Skip to content

Greenland’s Summer Ice Melt Delayed

June 16, 2023

By Paul Homewood

pressure

The weather across the UK has been dominated by high pressure all month so far. But where there is high pressure, there is always low pressure elsewhere.

And that low pressure has been stuck over Greenland. The consequence has been a lot of snow, delaying the beginning of the summer melt:

https://i0.wp.com/polarportal.dk/fileadmin/polarportal/surface/SMB_curves_LA_EN_20230615.png

http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/

Of course, this is all just weather, just as in 2012, when high pressure brought sunny weather to Greenland and a lot of ice melt, while here we had that notoriously wet summer.

14 Comments
  1. Andrew Harding permalink
    June 16, 2023 6:13 pm

    No doubt that this late melt will not receive a great deal of publicity?

    • Thomas Carr permalink
      June 16, 2023 6:34 pm

      When you consider that one of the heavy newspapers has just increased in price again you would think that they would welcome some pre-assembled copy to give relief to part of their salary burden. Paul may be fostering such contacts at this very moment. There was excellent precedent at the S. Telegraph.

  2. June 16, 2023 7:31 pm

    Paul there used to be a page on polar portal that graphed snowlines. It showed a trend of increasing snow cover over twenty years . Link seems to have been discontinued, or else my internet is too weak. Have a look see.

  3. In The Real World permalink
    June 16, 2023 9:27 pm

    Yes , as soon as any ice starts melting you can be sure the media will be shouting about it .
    But when you look at Polar Portals charts you can see that the ice sheet is still increasing , like it does for most of the year .

    A couple of years ago they proclaimed so many million tons of ice had gone in a few days , and it would soon be all gone . What they did not dare say was that the amount was insignificant , and would all be back again in a few weeks of Winter . Which does last for about 10 months up there .

    • Matt Dalby permalink
      June 16, 2023 9:54 pm

      It was last year when Greenland lost 18 Gigatons of ice in 3 days in July which is about 1 Gigaton more than is typically lost in 3 days at the height of the melt season. At least one MSM outlet claimed that it was enough water to cover Florida to a depth of 2cm. They’re able to claim that overall Greenland is still loosing mass each year by assuming that ice loss from calving is constant. In reality it’s likely that marine terminating glaciers i.e. all the major Greenland glaciers and icesheets undergo a relatively rapid retreat followed by a much longer period a gradual advance and the high rates of calving seen in the 1990’s and 2000’s have now significantly reduced. Also sea surface temperatures on both the East and West coast are below the 1981-2000 average http://www.climatereanalyzer.org further slowing ice loss from marine terminating glaciers.

  4. Gamecock permalink
    June 16, 2023 10:05 pm

    The claimed threat is that melting ice will raise sea level, and SINK LONDON (Oh my!). For the decades we’ve been watching Greenland ice, SLR rate is unchanged. It hasn’t changed in a century.

    Either there has been little change in Greenland’s ice, or IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER.

    Ipso facto, ice melt on Greenland isn’t news.

    A change in the rate of SLR would be news. If it ever does, we can investigate. Until then, chatter about ice melt is just Angels on a pinhead.

    • Graeme No.3 permalink
      June 16, 2023 11:40 pm

      Well leading “Climate Scientists” claimed in 1981 that arctic ice melt would some see Buckinham Palace covered by 7 foot of water.
      And in 1527 after years of publicity from “Climate Scientists” (or astrologers as then called) predicted London would be flooded. Some 20,000 persons left their homes for higher ground, and the Prior of St. Bartholomew’s built a fortress in which he stocked enough food and water for a two-month wait. When the dreaded date failed to provide even a rain shower in a city where precipitation is very much to be expected, the astrologers recalculated and discovered they’d been a mere one hundred years off.

      • M E permalink
        June 17, 2023 3:15 am

        In defence of the people of the Cities of London and Westminster and of Southwark, the river was much wider and tidal up to their reaches . There was a lot of mud washed down river too . The bed of the river did not scour out as it did after the embankments were built.

      • June 17, 2023 7:43 am

        The astrologers were more honest than today’s Climate ´scientists’ then?

      • In The Real World permalink
        June 17, 2023 9:12 am

        About 97% [ yes I know ] of the Arctic circle is sea ice , which would have no effect on sea levels if it melted .
        So all of lies about that melting and flooding a lot of the world is just totally ignoring the laws of physics .
        But that is all the Green loonies have , loads of lies that they keep pushing at the public .

  5. June 17, 2023 12:03 pm

    According to CNN today the climate is extreme right now and something very weird is happening.

    https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/17/world/four-climate-charts-extreme-weather-heat-oceans/index.html

    • Gamecock permalink
      June 17, 2023 3:18 pm

      ‘We’re only halfway through 2023 and so many climate records are being broken’

      Cirrusly, these yahoos don’t even know what ‘climate’ means.

      CNN ignorance is . . . redundant.

  6. Max Beran permalink
    June 18, 2023 10:32 am

    To me, the real relevance of this story (that sea level rise isn’t accelerating) is a textbook example of what distinguishes “THE science” from classic, correctly formulated “science”.

    Both are to do with cause and effect, but “THE science” posits the truth of a favoured cause and makes a list of all the effects considered consistent with that assumed truth. In other words what is the likelihood of the evidence GIVEN the truth of the hypothesis. This is obviously a high number as that is the way the evidence has been pre-screened, and is an irrelevant number. Proper science does it the other way round by not pre-determining a favoured cause and, looking at all the effects, asking which cause is most likely. In other words, given the evidence, what is the likelihood of this or that hypothesis being true.

    Sea level rise is a classic. It is certainly likely that global warming would cause sea level to rise but that’s “THE” science, not proper science. Proper science would take note of how sea level rise predates the particular posited cause and its rate hasn’t changed during the period that particular cause has been present. It would look at alternative causes and evaluate the evidence for those. The story is similar with glacier retreat.

    It comes back to Bayes Rule that the Probability of Y given X is NOT the same as the Probability of X given Y – the probability that sea level rises GIVEN the Earth is warming is not the same (and is much larger than and is irrelevant to) the probability that the Earth is warming given the sea level is rising. To reverse the order of the probability, as in the Bayes formula, you have to consider (a) alternative Y’s and (b) X’s that don’t agree with Y. “Consistent with” is the most damning and damaging phrase in this whole sorry business.

    • Gamecock permalink
      June 18, 2023 10:32 pm

      Thx, Max. That is wisdom.

Comments are closed.