Greenland glaciers double their rate of advance

[kenl01]

3 Feb 06 - A report from the University of Swansea's School of the Environment and Society said that two major Greenland glaciers - the Kangerdlugssuaq and Helheim glaciers - have doubled their rate of flow to the ocean over the past two years after steady movement during the 1990s.

"It seems likely that other Greenland outlets will undergo similar changes, which would impact the mass balance of the ice sheet more rapidly than predicted," the study said.

“The fact that the two major outflow glaciers had shown the same sudden acceleration despite being more than 300 km apart suggested the cause was not local but more likely climatic or oceanic in origin.”


This article, published by Reuters News Service, goes on to wring its hands over global warming. Funny, isn’t it, how retreating glaciers were once attributed to global warming - now advancing glaciers are attributed to global warming.

See complete article:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060203/sc_ ... eenland_dc

[x-y-no]

The issue in Greenland isn't advance or retreat of the perimiter of the glaciers, it's the fact that the glaciers as a whole are flowing into the ocean at a rapidly accellerated pace.

There's a fundamental difference between typical mountain glaciers (such as those rapidly disappearing from Glacier National Park) and the coastal glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica. That difference is that the latter are fed from large inland ice caps, whereas the former are fed only by precipitation on the mountain slope above. (in the extreme long range, it's the same of course - but the point is ice caps are a huge resevoir)

So climatic warming causes mountain glaciers to shrink back as they melt, because there isn't enough of a resevoir to supply increased flow. But in Greenland, there's a huge amount of ice upstream, so the glaciers can flow arbitrarily fast.

So there's absolutely no inconsistancy here at all.

[kenl01]

Now then, I don't have the time to argue whenever someone misunderstands or disagrees.

Don't forget that most mountain glaciers at high altitudes are GROWING. The reason for ice thickening in most of Greenland and Antarctica and many other mountain areas is due to increasing snowfall accumulation in recent decades. The overall cooling observed in both these areas is only second to importance for the reason of ice thickness increase. Sure not EVERY year will snowfall drastically increase in all these areas, but the overall trend in increased snowfall over the years is why the main ice sheets thicken. You will allways have a certain degree of variation of course, such as a warmer year with less snowfall, or variation of the SST's up there in the Arctic and Antarctica based on ocean current variation (part of that due to changes in the PDO/NAO cycles) and also seismic (earthquake and volcanic) activity occurring near the ice sheet. The latter is still quite new in scientific study, but too important to be ignored. Again, just part of a cyclical change which appears to be ongoing without exception.

One very interesting argument can also be found under:

http://www.intellicast.com/DrDewpoint/Library/1246/

[kenl01]

GLOBAL TEMPERATURE ANOMALIES (1979-2002)

With mountain glaciers growing in most areas, an argument can also be made concerning the relationship between that and upper atmospheric temp trends since 1979, indicating an overall cooling, especially above 10,000 feet across the land areas.

Since 1979, the equipment deployed by NASA on 9 TITOS-N satellites has performed 270,000 measurements daily of the temperature in the lower troposphere(from the Earth’s surface up to 8 km) and in the lower stratosphere (14 to 22 km). The measurements are taken every 12 hours, virtually all over the globe, with no disturbance from local effects, such as urban “heat islands.” The more sizable temperature rise in 1998 was caused by the El Niño effect. In the entire period, there is a weak cooling of approximately –0.06°C per decade.

On the global scale, the most objective measurements of the temperature in the lower troposphere, conducted since 1979 by American satellites (with no interference from “heat islands”), indicated up to 1998 not a climate warming, but rather a modest cooling (–0.14°C per decade—see Figure 8). In 1999, the temperature rose because of the El Niño effect (cyclic variations in the sea current flowing from the Antarctic, along Chile and Peru, to the equator), changing the 1979-2003 trend into a slight warming. However, since 1994, the satellite data show a deep cooling of the stratosphere. Temperature trends in the last 26 years, (1979-2005) especially above 25,000 feet altitude, have shown a net cooling of -.24C.



see charts at:
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/A ... arming.pdf

[kenl01]

Another interesting argument can be made between global climate change and cosmic rays, which appear to be on the increase:

However, in 1997, it suddenly became apparent that the decisive
impact on climate change fluctuations comes not from the Sun, but rather
from cosmic radiation. This came as a great surprise, because the energy
brought to the Earth by cosmic radiation is many times smaller than that
from solar radiation. The secret lies in the clouds: The impact of clouds on climate and temperature is more than a hundred times stronger than that of carbon dioxide. Even if the CO2 concentration in the air were doubled, its greenhouse effect would be cancelled by a mere 1 percent rise in cloudiness: The reason is simply that greater cloudiness means a larger deflection of the solar radiation reaching the surface of our planet. (See Figure 9.) In 1997, Danish scientists H. Svensmark and E. Friis-hristensen
noted that the changes in cloudiness measured by geostationary satellites perfectly coincide with the changes in the intensity of cosmic rays eaching the troposphere: The more intense the radiation, the more clouds.52 Cosmic rays ionize air molecules, transforming them into condensation nuclei for water vapor, where the ice crystals—from which the clouds are created—are formed. The quantity of cosmic radiation coming to the Earth from our galaxy and from deep space is controlled by changes in
the so-called solar wind. It is created by hot plasma ejected from the solar corona to the distance of many solar diameters, carrying ionized particles and magnetic field lines. Solar wind, rushing toward the limits of the Solar System, drives galactic rays away from the Earth and makes them weaker. When the solar wind gets stronger, less cosmic radiation reaches us from space, not so many clouds are formed, and it gets warmer. When the solar wind abates, the Earth becomes cooler.
Thus, the Sun opens and closes a climate-controlling umbrella of clouds over our heads. Only in recent years have astrophysicists and physicists specializing in atmosphere research studied these phenomena and their mechanisms, in the attempt to understand them better. The climate is constantly changing. Alternate cycles of long cold periods and much shorter interglacial warm periods occur with some regularity. The typical length of climatic cycles in the last 2 million years was about 100,000 years, divided into 90,000 years for Ice Age periods and 10,000 years for the warm, interglacial ones. Within a given cycle, the difference in temperature between the cold and warm phases equals 3°C to 7°C.
The present warm phase is probably drawing to an end—the
average duration of such a phase has already been exceeded by
500 years. Transition periods between cold and warm climate
phases are dramatically short: They last for only 50, 20, or even
1 to 2 years, and they appear with virtually no warning.

Source: N.D. Marsh and H. Svensmark, 2000. “Low Cloud Properties Influenced by Cosmic
Rays,” Physical Review Letters, Vol. 85, pp. 5004-5007

[x-y-no]

Now then, I don't have the time to argue whenever someone misunderstands or disagrees.

Well, that's fine but when I see false statements like this, I'm going to continue pointing out that they're false.

Don't forget that most mountain glaciers at high altitudes are GROWING.

That's an interesting claim. I don't know if it's true or not - I expect that depends on the definition of "high altitude". What is certain is that overall (i.e. summed over all altitudes), mountain glaciers are shrinking.

I'm not sure what releveance you think there is to your selected subset of "high altitude" glaciers. Perhaps you could expound on that.

The reason for ice thickening in most of Greenland and Antarctica and many other mountain areas is due to increasing snowfall accumulation in recent decades.

Increased high-latitude precipitation is indeed an expected effect of climate warming, so the increased snowfall in Greenland is no contradiction to what I'm saying. However, the best current measurements indicate that the increased volume of glacial flow into the ocean is larger than the increase in ice volume due to precipitation. See:

Johanessen, O.M; Khvorostovsky, K; Miles, M.W; Bobylev, L.P. (2005) ScienceVo. 310 no. 5750, pp 1013-1016 (regarding increased volume in the interior Greenland ice)

and

Ringnot, E; Kanagaratnam, P (2006) ScienceVo. 311 no. 5763, pp 986-990 (regarding increased glacial flow in Greenland)

and

Velicogna, I; Wahr, J; Hanna, E; Huybrechts, P. (2005) Geophys. Res. Lett.Vo. 32, L05501, doi:10.1029/2004GL021948 (regarding a new gravitometric study which shows net mass loss in the Antarctic)

[x-y-no]

Another interesting argument can be made between global climate change and cosmic rays, which appear to be on the increase:

...

Source: N.D. Marsh and H. Svensmark, 2000. “Low Cloud Properties Influenced by Cosmic
Rays,” Physical Review Letters, Vol. 85, pp. 5004-5007

I'll try and track down a full copy of this paper. I'm somewhat at a loss as to why one would expect the cosmic ray flux to change in such a way as to counter the GHG forcing we are introducing. Also, the claim of extremely rapid (decadal or shorter) shifts at the end of previous interglacials is suspicious to me.

I'll reserve judgement until I've read the paper, though.