that case I would ask: is this Lysenkoism at work, or are things are the level? Who can we trust and how do we figure this out? We can only do this is we get both sides of the story and let the evidence speak for itself, but this is exactly what we’re discouraged from doing by the “skeptics are just paid off” meme.
I say let’s hear both sides.
Don132
“2 metre rise by the end of this century will affect our children.”
How old are your children now? Because that is 81 years away. And humans are not living as long.
You think that the ocean is going to rise two meters…at best its about 11 inches a century. And that is backed by more science than I think you have read.
Its about an eight of an inch each year.
But since the start of the Solar Minima, that reversing, and will stop…and if this cold sun turns out to be a LIA, then a reversal will happen.
Where in hell, did you get 2 meters from?….that 0.972 inches a year?
We must be doomed.
“Greenland is melting faster today than it has at any time in the last 350 years, and probably much longer, new research finds.”
This is the funniest thing I have ever read…in ‘probably’ the last 350 years….ahahahahahahahahhahahahaha…BTW who named it Greenland…it was “probably, named before 350 years ago, much longer…maybe?
Nothing new with glaciers – but nonetheless fascinating :
https://youtu.be/MCH8Wyt2Ccc