Greenland Icecap – 2023
By Paul Homewood
http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/
Summer is over in Greenland, and the SMB has finished above average once again.
This is the fifth of the last seven years to finish above average:
Courtesy of Tony Heller
As always, please read the DMI explanatory note:
When calving and bottom melting are factored in, there is a net loss of ice. However this loss has been taking place since the end of the 19thC, following the Little Ice Age, the coldest era in Greenland since the Ice Age.
Annual average surface mass balance (blue line), marine mass balance (gray dashed), and their mass balance sum (black line).
https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2021-131/essd-2021-131.pdf
The above chart runs to 2021, but I have updated it to include last year, and simplified the chart with a 10 year average:
https://dataverse.geus.dk/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.22008/FK2/OHI23Z
As can be seen, the rate of loss in the last decade is similar to the 1930s, 50s and 60s. During the 1970s and 80s, Greenland’s climate grew much colder, and the ice mass loss almost stopped completely.
Significantly the rate of loss now is not accelerating, as you may have assumed from what the media have told you. On the contrary, the rate of loss has been slowing down since 2012.
The average annual loss between 2013 and 2022 was 184 Gt, which equates to 0.51mm sea level rise a year.
In short there is nothing alarming or unprecedented about the tiny amount of ice melt in Greenland.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
I remember a couple of years ago , an warm weather front from Africa came up the North Atlantic and caused some ice melt .
The media were on it like a ton of bricks , quoting billions of tons of ice melted .
What they did not mention was the fact that for about 10 months of the year the ice level was increasing , and a little extra melting in the Summer was nothing out of the ordinary .
Somebody did some calculations which showed that the claimed ” Massive Ice Melt ” ,if it did that every year and never froze again in their winter , would take about 12,000 years to reduce the Greenland ice coverage by half .
Plus ca change, plus……
Mr. Homewood: Your graph cannot be accurate, as it disagrees with everything we have been told by the Climate Mafia. What about those Polar Bears clinging to life on a square meter of ice? What about those “atmospheric Rivers and a Globe on fire? Riddle me that, Paul.
I can see a famous BBC fact checker on its way
AAH! But there are no polar bears in Antarctica!
A sure sign (to some minds) that Global Warming has the Earth on fire!
And also that last summer Antarctica was losing ice rapidly as seen on the media, but not all of them as apparently a temperature of minus 15.3℃ (the eleventh highest since 1977 at that site) might have made them think, as also the minus 25℃ at Mawson base.
The rate of sea level rise is unchanged for over a century.
‘As can be seen, the rate of loss in the last decade is similar to the 1930s, 50s and 60s. During the 1970s and 80s, Greenland’s climate grew much colder, and the ice mass loss almost stopped completely.’
The rate of sea level rise is unchanged for over a century.
Greenland ice melt has had double-ought zero effect on SLR. None. Zero. De nada. We have the data.
So no should care whether Greenland ice goes up or down.
The propaganda for the delectation of the believers generally talks of “ice melt;” rarely, so far as I can judge, of “net ice melt.” On the occasions when I have spoken (gently) to an avowedly unscientific votary, it has dawned on me that he or she does not actually know that “Arctic ice” is not a static lump, but something which grows and shrinks with the seasons and is always flowing – or floating – from place to place. The concept of an inanimate dynamic process, which sometimes has its balance on one side and sometimes on the other, seems to be unavailable to the mind. To use an everyday analogy, they seem wedded to a savings-account view of the world rather the proper current-account view.
It is snowing in Greenland, throughout an area of a million square kilometers:
http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/
I’m far from convinced that the marine mass balance is more or less constant. It’s quite likely that large marine terminating glaciers undergo a long period of gradual growth during which the ice melts at the bottom where it’s in contact with slightly warmer sea water. This makes the floating part of the glacier unstable and it undergoes a relatively short period of rapid retreat followed by gradual growth. If the marine mass balance is calculated from a period of rapid retreat, likely as it would confirm the alarmist beliefs of the DMI, and it’s assumed this rate is constant the calculations of total mass balance will be wrong. It may well be that Greenland is experiencing a period of marine glacial advance, relatively little calving and low marine mass balance. This would mean that for at least 5 of the last 7 years it’s actually been gaining at least 50Gt of mass a year.