For those out of state, this is in response to a Jack Ohman cartoon in today’s Oregonian showing a skeptic drowning while reading a newspaper with the headline “Greenland Ice Cap Melt”…
Mr. Ohman,
Regarding your ‘Greenland Ice Cap Melt’ in today’s Oregonian, I recall the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s quote: “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.” It is irresponsible to print warming claims for Greenland with the hope that if one says it often enough, perhaps it will come true. To the contrary…
“The speed-up [of Green-land ice melt] has stopped across the region,” February 2009, Vicky Pope of the official UK Met Hadley climate office confirmed. Pope is among the top alarmists in the world.
“So much for Greenland ice’s Armageddon,” reported Richard Kerr in the January 2009 Science.
“It has come to an end,” glaciologist Tavi Murray of Swansea University in the U.K. reported at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Copenhagen, referring to claims of rapid ice melt.
“Galloping glaciers of Greenland have reined themselves in,” Science 23 January 2009.
“Greenland ice sheet slams the brakes on,” NewScientist July 3 2008
Helheim is one of Greenland’s two largest “discharge” glaciers into the ocean. It’s one-year advance between 2005 and 2006 made up half the entire loss from May 2001 through August 2005. Average thinning of the other largest discharge glacier, Kangerdlugssuaq, declined to near zero in 2006 with some thickening according to a study in Science. Indeed, there has been melting at the edges of Greenland, but the height of the ice pack and the total volume of ice is increasing.
“Meltwater has a negligible effect on the rate at which the ice sheet moves.” (Van De Waal, 2008, New Scientist)
I have included additional references below for your perusal.
Glacier Slowdown in Greenland: How Inconvenient, World Climate Report, January 23, 2009 [here]
Why the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets are not Collapsing, by Cliff Ollier and Colin Pain, Australian Institute of Geoscientists, August 2009 [here]
Greenland, by Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow, June 19, 2009 [here]
Media Credibility, Not Ice Caps, In Meltdown, by Peter C Glover, The American Thinker, Feb 23, 2009 [here]
Eco-warriors and media hype aside, the fact is, as we head into 2009, that the world’s ice mass has been expanding not contracting. Which will surprise evening news junkies fed a diet of polar bears floating about on ice floes and snow shelves falling into the oceans. But if a whole series of reports on ice growth in the Arctic, the Antarctic and among glaciers are right, then it is truth in the mainstream media (MSM) that’s in meltdown not the polar ice caps.