Greenland Glaciers Melting Much Faster

grqb writes "NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says that satellite observations indicate that Greenland's glaciers have been dumping ice into the Atlantic Ocean at a rate that's doubled over the past five years. Greenland Ice Sheet's annual loss has risen from 21.6 cubic miles in 1996 to 36 cubic miles in 2005 and it now contributes about 0.5 millimeters out of 3 millimeters to global sea level increases. One theory as to why this is happening is that the meltwater, caused by increasing temperatures in Greenland, serves as a lubricant for the moving ice, hastening its push to the sea. Another study has estimated that the warming rate in Greenland was 2.2 times faster than the global norm -- which is in line with U.N. climate models."

Comments

NAO

[Anonymous Coward]

But during these past 5 years, the favored phase of the NAO has been negative, which is associated with ridging into Greenland (translating into warmer temperatures there) while Europe and the eastern United States is colder.

I just don't think it's a good idea to make climate extrapolations from five years of data over a small part of the globe. There's plenty of other evidence of global warming without this bullshit.

Re:NAO

[radtea]

There is no doubt we were about the enter another ice age.

This is a religious statement, not a scientific one. There is most certainly doubt as to where the climate is heading. Many global circulation models predict a hotter, drier climate in the next few hundred years. Some ice core data suggests that the interglacial climate is bimodal, with the second mode having an average global temperature 5 C or so warmer than the historical average, and we may be heading into a (possibly human-induced) mode change.

And given that the large (million-year) scale of climate change is extremly poorly understood, there is no reason to believe that the current interglacial is not the end of the ice-age that has dominated Earth's climate for the last million years or so. So there is doubt all round, and the only thing that is certain is that people who have no doubts about the correctness of their own position are contributing nothing but noise to a very complex debate.

There will be plenty of posts talking about...

[tempestdata]

1) The fact that we need to do something now to save the world before its too late!

To them I say.. its useless. Your puny little voices will not be heard. The only way to stop global warming were for the people of the world to collectively reduce their usage of energy and lower their standard of living. Its not happening. It simply is not going to happen.

2) The fact that it cannot be proven that it is human's causing this global warming, and that we know very little about the climate and have been measuring it for a very very short time.

To them I say.. Sure. Fine. But just remember that our great and global civilization wont be the first to have underestimated their effect on nature. History has shown that civilizations CAN affect the environment around them to the point that their civilization becomes unsustainable. Look up the end of the Mayan civilization. Actually even the Easter Islands belong to this category.

Bottom line. I dont think we are hurtling toward the point of no-return.. I believe we are PAST the point of no return.. at this point we might as well just try to find ourselves another planet, or work on technologies that make sure our civilization can survive the future.