Greenland ice may be more robust to climate change than feared

Written by Alister Doyle, Times Colonist.

A helicopter is taking off Greenland Ice Sheet

A helicopter is taking off Greenland Ice Sheet (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Greenland’s ice seems less vulnerable than feared to a runaway melt that would drive up world sea levels, according to a study showing that a surge of ice loss had petered out.

“It is too early to proclaim the ‘ice sheet’s future doom’” caused by climate change, lead author Kurt Kjaer of the University of Copenhagen wrote in a statement of the findings in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

An examination of old photos taken from planes revealed a sharp thinning of glaciers in north-west Greenland from 1985 to 1993, the experts in Denmark, Britain and the Netherlands wrote. Another pulse of ice loss in the area lasted from 2005 to 2010.

The discovery of fluctuations casts doubt on projections that Greenland could be headed for an unstoppable meltdown, triggered by manmade global warming. Greenland contains enough ice to raise sea levels by 7 metres (23 ft) if it all thawed.

“It starts and then it stops,” Kjaer told Reuters of the ice losses. “This is a break from thinking that it is something that starts, accelerates and will consume Greenland all at once.”

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Comments  

 
Mark
# Mark 08-03-2012 08:44
Quote:
NASA said last month that almost the entire surface of Greenland had been thawing in a rare warm spell that it said might happen only once every 150 years.
A Danish-led team of scientists also published data in May indicating that ice in the south-east of Greenland had shrunk in a previous warming period in the 1930s.

Now who should I believe! Easy the Danes of course ;-)
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Gator
# Gator 08-03-2012 09:31
Hey Mark! If anyone is going to watch sea level carefully, it would be the Danes. They are too wealthy to pull a scam like those greedy, beady eyed rent seeking islanders, who cannot sink their islands fast enough!
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Tez
# Tez 08-04-2012 02:32
It must be that goddamn natural variation that nobody is supposed to know about.

The IPPC dont recognise natural variation. Here is their mission statment:

"The role of the IPCC is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change"

No wonder drewski is so confused. :-x
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