Guest essay by Larry Hamlin
The Orange County Register ran an article Sunday August 8, 2021 addressing the issue of glacial melt particularly regarding the situation in Greenland and tried to connect this information to the “code red for humanity” hyped in the latest UN IPCC AR6 climate report with the Register article shown below.
The article has a general discussion of various Greenland glacial ice issues including faster glacial flow, side wall friction declines and increased melting as noted below.
The article closed by noting that scientists say that if all the Greenland ice melted that ocean sea levels would rise by 20 feet and then mentioned various ways glacier flow is measured as shown below.
What the article completely failed to address was any clearly pertinent information actually discussing the degree of Greenland ice melt that has occurred during the past several decades and more significantly any information regarding the extent of Greenland temperature changes that have occurred over the past thousands of years showing that natural climate change has had dramatic impacts in increasing Greenland’s past temperatures absent any UN IPCC “code red” man-made CO2 emissions hype with paleoclimate data regarding Greenland significantly increased past temperatures over the last 4,000 years shown below.
The settlement of Vikings in Greenland over a thousand years ago are also well documented but unaddressed in the Register article.
“The Norse arrived in Greenland 1,000 years ago and became very well established,” said Schweger, describing the Viking farms and settlements that crowded the southeast and southwest coasts of Greenland for almost 400 years.”
The Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) provides detailed Greenland glacier ice mass balance data going back to at least 1986 through 2020 covering some 35 years of actually measured data with this information readily available in its reports as noted below from the report covering year 2020 outcomes.
This report summarizes the year 2020 outcomes for Greenland ice melt as shown below.
Additionally, the report provides Greenland ice mass balance outcomes over the past 35 years as provided in the reports graph shown below.
The DMI determined average Greenland ice mass balance loss over the period 1986 through year 2020 is about 133 billion tons per year which represents about 0.005% of Greenland’s total ice mass which means that at this rate of loss Greenland will lose about 1% of its total ice mass within about 200 years resulting in an increased ocean level of about 2.4 inches.
The ice mass balance loss of year 2020 was exceeded by 14 earlier years with the largest measured ice mass balance loss being 2.7 times greater than year 2020 in the year 2012.
The Register article is highly misleading and tries to make in a very clumsy way a connection between recent Greenland ice mass loss and the UN IPCC AR6 “code red” hyped climate alarmist report with this AR6 report built upon use of flawed and failed “computer models”.
Arctic ice levels above last 6 years and the melt seems to have ended early; Greenland melt season short and over; Antarctic ice above prior season levels; 80N temperatures at the averages with no apparent warming; record cold in South Africa; freezes in South America resulting in lost crops and the source of most of the heat (tropical Pacific) is neutral forecast to go colder. Let’s see where we are this time next year.
The Times:
Melting ice fuels Vladimir Putin’s dream of Arctic trade route (dominance)
Russia is building new icebreakers to keep the Northern Sea Route open all year round.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/melting-ice-fuels-vladimir-putins-dream-of-arctic-trade-route-z8k885qs2
Why Russia would be interested in stopping global warming when Siberia could have more attractive climate all year round.
Perhaps because this year Siberia is seeing huge fires, melting permafrost is causing issues for settlements and there have again been record temperatures along the N Siberian coast.
climate change does not just make it a few degrees warmer evenly through the year.
the icebreakers are only viable because the ice is thinner and melts earlier…
Nah.
We should encourage them to send more scientists to study melting Greenland in December.
They also special request that mikey manniacal join them.
Extent is high – because of a very high degree of dispersion.
The state of the ice is not good.
You’re not giving us much to go on, Griff. You seem to be making an unsubstantiated assertion.
Got a link?
When someone only uses a small portion of the available records, one should immediately become very suspicious of what they are claiming to demonstrate.
I check the close button when I read “What you should know ….”. I go to fact checkers so it’s clear to me what’s not true. They’re starting to lie even harder now, and I bet they haven’t even looked at the Arctic sea ice extent (and the Antarctic). Are there any further levels of lying that we will have to, or not have to endure? I can’t think of any, but I never underestimate the libtard puppeteers.
It always takes lots of fossil fuels to study glaciers, cars, ships, helicopters, snow mobiles, jets, but they are to be excused there, they are helpless victems of the system, but they are fighting for The Cause, to soak the rich and to elevate themselves. you know the shtick, the hockey shtick!
It is easy to find articles about the Vikings farming on Greenland. They produced barley, which they used for beer and bread, and did so for several decades, until disappearing in 1408. Today there is limited potatoes and strawberries produced, which no self-respecting Viking would eat. Medieval Warm Period, anyone?
During the warmest times the Greenland Vikings herded over 100,000 goats and sheep and several thousand cows. We couldn’t do it now because such herds need water, not ice, during the winter.
it was very stupid of Alarmists to attempt to “erase the Medieval Warm Period.” What good came of denying the truth?
The Orange County Register article fails to observe that, as noted by Hamlin, “about 133 billion tons per year which represents about 0.005% of Greenland’s total ice mass which means that at this rate of loss Greenland will lose about 1% of its total ice mass within about 200 years …” Which means, it will take about 20,000 years for that 20 foot rise to be achieved. In 20,000 years we may well be in the throes of another major glaciation! It may not matter if humans, as we know them, no longer exist, or if we solve controlled nuclear fusion long before then. For perspective, it is generally accepted that civilization started about 10,000 years ago. Consider how much technology has advanced in the couple of hundred years that the Scientific Method has been adopted.
Clyde, especially within the climate science community, is the Scientific Method observed frequently enough to keep the technology ball rolling?
There are some disciplines, such as research in materials science, that seem to be making great strides. It is probably because the criteria for new materials is simple: does it do what is needed?
After awhile, it will become evident to all that the claims made by climastrologists aren’t happening. They will lose credibility, while the rest of science continues its advances.
Whenever I see the headline that begins with “what you should know” or “everything you need to know” I automatically assume it is written by someone who, with very little practical knowledge of the subject” is simply regurgitating what has been fed to them by other media sources. Usually they fail to acknowledge their sources and just assume that their interpretations are the right ones. Come to think of it, that is a pretty good definition of B.S..
…but, but, but… the penguins!
Exactly! If nothing is done there will be no living penguins in the arctic!
And for that matter, the Antarctic polar bear population is at equally great risk.
Hey, exactly, what about the Penguins?. I have been up there looking out for them for years and have yet to spot a single one. That is proof positive climate change has destroyed the Greenland Penguin population., What else could it possibly be?
Difficult.
The polar bears certainly couldn’t have eaten the penguins because they can’t get the wrappers off
Yes Rod,
According to an article in the UK i newspaper 6th August 2021
“A study shows that, due to rising Arctic temperatures, emperor penguins will be on the irreversible road to extinction by 2050”
Written by Imogen West-Knights.
A while back the i was also telling people that the Arctic was a continent.
You have to believe everything you read in the papers don’t you?
There were some wild excursions in Greenland’s SMB this summer (both positive and negative), but overall so far this year it’s pretty close to the 30-year mean.
Can’t wait for someone to chime in with NSIDC graphs that show melt extent is anomalously high. I can’t find that metric defined anywhere, but I suspect it just means the area subject to melting on a daily basis. I can’t fathom why that by itself would be useful, except for making it look like they’re doing something useful.
I seem to recall during a recent election that one candidate was standing near a Greenland glacier. While it was gushing a large amount of water, the person was decrying global warming and using the glacial outflow as proof. Never mind it was summer there and the glacier was doing what comes naturally during a warm summer. Oh the horror!
The alarmists use all sorts of little tricks like that to try to fool the people.
That’s where WUWT comes in handy, where those kinds of falsehoods and distortions can be exposed for what they are.
Well, I learned several things here:
1 – Glaciers have snouts. I did not know that, but now I do. A colorful way to describe a part of a glacier.
2 – Normal ice movements (glaciers slide away from their points of origin) upsets people who think that glaciers are static, when they aren’t. They are also very noisy at times. They seem to sound like grumpy old men hanging out at a local pub.
3 – Newspaper people in LaLaLand on the West Coast live in some sort of bubble, which seems to make them think that everything about the real world is static – never changes, which is not true. Change scares those people.
Sad.
It’s not necessarily a slide. Glaciers flow. The ice deforms plastically due to mass and gravity.
Yes, I forgot that. Thanks for the reminder.
I also left out the friction that produces a watery “gliding” surface for the glacier to move.
That’s why glaciers have so many crevasses… That plastic ice cracks as it descends…
/S
Usually near the coasts, and the crevasses typically only extend to a depth of about 50 meters, which is where the ice starts to behave plastically instead of brittley.
“Change scares those people.”
No doubt as a result of trauma while being changed as an infant.
Yes, that’s because the parents don’t ask permission each time they touch the child, causing irreparable trust issues, a lifetime of whining, championing idiotic issues and a tendency to use bright colours to dye their hair.
Everything but the social sciences (read non-science or nonsense) are static to them. As for social everyone lives under a living document humanity constitution founded in Post Modernism and changes happen rapidly. Today you might be female and decide based upon preaching from your 5 grade teacher that you are male and voila! You went from she to he to them. Its better than science its magical.
LA Times has an article today on how California is getting serious about protecting its’ coast from rising sea level and threw out scaremongering forecasts of $Billions it will cost if we don’t do something now. Used the normal scare tactic of conflating erosion with sea level rise including pictures along with AGW. As usual, no facts, just opinion based on their consensus. This is supposedly the new tactic California will use to justify the power outages, loss of industry, and inflated living costs.
Larry: you wrote:
““The Norse arrived in Greenland 1,000 years ago and became very well established,” said Schweger,”
Who is Schweger? I can’t find that name in your text or the quoted article.
Also, as a general point, it’s sometimes a bit difficult to see which words are yours and which are part of the article you are quoting. Since all the quotes are images, maybe put a border round each image?
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Years ago, I watched a video on youtube – it was a National Geographic or some such – which described the archeological excavation of what might have been the last Norse family in Greenland. They had eaten their cow, they had eaten a baby calf, and they had eaten their dog (as determined by knife marks on the bones). It was a very sad story. It was conjectured that they couldn’t get their boat to sea because there was permanent shore ice. I suspect they moved in with the Inuit, who have traditionally welcomed fresh genes.
If anyone has a link to that video, I wouldn’t mind watching it again and storing it, to show alarmists what kind of climate they are hoping for if we abandon fossil fuels.
Not as bad as the Donner Party!
Except, unstated by the OC Register is that they used a delusional three thousands year of melting Greenland to achieve their 20 feet SLR rise.
Note that their “Team of scientists” spent a lot of time studying floating glacier ice. Also known as Sea Ice.
Sea ice and “floating glacial ice” are two separate things. Sea ice grows and shrinks annually but doesn’t alter sea levels (contrary to what Al Gore believed).
If it’s floating the ice isn’t grounded.
Water beneath glaciers is normal as the ice melts during summers, but that water flows out from the glacier.
Lakes below glaciers do not mean the glacier is floating as most of the glacier is grounded on all sides of the lake.
Calling the tip of the glacier a “snout” implies they are studying the front part of the glacier as it becomes sea ice.
That is, once the glacier floats where it meets the sea, the glacier is no longer technically a glacier it is sea ice and unable to cause sea level rise.
The article misstates so much that it is a shoddy alarmist article solely meant to misinform.
Not all glaciers push their toe out into the sea where they can break up into ice bergs (calving), but when they do, their displacement has already caused as much SLR as it ever will. Sea ice is formed each year from the sea itself, so melting is not an issue with SLG … which is why they needed to include Polar Bear endangerment. My point was, glacial ice and sea ice are two very different things. Glacial ice doesn’t even need to melt to cause SLR.
Australia’s ABC had breathless reports of the horror of rain on Greenland ice summit this year – reports advised it is the first time EVAH.
Also learnt today that Europe has been 2C warmer than average through July. Is that bad or good. Whatever it is I am looking forward to some of it in southern Australia.
The Guardian ran an item about the rainfall on Greenland by Damian Carrington which, true to form, was full of dire predictions about sea level rise if all Greenland’s ice melted. He did note however that
“Scientists at the US National Science Foundations summit station saw the rain on the 14th August but had no guages to measure it because it was so unexpected” somehow though he then goes on to say “Across Greenland an estimated 7bn tonnes of water was released from the clouds.”
Guardian 21st August 2021
Jeff’s credentials don’t lead to having confidence in his claims
Credentials bear no relationship to claims. Here’s what Richard Feynman said about science …
“First you guess. Don’t laugh, this is the most important step. Then you compute the consequences. Compare the consequences to experience. If it disagrees with experience, the guess is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your guess is or how smart you are or what your name is. If it disagrees with experience, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”
Many folks, like Mike Mann, have lots of alphabet soup after their names, but don’t have the common sense necessary to be right most of the time. If they can’t buck the claims, they have to go after the messenger’s credentials to change the subject that they can’t argue.
Complaining about someone’s ‘credentials’ is really an ad hominem attack.
There is no doubt that natural climate change has had dramatic impacts in increasing Greenland’s past temperatures absent any UN IPCC “code red” man-made CO2 emissions
There’s also no doubt that CO2 emissions are now also having dramatic and increasing impacts.
And it is clear that mass loss will accelerate in the (near) future – we have seen this year one of the highest one day melt events and rain and high temperatures recorded for the first time at the summit of the ice cap.
There’s plenty of doubt, you just refuse to acknowledge it.
Since there is no mass ice loss you are simply spewing lies as you always do, lie spewing liar.
Griff there is no doubt that you have your head deeply buried up you @rse.
Chronic cephalo-rectal insertion resulting in brain cells dying from oxygen deprivation.
There you go again with your unsupported assertions that demonstrate your religious beliefs.
I don’t know why you would look at some Orange County paper…
Accurate and independent information on Greenland is available here:
Greenland Ice Sheet Today | Surface Melt Data presented by NSIDC
The stupid really hurts some days….
So, you admit there is no ice melt problem in Greenland. That is what the link you posted states. Did you even bother to go to NSIDC and read what they said? No, you just tried to used a link to spread the same lies you always spew, lie spewing liar.
Because ordinary people read the Orange County and other papers and are fed a constant stream of rubbish by all the media on the subject of climate change. My pile of cuttings has increased exponentially as we run up to COP 26.
Because the reporters and editors are willing to put their names on the articles, unlike you. They also will publish well-written rebuttals.
Now, why would anyone take you seriously?
There is nothing unusual happening in Greenland and so they lie.
So the same idiots who tell us math is racist are claiming humans are destroying the climate. Sure. Whatever.