By P Gosselin
The media and activists, among them a number of “Climate scientists”, have been declaring that Greenland ice melt has been accelerating.
Today the German Klimaschau climate news video reports, however, that this has not been the case over the recent years. All the recent talk about accelerating Greenland ice loss over the past years is false.
SMB on the rise
First a plot of Greenland’s surface mass balance SMB (blue curve below) shows that snow accumulation has occurred faster than snow and ice have melted over the past 35 years:
Chart: cropped from Klimaschau here.
Though the annual SMB values declined from 1985 to 2012, the trend has rebounded since.
Loss through coastal discharge steady over the past 15 years
Another factor that plays a role in Greenland’s total ice mass is the amount of ice at the coast that breaks off into the ocean (green curve = Discharge). This factor ultimately decides whether Greenland’s total ice mass is growing or shrinking. Currently at the coasts Greenland is losing close to 500 gigatons annually.
But the coastal ice discharge over the past 15 years has been stable.
Strong deceleration in total mass balance (TMB)
Next we consider both the SMB and the Discharge together. Here we see that Greenland’s total mass balance TMB (red curve) is negative, meaning a net ice loss in total, but has been decelerating since 2012.
In 2017, total ice mass in fact gained a bit.
If we use a 10-year smoothing, we get the following:
Chart: cropped from Klimaschau here.
Clearly Greenland is not melting faster and faster like the media bedwetters like to have their audiences believe. Ice lost has been slowing down substantially for about a decade now.
Greenland cooling since 2005
One reason for this unexpected trend is likely cooling taking hold, as data from 5 stations show cooling since 2005, according to Kobashi et al 2017:
Obviously the opposite of what the media and alarmists are claiming is in fact happening in Greenland. Where will the climate ambulance chasers go next?
