Greenland’s Glaciers Expanding Again
By Paul Homewood
Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Mass Balance 2017/18
http://www.dmi.dk/en/groenland/maalinger/greenland-ice-sheet-surface-mass-budget/#
As I reported last September, Greenland’s ice sheet mass balance had grown at close to record levels for the second year running.
To clarify again, the mass balance calculation accounts for:
1) Snowfall
2) Ice melt
3) Ablation
In other words, it does not include calving.
DMI’s Polar Portal has now published its report for the year. This is the summary:
Whilst NW Europe was enjoying a hot summer, Greenland’s was pretty miserable. This dipole is well known, and is sometimes known as the Atlantic see-saw. Often, when Europe enjoys hot weather, Greenland gets the opposite, and vice versa.
Greenland’s last really mild summer was in 2012, which Brits will not have forgotten was when we had record rainfall!
One statement which stands out is whilst glaciers have continued the development seen during the last six years in which they have more or less maintained their area.
We have been repeatedly told that these glaciers are disappearing quickly, but now we find that they have been stable since that warm summer of 2012.
DMI also add this graph:
DMI do not tell us how much this ice loss is in relative terms, and inevitably the y-axis is presented in true alarmist fashion!
They do admit that satellite monitoring of these 47 glaciers only began in 1999, so we have no way of knowing longer term trends prior to then.
Nevertheless, ice loss at glacier termini has been virtually insignificant in the last six years.
Given the positive surface mass balances seen every year, the ice sheet has almost certainly grown in overall terms since 2012.
The Polar Portal also provides easy to retrieve temperature data for the main sites:
At each station we find that temperatures since 2000 have been very similar to the 1930s and 40s, with the exception of 2012.
But perhaps even more significantly, the 1960s to 1980s were as cold at times as the extraordinarily times of the late 19thC. We must remember that the 19thC is well recognised to be probably the coldest period in Greenland since the end of the ice age.
Why anybody would regard the period 1960-90 as “normal” remains a mystery. Yet that is precisely what the so-called experts maintain.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Reblogged this on Climate Collections.
Did DMI kill the Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Mass Budget page?
Yes, it appears so. I don’t think they want it widely known that the Ice is increasing
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/index.uk.php
There’s so much wrong on that page. First it states (they’d promised me last summer that they’d fix this):
“During the past 10 years the melting of sea ice has accelerated, and especially during the ice extent minimum in September large changes are observed.”
Also – on that page the animated graphic of the “the ice extent in the middle of February for the period 2000-2009.” It’s been stuck there for years now. I suspect they don’t want to show the last decade.
The web site has been very odd for several months now.
“The evidence did not include calving”…
The US Coast Guard’s Ice Patrol addresses that?
2017: “This year, the International Ice Patrol tallied a total 1,008 icebergs that were detected in the N. Atlantic shipping lanes, marking the fourth consecutive season where the danger has been classified as “extreme”. The number of icebergs detected this season was up sharply compared to 2016, when 687 icebergs were detected. With the new numbers in, officials said that this year marked the 19th most severe season since records began more than 100 years ago.”
Not doing well this year, sadly. Click on ‘Large version of the latest graph’ at the link below.
http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/
Thanks Tiny for the vector to the graph!
Yes, thanks for the link. Still its growing and within the mean, and theres not been a summer melt anything like that of 2012, the scary red line they like to put in there!
tinyco2, interesting how that graph works, ie they re-zero each year at September.
So 2017/18 ended at 500Gt which is 100Gt above average, but they bring that back to zero, so this years data is on top of the gain of last year.
So what you cannot see is the long term loss or gain.
Anybody know where that Actual mass data is ie not the Balance.
Yes, it’s mainly the NW where ice growth has been slow.
I suspect that is because of the predominance of high pressure systems there, and thus lack of snow.
We seem to have the same conditions at the moment, with low pressure persistent over Iceland and south of Greenland
https://gracefo.jpl.nasa.gov/resources/33/greenland-ice-loss-2002-2016/
“Research based on observations from the NASA/German Aerospace Center’s twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites indicates that between 2002 and 2016, Greenland shed approximately 280 gigatons of ice per year, causing global sea level to rise by 0.03 inches (0.8 millimeters) per year”
0.8 mm/y out of the current SLR of 3.0 mm/y or 11.8”/century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_ice_sheet
“Analysis of gravity data from GRACE satellites indicates that the Greenland ice sheet lost approximately 2900 Gt (0.1% of its total mass) between March 2002 and September 2012. The mean mass loss rate for 2008–2012 was 367 Gt/year.”
In the ten years between 2002 and 2012 Greenland lost 2,900 Gt which represented –
(0.1% of its total mass) (Yep, read the fine print.)
YES – AN ASTONISHING, NAY STAGGERING EVEN, ZERO POINT 1 PERCENT OF ITS TOTAL MASS!!!!!!!!
Are you effing kidding me? The uncertainty must be 10 times that much.
Who measures this crap and thinks the numbers have substance???
Probably those barely 20 millennials with their participation/entitlement PhDs.
Every year Greenland “loses” 500 Gt during the summer and gains it all back in the winter.
Wow, sea level rise of 3 hundredths of an inch per year! Sh*t we are all going to drown.
Martha Kearney reporting from the nether regions on the ‘Today Program’ this morning reports that all around her is in meltdown, wet, wet, wet.
How does water melt at -20?
But the anomaly graphs above show it is 2 degrees C warm.
Just goes to show how deceiving they are if that is all the public are shown.
BBC was reporting from Svalbard…
Despite its northerly location (74º to 81º north) Svalbard has a relatively mild climate. Due to the Gulf Stream, Svalbard’s west coast is the world’s most northerly ice-free area.
https://global.hurtigruten.com/destinations/svalbard/inspiration/
But Svalbard was also as warm in the 1300s as it is today, or even warmer!
http://sciencenordic.com/deciphering-svalbard’s-climate-history:
Bergen Uni has an interesting way to put over a balance between toeing the political warming line and honesty in the results of their research. I took one of their online short courses on climate and had the same opinion – on one side they laid out how climate has changed in the past, then went on to say that the past was relatively stable and has only really changed in this last century. To an independent on the subject it must be completely confusing!
Solo Atlantic rower’s lost boat found in Norway
8 hours ago
He added: “I thought it might end up in Norway because of the Gulf Stream.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-47524246
Elsewhere on the internet the sky is still falling because of rainfall in Greenland, which of course must be increasing, causing an increase in melting. Note the comparison photo in the following BBC article, comparing a sunny before and a cloudy now, proving that rain makes the snow darker (not at all because of less light):
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47485847
The study referred to only talks about the period up to 2012 (as has been the case with other recent studies). Are we meant to believe that it took them 6 years to write a paper and get it published, or did they ignore what has happened since 2012 because it didn’t fit in with the alarmist narrative?
“Didn’t fit in” must be the favourite.
Wiki has Greenland at 836k sq miles.
That’s 2.165 million sq km’s.
2,000 sq km’s ice ‘loss’ is less than 0.1% of Greenland’s surface.
A statistical irrelevance, which is obviously why those figures were presented without context.
Scare over.
Next!
Thats dashed inconvenient.
How very, very inconvenient…….
BBC radio 4 yesterday had a 15 minute programme where some Green-loony claimed that all “deniers” were psychologically damaged and in need of re-education. This followed a section in which all the usual, and well disproved, lies about climate change (ice extents, sea-level etc) were spouted, without the slightest question from the complicit interviewer.
I was driving at the time of this monstrously stupid programme and could easily have been a victim of climate change fakery.
Try http://helpmechill.com/
Also available on DAB radio in the London area and some midlands regions.
Thanks, but not sure that my blood pressure would cope with hearing it again.
“Why anybody would regard the period 1960-90 as “normal” remains a mystery.”
Ask Phil Jones….
Phil Jones
To: “Parker, David (Met Office)” , Neil Plummer
Subject: RE: Fwd: Monthly CLIMATbulletins
Date: Thu Jan 6 08:54:58 2005
“I’m hoping that IPCC will stick with 1961-90. The issue of confusing users/media with new anomalies from a different base period is the key one in my mind. Arguments about the 1990s being better observed than the 1960s don’t hold too much water with me. There is some discussion of going to 1981-2000 to help the modelling chapters. If we do this it will be a bit of a bodge as it will be hard to do things properly for the surface temp and precip as we’d lose loads of stations with long records that would then have incomplete normals. If we do we will likely achieve it by rezeroing series and maps in an ad hoc way.
Personally I don’t want to change the base period till after I retire!”
Cheers
Phil
Or ask David Parker:
“Neil
There is a preference in the atmospheric observations chapter of IPCC AR4 to stay with the 1961-1990 normals. This is partly because a change of normals confuses users, e.g. anomalies will seem less positive than before if we change to newer normals, so the impression of global warming will be muted.”
SLR has been linear for a hundred years. Ipso facto, why care about Greenland glaciers?