By Paul Homewood
More alarmist Greenland nonsense, courtesy of the Guardian:
Last year’s summer was so warm that it helped trigger the loss of 600bn tons of ice fromGreenland – enough to raise global sea levels by 2.2mm in just two months, new research has found.
The analysis of satellite data has revealed the astounding loss of ice in just a few months of abnormally high temperatures around the northern pole. Last year was the hottest on record for the Arctic, with the annual minimum extent of sea ice in the region its second-loweston record.
Unlike the retreat of sea ice, the loss of land-based glaciers directly causes the seas to rise, imperilling coastal cities and towns around the world. Scientists have calculated that Greenland’s enormous ice sheet lost an average of 268bn tons of ice between 2002 and 2019 – less than half of what was shed last summer. By contrast, Los Angeles county, which has more than 10 million residents, consumes 1bn tons of water a year.
“We knew this past summer had been particularly warm in Greenland, melting every corner of the ice sheet, but the numbers are enormous,” said Isabella Velicogna, a professor of Earth system science at University of California Irvine and lead author of the new study, which drew upon measurements taken by Nasa’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) satellite mission and its upgraded successor, Grace Follow-On.
Glaciers are melting away around the world due to global heating caused by the human-induced climate crisis. Ice is reflective of sunlight so as it retreats the dark surfaces underneath absorb yet more heat, causing a further acceleration in melting.
Ice is being lost from Greenland seven times faster than it was in the 1990s, scientistsrevealed last year, pushing up previous estimates of global sea level rise and putting 400 million people at risk of flooding every year by the end of the century.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/mar/19/greenland-ice-melt-sea-level-rise-climate-crisis
It’s hard to know where to start with this drivel! Let’s start with the claim that 600bn tonnes of ice was lost last summer.
In reality, the Greenland ice sheet gains about 600bn tonnes of ice during winter in a typical year. This ice melts during summer, either directly on the ice sheet (as measured by the Surface Mass Balance – SMB- below) and or via glacier calving. [For those not familiar with the SMB, see my post here.]
http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/
It is true that the SMB lost around 200Gt more than average last year, though this was in part to a drier winter, with less snowfall. However, the SMB gained much more ice than usual in the two previous summers, which the study referred to by the Guardian describes as “cold”:
But it gets even worse!
According to NOAA’s Arctic Report card, also linked to by the Guardian, the ice loss from glaciers has virtually been at a standstill since 2012 (Fig C)
(c) Cumulative annual net glacier area change (km2) at seven major marine-terminating glacier outlets of the Greenland ice sheet from 1999/2000 to 2018/19
As a result, the total ice mass loss from Greenland’s ice sheet has slowed considerably in the last few years:
But what about these claims of Arctic heatwaves and “hottest on record”? So much hot air, I am afraid.
At Nuuk, for instance, in SW Greenland where most of the ice melt occurred, temperatures last summer were not exceptionally high. Indeed Nuuk was just as warm in 1888!
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/tmp/gistemp/STATIONS/tmp_GL000004250_15_0_1/station.txt
As for the Arctic as a whole, temperatures were close to average all summer:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
The Guardian gets over more hysterical, in a sign of its desperation:
Glaciers are melting away around the world due to global heating caused by the human-induced climate crisis. Ice is reflective of sunlight so as it retreats the dark surfaces underneath absorb yet more heat, causing a further acceleration in melting
If that was true, perhaps they would care to explain how Greenland could be as warm as now in the 1930s, without triggering further warming? Instead Greenland’s temperatures plummeted between the 1960s and 90s:
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/stdata_show_v4.cgi?id=GL000004250&ds=15&dt=1
