Climate crisis — not
Reposted from Electroverse
Chilled-out Greenland polar bear. A good, cold summer and the best fur coat money can buy.
It’s mid-summer over there, but yesterday’s deluge more than doubles the previous August record.
The Greenland ice sheet has never increased as much as 4 gigatons during summer, according to DMI (Danish Meteorological Institute) records that go back to 1981.
Of course, we don’t know what happened in the thousands and millions of years before 1981, but the records show that yesterday’s 4 Gt increase smashed the modern mid-August record by over two gigatons.
It’s strange that we don’t hear about this from the mainstream media. Nor about Tasmania’s record cold a few days ago.
Although the relentless loss of polar ice is constantly in the media, Greenland’s ice is here to stay.
Although a wild, relentless climate change is rammed home by the media, the weather naturally varies. Catastrophic climate change may be talked about, but it isn’t real.
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Re: Greenland gained 4 gigatons of snow & ice yesterday:
The author confuses precipitation with temperature. Water vapour increases with temperature and at -20C, snow-fall is almost impossible. Extreme precipitation events in Greenland are more likely in a warming climate. You should exercise more skepticism when visiting the wackier parts of the internet.
If you’re saying Greenland did not gain 4 Gt, please give your source and if you’re saying Greenland has been warming, produce a Greenland temperature graph. Water vapour MAY increase with warming though warming is not necessary for an increase. “at -20C, snow-fall is almost impossible” No, it isn’t. Please give a reference.
I should have noticed that you left this comment under the wrong post. Silly me. I have software that should allow me to move it (and my reply) but it doesn’t always work, so don’t hold your breath. – RT
You still have comments closed on the Greenland article. The glaciers are melting because Greenland is warming. This paper released last week in is highly topical.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-020-0001-2
The Greenland Ice Sheet is losing mass at accelerated rates in the 21st century, making it the largest single contributor to rising sea levels. Faster flow of outlet glaciers has substantially contributed to this loss, with the cause of speedup, and potential for future change, uncertain. Here we combine more than three decades of remotely sensed observational products of outlet glacier velocity, elevation, and front position changes over the full ice sheet. We compare decadal variability in discharge and calving front position and find that increased glacier discharge was due almost entirely to the retreat of glacier fronts, rather than inland ice sheet processes, with a remarkably consistent speedup of 4–5% per km of retreat across the ice sheet. We show that widespread retreat between 2000 and 2005 resulted in a step-increase in discharge and a switch to a new dynamic state of sustained mass loss that would persist even under a decline in surface melt.
Simon,
Greenland didn’t gain a record amount of mass because glaciers are melting. Global temperature is at a virtual standstill, so it’s probably nothing to do with DAGW. The cause of the acceleration in melting is unknown. What is your point?
Simon,
I skimmed through the paper. It has no graph of Greenland temperatures. Here is the record for Nuuk, in the south (second from the top). Not much warming is evident. Click to enlarge.
From the paper to which Simon linked us above:
“Following the step-increase in discharge, GrIS-wide totals have remained relatively stable at rates near 495–500 Gt yr⁻¹,…”
Wow! Greenland is losing ice at the rate of 495-500 gigatonnes (i.e. billion tonnes) per year! That’s really an awful lot of ice. We’re all gonna diieeeeeee!!!!!!
Aren’t we?
Well, yes, of course we are – eventually, in due course, when our time is up. But, just as a fun mathematical exercise, I decided to calculate how long it would take for the Greenland Ice Sheet to disappear completely if it continued to lose ice at the constant rate of 500 Gt/yr. It was a simple calculation: I just had divide the mass of the Greenland Ice Sheet (it’s about 2.85 million Gt, in case you were wondering) by 500 and the answer came out to 5,700 years.
After breathing a sigh of relief and wonder at that result, I went on to calculate the fraction of the Ice Sheet that would disappear by the year 2100 if it continued to lose ice at the same rate. Answer: somewhat less than one 70th, or 1.4%.
Now that I had got the wind in my sails, I decided to calculate the amount of sea-level rise to be expected by 2100AD from a total ice-melt of 1.4% of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Answer: about 11 cm, or almost 4½ inches.
Tell me again, climate alarmists, why we should all be frantically worried about the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet.
Yeah, good on you, Rick, and well said. I’ve been publishing these calculations sporadically. It’s pathetic that scientists still come up with these statements lacking all sense of proportion or context solely to mislead the reader. So after 5700 years, we can look forward (though our descendants are scarcely likely to have heard of the prediction!) to maybe four inches of sea level rise. Hah!
Thanks, Richard. I hadn’t realised that you’d already published these calculations. I only came across this site at the beginning of the year and I’m still discovering the many valuable works that it contains.
I suspect, though, that the slow rate of ice-loss is the least of the alarmists’ problems where the Greenland Ice Sheet is concerned. I think an even more challenging one (from their point of view) is the Viking settlements on Greenland during the Medieval Warming Period, which demonstrate that Greenland must have been even warmer then than it is now, in spite of the fact that the MWP occurred centuries before industrial society was born and therefore could not have been caused by society’s ‘carbon emissions’.
No wonder alarmist ‘climate scientists’ wanted to get rid of the Medieval Warming Period!
Except, we know that ice loss and sea level rise is non-linear. Continued acceleration is possible, I would argue likely. Therefore, a straight-line approximation is misleading.
Simon,
This sounds like your usual tactics of distraction. Before evidencing the dangerous warming humanity stands accused of, you want to bicker over thousands of years of melting ice it will cause. Cart before horse, old son. Also, whatever the period, it’s still only four inches of sea level rise. But, provide evidence of something to support that notion and I’ll listen. How do “we know that ice loss and sea level rise are non-linear”? Why might continued acceleration be likely?
“Except, we know that ice loss and sea level rise is non-linear.”
They may be, Simon, but the average rates of ice loss and sea level rise will automatically be constant (hence, linear) over any defined period of interest. It was the current average rate of ice loss (according to the paper which you cited) which I extended indefinitely into the future to make my calculations.
“Continued acceleration is possible,…”
Indeed it is. But that tells us nothing we don’t already know. What we need to know is whether the ice loss is actually going to accelerate or decelerate, at what rate and for how long in either case. Can you tell us these things?
“…I would argue likely.”
Then where is your argument? We cannot follow it if you do not show it to us.
“Therefore, a straight-line approximation is misleading.”
I don’t think it is. It tells us what we can expect to happen at specific times in the future if the average rate of ice loss remains unchanged. That is truthful information (assuming I’ve done the calculations correctly), not misinformation or disinformation. No-one is suggesting that the average rate of ice loss actually will remain unchanged in future. We’ll have to keep monitoring the situation and see how it actually develops. If and when a significant acceleration or deceleration in the rate of ice loss has been observed, we’ll be able to revise our calculations and our expectations accordingly.
In the meanwhile though, we appear to have no objective reason to believe that a dangerous acceleration is going to occur at any particular time, so there’s presently no cause for alarm about it. Anyway, to the best of my current knowledge, the complete meltdown of the Greenland ice sheet is going to take thousands of years, if it happens at all, and there’s no urgent threat from it for anyone to worry about. Unless they want to worry about it, of course. But I think that would be for their own subjective reasons peculiar to them, not for objective scientific ones.
Well, you can’t quickly read over 1200 posts, but I hope you keep finding good ones. I’ve just had a response from Simon, but before I publish it I want to try graphing two routes to a complete meltdown: linear and some kind of exponential loss, since he seems to argue the loss won’t be linear, and fair enough — what do we know?
So I’ll come back to this, but I’m busy right now on other work.