The story is a bit less alarming than your overheated headline. They claim to have noticed that the total surface of the Greenland ice sheet that has melted increased from a normal 40% to 97% this summer. That does not mean that 97% of the ice covering Greenland has melted, just that 97% of the surface area has detected some melting (which normally freezes back fairly quickly given the thousands of feet of ice under the surface.
I am shitfitter; hear me roar.
It's all about the albedo feedback. Snow reflects visible light and is still black in infrared. The less snow there is, the more heat is absorbed, and the less snow there is. Especially if you're talking about less snow early in the summer. At the solstice, the Arctic gets more incident sunlight heat than the Sahara. Yeah, that's at top of the atmosphere and it's going to be a bit less at the surface, but not much.
The regions where warm Arctic water flows in don't reset over the winter any more, and open water in winter is starting to move east along the Russian coast.
The sea ice area never recovered from 2007, when there was a very rare event with a lot of heat flowing in from the Pacific. This shows that the system is pretty close to critically balanced. The ice volume is just getting smaller, which can be seen not only in the modeled volume but in the record area/extent ratio this year, which shows that the ice is more broken up than ever before and is a purely observational indicator of thinner ice.
Greenland is high enough that not much air flows over it, so it pretty much makes its own weather. And it's rapidly getting darker too, which probably has a lot to do with why there there were 5 days above freezing at Summit (usually coldest point in Greenland) this year, compared with 4 recorded before this year, with 1-2 more likely coming this weekend.
Or it might have something to do with persistent water temperatures in the 50s in much of Baffin Bay.
Move along, now. Nothing to see here. Ain't no such thing as global warming.
Those who say Global Warming is real don't act like it's real; they keep doing completely unnecessary things which are environmentally harmful, like this.
Second thought: what are gun control and healthcare laws in Norway ;-)
I HAD HAD SEX WITH HUNTER S THOMPSON. HE CAME IN MY MOUTH AND I SWALLOWED IT. I SHOULD HAVE HAD HIS BABY. WE WOULD BE BALLIN' LIKE KOBE'S SON!!
The abandonment of the now extinct "appearance of propriety" ideal, now mutating to the "fuck erring on the side of caution" ethic.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on his not understanding it" ~Sinclair
Koch funded study converts climate change skeptic
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on his not understanding it" ~Sinclair
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Re: Greenland Ice Sheet Melting
Mon Jul 30, 2012 at 06:41:13 PM EST
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Thank you Otto Maddox for posting the above article. I was just thinking of posting it but you had already done so. I was linked to it today by the LATimes which has been doing excellent reporting on environmental issues this past decade, as far as main stream media outlets are concerned
What frightens me the most is nobody gives a shit. A shitty death on a planet with maniacal assholes in charge seems to be alright. That is how jaded billions of people are.
Are our we really that naive? Earth's atmosphere has been portrayed to be extremely complex and beyond the comprehension of an average human for decades. We are finding out that the obviousness of our actions is really not too complex.
Demand accountability with politicians, industry and your current government. I've been asking them for decades now, "When are you going to get responsible for our planet"?
The free pass on the environment has to stop.
