Greenland Ice Sheet Not Covered In Soot

An anonymous reader writes with word of a a new study of the Greenland ice sheet led by Dartmouth adjunct assistant professor Chris Polashenski, which maintains that the darkening sensed there by satellites is not caused by dust and soot deposited by forest fires and industry, but rather by the slow degradation of the sensors on the satellites themselves. [Polashenski] and his colleagues analyzed dozens of snow-pit samples from the 2012-2014 snowfalls across northern Greenland and compared them with samples from earlier years. The results showed no significant change in the quantity of black carbon deposited for the past 60 years or the quantity and mineralogical makeup of dust compared to the last 12,000 years, meaning that deposition of these light absorbing impurities is not a primary cause of reflectivity reduction or surface melting in the dry snow zone. Algae growth, which darkens ice, also was ruled out as a factor. Instead, the findings suggest the apparent decline in the dry snow zone's reflectivity is being caused by uncorrected degradation of sensors in NASA's aging MODIS satellites and that the declining trend will likely disappear when new measurements are reprocessed.

Comments

Retractions from the pro-Global Warming crowd?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the most important parts of performing real science is the act of critically reviewing past results when new evidence comes to light or new observations are made, and admitting that earlier conclusions may have been completely wrong.

Now that there's evidence to suggest that at least some of their claims may be wrong, will we actually see those who support the notion of "global warming" (or "climate change" or whatever it is being called today) review their work, and admit that they were wrong if it turns out that they were? Will we see retractions and apologies from them?

Re:so this is how....

[Rei]

I don't get this. These conversations always summon these sorts of people:

"The sensors are wrong and the scientists aren't doing any sort of correction to remove bad data or adjust the data to cancel out the errors - GLOBAL WARMING IS A LIE" .... people who then in an unrelated article proceed to argue:

"The scientists are applying so-called "correction factors" to the data rather than using the raw data, so that they can make up whatever they want - GLOBAL WARMING IS A LIE!"

I wish they'd make up their minds.