It’s that time of year again. The heat of the summer has practically ended and now all the summer melt statistics can be released. This is a perfect time to scare the populace once again that Greenland will melt at an alarming pace and that coastal states will be inundated. In states like Iowa and Missouri, few take notice. But in the state with the lowest mean elevation—Delaware—such proclamations are not taken lightly.
That is why my fellow citizens of the “First State” paid close attention when a recent Smithsonian Magazine article suggested that “if all of Greenland’s ice melts, scientists agree, Earth would be in for about 20 feet of rising seas.” Note that all scientists agree with this statement so who are we to argue?
Well, certainly not me! Because I continued to read the article and found a quote by Ted Scambos, an “ice sheet expert at the University of Colorado Boulder”. He said that “to get [that level of retreat] would require several centuries, more perhaps” (emphasis added). Hmmm…I guess it is all in the timing.
But it too is all in the spatial distribution. It always amazes people to hear that warmer conditions will lead to more snow in Greenland. How can that possibly be? Well, warmer air can contain more moisture at saturation than cold air. Thus, as temperature rises, the potential for more precipitation can occur. You may have heard the phrase, “It is too cold to snow.” The correct phrase should be “It is too cold to get much snow.” Air temperatures in central Greenland are indeed increasing, but they are not getting near freezing. Thus, the precipitation still falls as snow but with the increased ability to transport snow through warmer air, snowfall increases. This is manifest in that the ice in central Greenland is, in fact, increasing, not decreasing.
But another telling paragraph in the article reads, “the new 10-inch metric…is a higher figure than sea-level rise estimates in other recent forecasts.” They cite the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that suggests global sea level will rise by only 2 to 5 inches by 2100, due to ice melt in Greenland. How can these researchers argue that the IPCC—the distinguished global panel of scientists—are off by a factor between 2 and 5? Well, scientists can always say it will be worse…but we can never criticize the IPCC if it went the other way.
The fact is that while sea level is rising, it has not been accelerating at any appreciable rate over the last century. Sea level has been rising since the demise of the last Ice Age some 22,000 years ago and, in my opinion, will continue to rise until (1) no ice is left on the planet or (2) we reverse course and head back toward another Ice Age. The Poles will always warm/cool faster than other parts of the planet for several reasons. With the same energy input, cold air will warm more than warmer air. Second, water vapor has a higher specific heat than dry air, which means that it will take more energy to heat warm, moist air than warm, dry air at the same temperature. Third, melting ice decreases the amount of energy that is reflected from the surface, thereby providing positive feedback where loss of ice leads to more energy absorption which leads to warmer temperatures which leads to more loss of ice.
So, let’s answer the title question, will Greenland ever be “green” again? If we wish to stop sea level rise, then we need to enter another Ice Age. But while sea levels will no longer be an issue, the myriad of problems that colder conditions will bring will only be the beginning. Changes in carbon dioxide concentrations will have virtually no effect on sea level rise, however. To use a phrase from the article, Greenland may be green again, “but to get [that], would require several centuries, more perhaps.”
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Blaise Vanne says
Why no one reports this is beyond me, as it is ALL publicly verifiable info, which links I even provide here for your convenience:
Obama mansion on all white Martha’s Vineyard is 10 feet above sea level at the nearest town of Edgartown, Martha’s Vineyard
Actual address at 79 Turkeyland Cove Rd is even lower, 3 feet above sea level. Verify this yourself at https://www.whatismyelevation.com/location/41.36189,-70.54573/79-Turkeyland-Cove-Rd–Edgartown–MA-02539-
You can verify the address, and what his uberluxe mansion looks like on Forbes:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathleenhowley/2019/09/01/obamas-buying-marthas-vineyard-estate-from-boston-celtics-owner/#5abccadd5300
dlarryB says
Needs revision since the world is only six thousand years old and the one and only ice age resulted when God judged the world with a global flood some 4500 years ago.
Prof Mudpie Dickens says
Farley Mowat, the noted Canadian leftist and Greenpeace activist, wrote in his book West Viking (written while we were still in the global cooling scare) that there were probably at least dwarf forests growing in Greenland when the Vikings arrived in 985 AD and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History reports “… Erik the Red discovered two areas of southwest Greenland which were suitable for farming, with grasslands and small stands of alder and birch.” You will note that it is too cold today for any type of forests to grow in Greenland, and there is zero ability to farm, unless modern technologies are utilized – and even then, crop selection is very minimal. Mowat also reported the Arctic pack ice was much less in that Viking discovery era than today. Dr. Fred Singer writes that when the Vikings first settled Greenland, they grew vegetables, and it was warm enough to allow the population to grow to 3,000 people and by 1100 AD the place was thriving enough that they had their own bishop and twelve churches. Nature reported in a 2010 article that clamshell studies also confirm Norse records. Meanwhile, the Archeological Survey of Canada has also noted around “A.D. 1000, a warmer climate resulted in the tree line advancing 100 kilometres north of its present position.” The results of this? Especially in northern Europe, “the period between 1150 and 1300 was truly a flowering period, for population reached unprecedented levels that were never to be seen again until the late 18thcentury in many countries; the English population experienced a staggering threefold increase in its population during the last century since the Domesday Survey in 1086”.
This climate optimum (also called a climate anomaly) coincided with a period of increased solar activity (see below). Farming of various crops extended hundreds of kilometers farther north than it is possible today.
Yet, in the 1100s, Greenland cooled dramatically, briefly stabilized, and then dropped even further in the 1200s to the early 1400s. Sirocko (2010) places the earlier event at the beginning of the 1310’s, while a more commonly accepted time frame for the first cold phase is the coinciding solar minimum called Wolf minimum from 1280-1350. There were repeated cold snaps and advancing glaciers and sea ice from that time onward, but it was not until the early 1600’s that the most devastating effects of the Little Ice Age began to set in, which is the more commonly used date for its beginning. As Dale Mackenzie Brown writes “An ice core drilled from the island’s (Greenland’s) massive icecap between 1992 and 1993 shows a decided cooling off in the Western Settlement during the mid-fourteenth century.” But the recent recovery in temperatures is only putting us back to the average temps from an earlier age!
Indeed, when I was visiting Iceland at Skaftafell Nat’l Park two years ago, Icelandic historians know from extant deeds – and have put in the displays at the park – that somewhere around FORTY old Viking era farms are currently buried under the Vatnajokull glacier system (the largest in the world outside of Greenland and Antarctica). In other words, it was simply much warmer in the Icelandic settlement era than it is today. We are routinely informed of the melting of Greenland glaciers today at lower altitudes, but demonstrably there are at bare minimum low altitude glaciers in roughly the same geographic area that had seen more melting and more pronounced glacial recession one thousand years ago than we see today. Al Gore may want to visit Skaftafell National Park in Iceland on one of his many jet-setting, carbon burning trips to check the facts himself.
More evidence: There are records of grape growing occurring in places in northern Europe back during this optimum where they can’t grow today. Gregory McNamee, in the Weather Guide Calendar (Accord Publishing, 2002) noted that wine connoisseurs might have gone to England for fine vintages (can’t grow fine vintage grapes there today!), that heat loving trees like beeches carpeted Europe far into Scandinavia, and Viking ships crossed iceberg free oceans to ice free harbors in Iceland…”. Art Horn writes that “In the winter of 1249 it was so warm in England that people did not need winter clothes. They walked about in summer dress. It was so warm people thought the seasons had changed. There was no frost in England the entire winter. Can you imagine what NOAA would say if that happened next year? “