I met him in Ilulissat, the largest settlement in Greenland, population 3,000. Ilulissat is what many of the scientists on the Greenland Ice Sheet call a safe base for their research. He was presenting to a community gathering on his work at Swiss Camp, the longest continually operating research facility on the ice sheet that…
West Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapse: The Critical Path Article link Sea level rise estimates of around 10 feet by 2100 are now becoming hard to ignore. This article is about several new findings in 2018 that build on near-10 feet of sea level rise news from NOAA in 2016 and 2017. What is…
Ice Waves — The most fantastic climate science of last week (that crossed my desk): This work evaluates a new discovery of melt waves of increased ice and water discharge in the Greenland melt years of 2010 and 2012. At one glacier (Rinks,) the peak monthly increased ice and water discharge was about equal to…
First published on Truthout December 26, 3015, by Bruce Melton. Climate science is way out in front of climate policy. Commitments at the United Nations Climate Conference in Paris pale in comparison to those from the Kyoto Protocol with its beginnings in the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. The cheap and unambiguous solution of removing CO2…
First Published on Truthout, April 13, 2015. The Gulf Stream plays an immensely important role in moderating the climate of eastern North America and Europe. Moreover, Greenland melt impacts ocean current processes in the North Atlantic. For years, contradictory research has alternately said the Gulf Stream was slowing and that it was not slowing. The…
The location of this “hole” in the North Atlantic is in a crucial area where Gulf Stream water sinks. This sinking of warm water buries heat and carbon dioxide in the deep ocean in a massive global current that stretches all the way around the tip of Africa to the Eastern and North Pacific. This…
First published on Truthout, March 5, 2015. Greenland is warmer than it has been in more than 100,000 years and climate disrupting feedback loops have begun. Since 2000, ice loss has increased over 600 500 percent, and liquid water now exists inside the ice sheet year-round, no longer refreezing during winter. Complete Article
Greenland’s ice mass loss appears to be 22 percent more than 2013 IPCC suggests. The IPCC uses four major outlet glaciers to define Greenland ice mass loss. The most recent evaluation uses 130 glaciers and nearly 100,000 satellite laser altimetry points across Greenland. This work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of…
This research, funded by the Swiss and U.S. National Science foundations, looked at Greenland Ice Sheet movement in the melt zone that extends inland 50 to 100 miles from the edge of the ice sheet. This is where melt water moves through the crevasses in the ice sheet, then flows down to bedrock and lubricates…
The Arctic is warming more than twice as fast as the global average, Arctic sea ice and Northern Hemisphere snow cover are decreasing faster than the models project, more frequent extreme weather events are occurring and more frequent severe winters are occurring too. Three potential drivers of these events are: changes in storm tracks, the…
The North Atlantic is warming and Greenland’s ice loss has quadrupled in the last 20 years. Warm water is getting under the floating edges of outlet glaciers and causing thinning which in-turn causes the glaciers to speed up. New research has identified another and possibly new dimension to the increase of outlet glacier flow that…
First Published on Truthout, March 18, 2014 Today, we are burning fossil carbon one million times faster than it was naturally put in the ground, and carbon dioxide is increasing 14,000 times faster than anytime in the last 610,000 years (1,2). Climate is now changing faster than it has during any other time in 65…
A study in Geophysical Research Letters has found moss beneath a recently melted glacier on Baffin Island that dates back 44,000 to 120,000 years using radiocarbon-14 dating. This technique uses the radioactive decay rate of carbon-14, a rare but predictable version of a normal carbon atom, to date things that were once alive. The radioactive…
The most recent discoveries in climate science bear little resemblance to what we hear in the media. Greenland’s melt in 2012 for example has been widely advertised in the media as just another weather event, similar to many in the past. The adage that we cannot tell for sure if any single weather event was…
After twenty years of the D & D game climate change is much worse than it would have been if we had of started reducing emissions as the Kyoto Protocol, and nearly every single climate scientist on the planet suggested was prudent. First published on the Rag Blog, August 8, 2012. Before I tell you…
Abrupt climate change has arrived. They told us this would happen twenty years ago if we did not reduce emissions. We did not and it has. The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), a Ronald Reagan Presidential Initiative formerly called the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, tells us an important truth in the climate change…
How many times in the reporting of this event have you heard that we still cannot tell if any single weather event is caused by climate change? It is time we stopped comparing climate change caused weather events with similar events in the past. Our country is suffering through a second year in a row…
What was previously thought to be the threshold or complete melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet was an average global warming of 3.4 to 9.2 degrees F has now been refined to 1.4 to 5.8 degrees F. this is roughly half the warming that we previously understood. What was previously thought to be the threshold…
Our buddy Tedesco at Cryospheric Processes tells us that The Greenland Melt Index ranked 6th in 2011. The melt index anomaly is the number of days with detectable surface melt compared to the baseline period of 1979-2010, and is estimated from satellite microwave observations. But this “melt index” is something like comparing sea ice extents…
October 1, 2010 Phenomenal Ice Show – NASAs Ice Viewer From Greenland to Antarctica, these videos and still photo comparisons show climate change in action. http://climate.nasa.gov/GlobalIceViewer/index.cfm
