How Inconvenient,,,,,,,,,

[Tigermike 4,305]

How Inconvenient - the debate is not over,,,,,,,,,,

For some reason, the MSM hasn’t managed to pick up on this story

FALL MEETING OF THE AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION:

Galloping Glaciers of Greenland Have Reined Themselves In

Richard A. Kerr

Ice loss in Greenland has had some climatologists speculating that global warming might have brought on a scary new regime of wildly heightened ice loss and an ever-faster rise in sea level. But glaciologists reported at the American Geophysical Union meeting that Greenland ice's Armageddon has come to an end.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/323/5913/458a

January 23 2009

In this week's Science magazine, science writer Richard Kerr reports on some

of the goings-on at this past December's annual meeting of the American

Geophysical Union.

While he didn't cover our presentation at the meeting in which we described

our efforts at creating a reconstruction of ice melt across Greenland dating

back into the late 1700s (we found that the greatest period of ice melt

occurred in the decades around the 1930s), Kerr did cover some other recent

findings concerning the workings of Greenland's cryosphere in his article

titled "Galloping Glaciers of Greenland Have Reined Themselves In."

Here is how Kerr starts things off:

Things were looking bad around southeast Greenland a few years ago. There,

the streams of ice flowing from the great ice sheet into the sea had begun

speeding up in the late 1990s. Then, two of the biggest Greenland outlet

glaciers really took off, and losses from the ice to the sea eventually

doubled. Some climatologists speculated that global warming might have

pushed Greenland past a tipping point into a scary new regime of wildly

heightened ice loss and an ever-faster rise in sea level.

And some non-climatologists speculated disaster from rapidly rising seas as

well.

During his An Inconvenient Truth tour, Gore was fond of spinning the

following tale:

[E]arlier this year [2006], yet another team of scientists reported that the

previous twelve months saw 32 glacial earthquakes on Greenland between 4.6

and 5.1 on the Richter scale - a disturbing sign that a massive

destabilization may now be underway deep within the second largest

accumulation of ice on the planet, enough ice to raise sea level 20 feet

worldwide if it broke up and slipped into the sea. Each passing day brings

yet more evidence that we are now facing a planetary emergency - a climate

crisis that demands immediate action to sharply reduce carbon dioxide

emissions worldwide in order to turn down the earth's thermostat and avert

catastrophe.

Oh how things have changed in the past 2 years.

For one, the "team of scientists" that reported on the Greenland earthquakes

now think that the earthquakes were the result of processes involved with

glacial calving, rather than something "underway deep within the second

largest accumulation of ice on the planet" (Nettles et al., 2008).

For another, Gore's "massive destabilization" mechanism for which the

earthquakes were a supposed bellwether (meltwater lubrication of the flow

channel) has been shown to be ineffective at producing long-term changes in

glacier flow rate (e.g. (Joughin et al., 2008; van de Wal et al., 2008).

And for still another, the recent speed-up of Greenland's glaciers has even

more recently slowed down.

Here is how Kerr describes the situation:

So much for Greenland ice's Armageddon. "It has come to an end,"

glaciologist Tavi Murray of Swansea University in the United Kingdom said

during a session at the meeting. "There seems to have been a synchronous

switch-off" of the speed-up, she said. Nearly everywhere around southeast

Greenland, outlet glacier flows have returned to the levels of 2000. An

increasingly warmer climate will no doubt eat away at the Greenland ice

sheet for centuries, glaciologists say, but no one should be extrapolating

the ice's recent wild behavior into the future.

The last point is driven home by new results published last week (and

described in our last WCR and in our piece over at MasterResource) by

researchers Faezeh Nick and colleagues. They modeled the flow of one of

Greenland's largest glaciers and determined that while glaciers were quite

sensitive to changing conditions at their calving terminus, that they

responded rather quickly to them and the increase in flow rate was rather

short lived. Nick et al. included these words of warning: "Our results imply

that the recent rates of mass loss in Greenland's outlet glaciers are

transient and should not be extrapolated into the future."

All told, it is looking more like the IPCC's estimates of a few inches of

sea level rise from Greenland during the 21st century aren't going to be

that far off-despite loud protestations to the contrary from high profile

alarm pullers.

Maybe Gore will go back and remove the 12 pages worth of picture and maps

from his book showing what high profile places of the world will look like

with a 20-foot sea level rise ("The site of the World Trade Center Memorial

would be underwater"). But then again, probably not-after all the point is

not to be truthful in the sense of reflecting a likely possibility, but to

scare you into a particular course of action.

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Here is their entire statement http://climatebet.files.wordpress.com/2009...nhofe-epa16.pdf]PDF[/url]

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