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Once-Shrinking Greenland Glacier Is Now Growing, NASA Study Shows (nbcnews.com)
kenh shares a report from NBC News: A major Greenland glacier that was one of the fastest shrinking ice and snow masses on Earth is growing again, a new NASA study finds. The Jakobshavn (YA-cob-shawv-en) glacier around 2012 was retreating about 1.8 miles (3 kilometers) and thinning nearly 130 feet (almost 40 meters) annually. But it started growing again at about the same rate in the past two years, according to a study in Monday's Nature Geoscience. Study authors and outside scientists think this is temporary.
A natural cyclical cooling of North Atlantic waters likely caused the glacier to reverse course, said study lead author Ala Khazendar, a NASA glaciologist on the Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) project. Khazendar and colleagues say this coincides with a flip of the North Atlantic Oscillation -- a natural and temporary cooling and warming of parts of the ocean that is like a distant cousin to El Nino in the Pacific. The water in Disko Bay, where Jakobshavn hits the ocean, is about 3.6 degrees cooler than a few years ago, study authors said. While this is "good news" on a temporary basis, this is bad news on the long term because it tells scientists that ocean temperature is a bigger player in glacier retreats and advances than previously thought, said NASA climate scientist Josh Willis, a study co-author. Over the decades the water has been and will be warming from man-made climate change, he said, noting that about 90 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases goes into the oceans.
A natural cyclical cooling of North Atlantic waters likely caused the glacier to reverse course, said study lead author Ala Khazendar, a NASA glaciologist on the Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) project. Khazendar and colleagues say this coincides with a flip of the North Atlantic Oscillation -- a natural and temporary cooling and warming of parts of the ocean that is like a distant cousin to El Nino in the Pacific. The water in Disko Bay, where Jakobshavn hits the ocean, is about 3.6 degrees cooler than a few years ago, study authors said. While this is "good news" on a temporary basis, this is bad news on the long term because it tells scientists that ocean temperature is a bigger player in glacier retreats and advances than previously thought, said NASA climate scientist Josh Willis, a study co-author. Over the decades the water has been and will be warming from man-made climate change, he said, noting that about 90 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases goes into the oceans.
For some evidence of global warming. It's been decades now, and everything they've shown us as evidence has turned out not to be the case.
I wonder if in fifty years they'll be going on about global warming, even when it still isn't happening?
Here you go: http://berkeleyearth.org/globa..., now rejoice in the fact that your life long quest is over. Perhaps you can spend the rest of your life waiting for Trickle-down economics to start working?
I call bullshit on your argument. That's the same logical fault that is used by the anti-vax movement: because there is one "scientist" that published a link between autism and vaccination, the science is not settled. Let's just ignore that this "scientist" had his paper and approbation revoked for gross misconduct.
The question of "Is the human burning of fossil fuels affecting the world climate?" is settled. There is a small number of nay-Sayers, many with political and financial reasons, but that's completely normal. The on-going debate is only about the precise impact. Much of the projections in research papers is by nature conservative. Not in the political sense, but in the sense of "let's assume the unknown factors compensate as much as reasonable possible for humanities impact". Of course, media likes to quote the most dramatic projection instead, so for the layman it might look like drawing doomsday scenarios. A 50 feet raise of the ocean level doesn't sound that extreme, e.g. if you compare with https://xkcd.com/1225/ Not a scientific source and there is a ~10% difference in density between ice and water, but good enough.
Some of the big open questions are "Where is all the extra energy going that we do not see?" and "How does the raising ocean temperature affect the ocean and air circulation streams?". The former is difficult to answer because temperature monitoring for the world oceans is spotty at best. It's also an insanely large reservoir of storage capacity for heat, so small temperature changes reflect vast amounts of energy. The latter question is difficult to answer because there are a lot of small scale and large scale interactions all getting mixed up.
But with all those open questions, the data base is getting better every day and the quality of the models used is improving constantly as well. So far, the actual data has pretty consistently out-paced the conservative predictions for the temperature raise. That should be deeply troubling to everyone...