CNN ushered in August yesterday with a boilerplate scare story about a heat wave spurring rapid melting from Greenland’s ice sheet. Like many such articles, Sheena McKenzie’s “Greenland is in the grips of a heatwave. Here’s what it means for all of us” scares by presenting big numbers without putting them into relevant proportion:

• “In July alone, Greenland’s ice sheet lost 160 billion tons of ice, according to Clare Nullis, spokeswoman for the UN World Meteorological Organization. That’s roughly the equivalent of 64 million Olympic-sized swimming pools ….”
• “Now 2019 could come close to the record-setting year of 2012, said Jason Box, professor and ice climatologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. During that ‘melty year,’ he said, Greenland’s ice sheet lost 450 million metric tons—the equivalent of more than 14,000 tons of ice lost per second.”

Those numbers sound scary indeed—until they’re put into relevant proportion.

McKenzie did provide some proportion: “equivalent of 64 million Olympic-sized swimming pools.” But just how much does that aid anyone’s understanding? How much water is in one Olympic-sized swimming pool? How many Olympic-sized swimming pools would be filled by all the ice on Greenland? Or how many Olympic-sized pools would it take to hold all the water in all the world’s oceans? Without answers to such questions, that “proportion” is, for all practical purposes, meaningless.

Physicist Dr. J.C. Keister and provided a bit of relevant proportion with regard to similar claims about Greenland’s (and Antarctica’s) ice melts back in 2014. You can read those articles here:

• Lying with Statistics: “The National Climate Assessment” Falsely Hypes Ice Loss in Greenland and Antarctica
• If a Mountain Gets Cast into the Sea, What Happens?

Here’s the gist: Lately Greenland’s been losing about 1% of its ice per century (!), meaning it would take 100 centuries, or 10,000 years, for it to lose all of it. Meanwhile, natural cycles of global warming and cooling make it nearly certain that Greenland’s going to regain lots, probably all, of the ice it’s lost over the last fifty years or so, possibly much more, multiple times (with melting periods interspersed) in the next thousand years. And in terms of long-term natural cycles, many geologists think we’re due for an ice age well before 10,000 years from now—during which not only will Greenland regain all its ice, but also ice will cover most of Canada and the northern 48 states of the United States, and similar portions of the Eurasian land mass.

Do read J.C.’s and my articles—you might get some good laughs along with the good information!

McKenzie’s article ties this summer’s accelerated Greenland ice melt to the recent heat wave in Europe and concludes citing a scientist who says we can expect more record heat waves with global warming. But meteorologist and Cornwall Alliance Senior Fellow Dr. Roy W. Spencer pointed out in “Record High Temperatures in France: 3 Facts the Media Don’t Tell You” that the heat wave was a regional weather phenomenon, balanced by a cold snap just east of it—not an effect of global warming.

Greenland’s ice melt is, frankly, no cause for alarm.