Greenland Ice Loss Quickening
The temperature of Earth is rising owing to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And, one of the most dramatic signs of climate change is the rate at which Earth’s ice is melting. Satellites orbiting high above our heads are used to measure changes in the height of the ice and also to track how fast glaciers flow. (Credit: ESA)
PARIS (ESA PR) — Using a 25-year record of ESA satellite data, recent research shows that the pace at which Greenland is losing ice is getting faster.
The research, published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, uses radar altimetry data gathered by the ERS, Envisat and CryoSat missions between 1992 and 2016.
Radar altimeters record the height of the surface topography along the satellite’s ground track. They precisely measure the height of ice, water and land by timing the interval between the transmission and reception of very short radar pulses.
Over time, these measurements are used, for example, to work out how the height – or elevation – of huge ice sheets is changing, which, in turn, can be used to monitor ice loss.
The image shows Greenland ice-sheet annual elevation change in 2015, but using a 25-year record of ESA satellite data, recent research shows that the pace at which Greenland is losing ice is getting faster. The research, published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, uses radar altimetry data gathered by the ERS, Envisat and CryoSat missions between 1992 and 2016. (Credit: ESA/Planetary Visions)
Although the research team, working through ESA’s Climate Change Initiative, found only modest elevation changes in the early 1990s, the pace of thinning is clear in the satellite observations from 2003 onwards.
“A pattern of thinning appears to dominate a large fraction of the ice sheet margins at the beginning of the millennium, with individual outlet glaciers exhibiting large thinning rates,” says Louise Sandberg Sørensen, the paper’s lead author.
“Over the full 25-year period, the general picture shows much larger volume losses are experienced in west, northwest and southeast basins of Greenland compared to the more steady-state situations in the colder far north.”
Greenland ice height from Sentinel-3B. (Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2018), processed by ESA)
This, according to Dr Sørensen, highlights the strong climate sensitivity of the outlet glaciers of Greenland as well as the ongoing need for reliable, long-term monitoring of climate variables that help to improve climate models and inform policy responses.
The Greenland ice sheet is an important cog in the global climate system with its meltwater, for example, influencing ocean circulation in the North Atlantic. Ongoing monitoring of the ice sheet is equally important in understanding its contribution to the extent and changing rate in sea-level rise.
The more recent Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission is also being used to monitor changing ice height.
ESA’s Climate Change Initiative is a research programme that uses four decades of Earth observation archives established by ESA and its Member States to support the climate information requirements of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
In addition to the Greenland ice sheet, the programme is developing long-term, consistent data products based on satellite derived observations for a further 22 essential climate variables required by the international science community to understand the Earth system.
53 responses to “Greenland Ice Loss Quickening”
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I have it on good authority from an eagle that this is not happening, that it’s a huge scam. Glad it’s all fake.
Yes, Andrew, it just a few minutes after midnight upon “Titanic Earth”. 🙁 Regards, Paul.
Right now it’s just a matter of how active our deliberate engineering efforts are to address the effects of our accidental engineering efforts. Lot’s of people will be hurt by both efforts, but the world won’t end. At least it does not have to.
…. Say, are you using that deck chair?
… No, help yourself, I’m here to dance to the band. 🙂
Don’t think you’re going to get out of paying your bar tab.
What’s funny, is that nobody has to be hurt, if all nations lowered CO2 at same time.
Commercial interests would be offended and dearly held economic models would effected along with a lot of peoples ego’s and closely held beliefs. Let me tell you, that matters far more than the lives of the poor schmucks who can’t afford to move out of the way, or who worse yet called for preventative action to be taken in the face of the political right wing who insist the planet Earth is an infinite sink for humanity’s industrial byproducts.
Commercial interests, i.e. the insurance industry, has already accepted global warming and are including it in their insurance rates which is already having on impact on industry, including the President.
https://www.usnews.com/news…
Trump Resort in Ireland Will Build Seawalls to Protect Against Climate Change
By Alexa Lardieri, Staff Writer Dec. 22, 2017, at 8:58 a.m.
You could argue with the scientists if you want, but its a different matter when it comes to insurance underwriters. 🙂
But then that is why free markets are more effective at dealing with challenges like this that governments, they are driven by cost/benfits instead of politics in their decision making. Its also why countries like the U.S. are reducing carbon emissions while other nations that signed the Paris Accords are still increasing their emissions.
Despite their reputations as strictly beady-eyed green eyeshade types, insurance company executives tend to very much reflect the social matrices in which they are embedded. In the pre-Civil Rights era, insurance companies used to routinely discriminate on the basis of race, color, and creed despite this being objectively a poor business practice. So did banks. So did a lot of other business institutions. The secular religion of Global Warming is a popular one these days. Insurance companies are no more likely than any other business to leave money on the table if there is money to be made by catering to popular superstitions.
As much as it is hard to believe, the models insurance firms use for projecting risk have advanced a bit in the last 150 years. So have the professionalism of their business practices and behavior.
Extraordinary Popular Delusion and the Madness of Crowds makes it plain that a society in the grip of some particular fairy story will not easily give it up even in the face of what ought to be clear and objective proof.
So you should open an insurance company, specializing in beach front property.
In your dreams. It’s government mandate not the rigged marketplace that’s pushing electric cars and grid battery storage. And the foresight of one man. Without the limits on city traffic by left leaning urban centers, the government controlled market of China, Norwegian mandate on national conversion to all electric transportation, and California electric fleet requirements, the electric vehicle market would be severely runted from it’s current embryonic state. Additionally if it were not for the market rigging of Australian and European smart grid mandates we would never know how well a storage grid work out. I’m sorry, the market can’t do it alone.
Teslas seem to sell pretty well on their merits. Clunkier electric cars not so much. Given that subsidies and inducements are – or at least were – pretty much the same for all such, the difference has to be because of other factors.
Traffic limitation in cities is hardly an exclusively Left idea. The Libertarians want to do it via congestion pricing of access. The Left prefers to do it by arbitrary fiat, same as they pretty much want to do for everything else.
Were seeing right now how ongoing Green ruination of formerly enviable national power grids in France, Germany and much of the rest of Europe are working out – they aren’t. Prices and outages are both way up. So is public anger as has become flagrantly obvious recently.
California seems to be the hottest EV market by a factor of two. Look at this list. The top 5, CA, OR, WA, DC, and HA are all leftist states that have rigged the market to favor EV’s. Look at this list of the top sinks for Telsa purchases by nation. Look at that list. All but the US are totally lefty nations. Why is that? And tiny Norway is at #3, ahead of giants like Germany, France, and Australia. Rigging. Leftist rigging of the market made Tesla what it is.
There is some truth to this, but not necessarily because farsighted leftists have deliberately sought to boost EV sales – though CA, at least, does. But CA also has very expensive gasoline, Tesla is a CA company, Teslas are often a virtue-signaling device among the well-to-do and CA still has plenty of those as its overall population is still the largest of any single state.
In other places, like Norway, brisk EV sales may also have to do with the fact that Norway has probably the highest average gasoline price in the world. That is certainly a leftist market intervention – high taxes – but the EV sales bump isn’t necessarily a deliberately sought effect. In any case, Norway also has among the highest electricity prices in the world too. Even 40 years ago, Norway also had insanely high prices for alcoholic beverages, especially distilled spirits of any kind. It’s probably worse now. I guess the lesson here is mommas don’t let your kids grow up to be Norwegians.
Thanks. Actually the Norwegian policy is targeted. As you can see there, very targeted. They want to be exporting 100% of their oil and gas in order to prop up their social security system. I can tell you in spite of high gasoline prices and alcohol prices, Norwegians own cars, drive, and drink. At the same time even, lots of the time.
No argument on that last. I grew up in a heavily Norwegian town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
When I was in my 20’s, in 1977-78, I worked in Western Europe for two years. I was never posted in Norway, but many other people I crossed paths with on the project I was part of had been. It was universally viewed as a hardship post. The stories of Norwegian price levels for just about everything would curl your hair, but especially gas and booze.
We got a $20 general expense per diem regardless of which country we were in. In Italy, where I spent about 2/3’s of my two years overseas, it was said you couldn’t even drink your per diem. In pre-Thatcher England, where everyone seemed poor as church mice, you could drink your per diem but you couldn’t eat it. In Belgium, France and the Netherlands you could eat your per diem. In Norway you could eat your per diem for breakfast.
A hot dog and coke will set you back $20 bucks, and a #1 meal at McDonnalds costs more. So everyone cooks and eats out less often. As opposed to where I’ll go for breakfast after writing this. And they’re better off for it. But they maintain an American standard of living in spite of their high costs. I also challenge you to use google streetview to browse through the wrong parts of towns. Their farming sector is not in trouble like ours has been since the 80’s. And they leveraged their hydro power to make very profitable metals and then used the excess to go big into shipping, and then leveraged the excess maritime personnel to extract oil and gas from the North Sea and dominate global high end maritime operations. Take a look at the global maritime industry every time there’s a cutting edge development you’ll see Norwegians playing the game. For a nation of only 5 million they hit extremely hard for their weight.
BTW, that first list showed that Tesla ‘only’ has 50 odd % of the EV car market in the US. I’ve driven the Bolt and the Volt in pure EV mode. Chevrolet makes some really nice driving EV’s and they take the AZ heat with no problems. They make the trip from Tucson to Phoenix with range to spare in 120 deg heat.
Of course they do. Batteries are chemical reactors. Chemical reaction rates rise with temperature. You would likely find EV’s appreciably less salubrious if you drove one in Bemidji, MN in the dead of winter.
Yes of course. And my Prius suffers in colder weather. It only gets 46 MPG on average instead of its normal 53. Of course it’s a hybrid and can self heat it’s battery pack.
U.S. commercial interests – fracked oil and gas – have resulted in significant drops in the U.S. carbon footprint. Ironically, it’s the more statist parts of the world where fossil fuel use is rising fastest. The lives of “the poor schmucks” of the world will continue to be hard for immemorial reasons having nothing to do with Global Warming.
I have no problem with fracking to our hearts content as long as the market is rigged to eventual switch over to electric or hybrid cars. A national fleet of 400 mile range cars with the ability to source and charge off a storage grid driven by coal, gas, solar, wind, and nuclear. That will solve the carbon problem without stripping the common American from having freedom to travel the continent, and for American ground commerce to function on a continental basis. Displacing the civilian sector to an all electric infrastructure would also have the effect of shutting down a lot of the oil extraction from the shale reserves which could be used as a war reserve should such a national emergency come to the fore.
If “the market is rigged” we get energy that is more expensive than it needs to be. That, in turn, begets energy poverty of the sort that is behind a lot of that street rioting now going on in Europe. When the so-called “alternative” energy sources are able to beat the price of fossil-generated electricity, I’ll be delighted. But I’m not holding my breath.
There’s no free market. Unless you had several grids run in parallel each running to the various sinks, then you could have a real marketplace. With electrical power it’s choose your monopolist. The government riggers in Europe and China are doing a better job than the riggers in the US who run their business from quarter to quarter. Solar and wind were problematic because they were not baseload capable. That’s changing. On a joule per dollar basis solar and wind are cheaper. Thanks again to the foresight and experimentation of governments overseas.
Multiple grids would be a good idea from a resiliency, as well as a market competitiveness standpoint. So would a more distributed architecture that incorporated grids of all sizes straightforwardly. And its not a market failure that prevents this. In most places electricity has long since been declared a natural monopoly and multiple grids forbidden as “wasteful” just to make sure competition didn’t break out anyway. Lubbock, TX, in fact once had two competing electrical grids. I don’t know whether that’s any longer true. City governments certainly like monopoly franchises. They’re easier to tax, just add the tax to the monthly bills. Then there’s all the customary graft.
If wind and solar were really all-up cheaper on a joule per dollar basis, we wouldn’t be having this conversation so clearly that is not even close to being true.
As for those farsighted governments overseas, maybe you haven’t been watching the news lately. The victims – er, citizens – of said governments don’t seem any too pleased by how that government “foresight” has worked out in practice.
You’re forgetting a whole other reason we have monopolies when it comes to localities and grids. The grid owners. They ensure the local zoning and corporation commissions won’t allow anyone else in.
“If wind and solar were really all-up cheaper on a joule per dollar basis, we wouldn’t be having this conversation so clearly that is not even close to being true.”
I think this cut’s to one of the big differences between you and me, and between the political right and the political left. It has to do with long term planning and thinking. Look at the flawed logic of your statement. As if a new technology can overnight replace a established infrastructure that’s over 100 years old. You do understand that the majority of new new power plants going up in the US are solar and wind. You knew that didn’t you? I’m sure you did. Then why did you put up such a asinine statement? Integrated over the past 20 years this US now generates 20% of it’s electricity from renewable sources. It takes time to change out such an established infrastructure. what you really should have argued with wind and solar, up until recently were not baseload sources of energy. That’s only changed in the past few years and will take some time to work it’s way into the industrial tool set. Thank goodness it was an American industry that made it possible, but watch this, the US grid operators will only use it to the extent mandated by governments, and the EU and China will embrace and extend the technology and then capture the market for themselves.
Your linked EIA chart says 17% of U.S. electricity is from renewables but nearly half of that is from legacy hydropower plants and only 7.6% is from wind and solar with wind dominating solar by about 4:1. Your Forbes link says new natural gas-fired generating capacity equaled new renewable capacity.
Given that powerplant siting is a very government-intensive undertaking, and that governments at all levels, but especially in heavily urban states, tend to be leftist and favor renewable energy explains the rough parity between new gas and new renewable construction. It isn’t market forces.
But a new gas-fired plant is baseload and will run a lot nearer full capacity during its service life than will wind and solar installations. Said service life is also likely to be quite long. That may eventually prove true of solar facilities as well, but for now they tend to suffer a lot more accidental damage as they are, of necessity outdoors. The same is even more true of wind turbines. There are already hundreds of dead and abandoned wind turbines in CA, many only a few years old.
You’re right that there are major differences between right- and left-wingers but foresight is, contra you, not a leftist strength. Massive market distortions always produce epic waste, especially when inferior and more expensive things are forcibly substituted for proven and cheaper things. Europe has learned this expensive lesson quite brutally, but most of its governments seem inclined to plow ahead with their toxic policies regardless of popular will. Almost everything the left does makes the world poorer than it would otherwise be.
In 2018 wind and solar reached parity with hydro but was all of the new renewable capacity. I think this year wind and solar exceeded gas even. Let me look. That report was only for the first quarter of 2018. The EIA should submit a new report in early 2019 for 2018 and we’ll see then.
Here in AZ APS (Arizona Public Service) our major power producer got the AZ corporation commission to change the rooftop solar regulations to be totally in their favor under the argument that solar was unprofitable in the wilds of the market. Meanwhile their main installations are industrial sized solar fields, not gas peaking plants. They just announced the purchase of a Telsa battery bank. They love solar, it’s just that they don’t want joe-citizen to be a competitor. TEP Tucson Electric Power makes no bones about it, they have converted their coal plants to gas for baseload 8 years ago. All their new installations are solar and wind. Tucson has a lot more large parking lots and warehouse operations covered in solar as TEP does not use the government to prevent small solar producers from making their own power. We have a few farmers in Marana who went from growing cotton to selling 10’s of MW of solar but it was a court battle to get the grid owners to buy their power. Your pointing out of government corruption is many times correct, but you always seem to turn a blind eye to monopolist business practice and market rigging by private interests.
“if wind and solar were really all-up cheaper on a joule per dollar basis,”
You appear to be disputing Lazard
The U.S. “carbon footprint” continues to drop as fracked gas replaces coal even though Trump took us out of the Paris Accord. Those remaining in the Paris Accord, notably China and India, both continue to grow their national carbon footprints at an impressive clip.
Warmists need to face the fact that the global off-switch for atmospheric CO2 rise doesn’t reside in either the U.S. or Western Europe and hasn’t for decades. So, lefty ambitions to the contrary notwithstanding, we’re in for a fairly definitive experiment in whether or not atmospheric CO2 concentrations really have any consequential connection to global average surface temperature. I don’t think the results of said experiment are going to be especially helpful to the Warmist cause.
Warmists
I like that. It’s reminiscent of remoaners and Project Fear in the UK.
I am a warmist, I suppose. It’s all that evidence. I choose to believe my lying eyes.
The notion that the left is pushing the climate change “narrative” because they hate our freedom, just like those Islams, is pretty silly. As if converting to renewable energy sources and thereby winning our energy independence, ending the need for the perpetual fossil fuel war, oh, and solving the climate change dilemma to boot is a threat to Capitalism. It isn’t. If we do convert to renewable energy sources, it will be capitalists that make it happen. Those windmills and solar farms and giant batteries aren’t going to make themselves. California and New York are going to make piles of money out of this. Not to worry.
It is a threat to the fossil fuel industry. Metering wind and sunlight is not going to be nearly as lucrative. It’s that unamerican lack of resource scarcity. The damn sunlight is everywhere. Oh well. That’s capitalism for you. Industries sometimes vanish.
And ending the perpetual fossil fuel war is a threat to the defense industry. So I suppose cost plus crony capitalism does have a reason to feel aggrieved. And those wretched Islams are going to have to figure out how to manage without our crafty supervision, not to mention the trillion per month in vanished oil revenue. That won’t be pretty, but it also won’t be our problem.
The fossil fuel / military / government subsidy dependent states are going to take a hit. That’s what this is really about, right? Once again, they will be on the wrong side of history. But hey, if we don’t need to do the perpetual war thing then maybe we can get some social programs in there and turn those folks into productive citizens.
Pretty much everything the Left does is because they hate the freedom of others. Energy policy and scams like Global Warming are just part of the whole package. The Left hates, in no particular order: private schools, home schooling, civilian gun ownership, private automobiles, non-union workplaces, small business, large business, mid-sized business, Christianity, the U.S. military and, in general, anyone doing anything that hasn’t been pre-approved by some government busybody. In short, the Left hates both freedom and the institutions designed to protect it. The Left seeks to establish a comprehensive permission slip-based social order as Europe has largely done. As someone once said, “There are people out there who are simply incurably suspicious of any human interaction that occurs unmediated by bureaucracy.” That would be the Left.
I am beginning to suspect that you and I are not going to reach a consensus on these issues.
Earth can’t be Titanic Paul. Titanic’s nemesis was an iceberg. According to you and Andrew T., there will shortly be no more icebergs.
That’s a stupid statement as you know there will be more icebergs as the ice sheets increase their flow rate.
The end game is obviously that the glaciers that create the icebergs disappear. If you want a genuinely stupid statement Al Gore was incautious enough to actually predict some years ago that the entire Arctic ice cap would disappear by 2013.
Don’t be stupid like Mr Gore. I made some counter arguments and provide links to some market data that I think make my points. Instead of focusing on silliness like this, I’m more interested in your responses to those.
Find them above.
yeah, but good news is that we will not run into icebergs. They will be gone.
There is little or no planet-wide warming trend. But Greenland is hardly the whole planet. There certainly has been a warming trend in certain parts of the northern high latitudes in recent years. Parts of the Earth warm and cool all the time. Greenland, at the time of Eric the Red, had a lot less ice cover than it does even now. The same might well have been true of the northern polar cap. That didn’t result in any drowned continents. It also didn’t last.
From your posting, it sounds like you looked at the data, but I’m going to guess you only skimmed it at best. Possibly you just like reading climate denial articles that aren’t written by climate scientists, but by people with a political axe to grind.
The data doesn’t lie. We’re in an artificial global warming trend caused by the release of CO2 which comes from burning formerly sequestered coal, oil, and natural gas. Nearly all climate scientists agree on this, so you’re in the minority here.
Much of the “data” adduced by climate alarmists has been “adjusted” – and always in a way that accentuates the alleged warming effect. You are correct that “data doesn’t lie.” That’s why people – who very much do lie – have to keep fiddling the data more and more in support of their case.
“Climate scientists” and “people with a political axe to grind” are not disjoint sets. They come pretty close to being an identity relationship, in fact. There is, to put it bluntly, huge money to be made in climate alarmism. University departments, endowed chairs, staff and facilities, grant money, “research” funding. And then there are all the opportunities for organizational aggrandizement by government agencies as well. There are literally tens of thousands of people whose livings now depend upon climate alarmism.
“Nearly all climate scientists agree on this,” because those who didn’t agree have been driven out of the tribe by the liars and fabulists who now almost totally control the field. The thing is, “climate science” is less a field than it is an intersection of many fields. Among these are physics, chemistry, mathematics and statistics. Self-labeled “climate scientists” have pretty well succeeded in shutting down dissent within their own ranks but have been far less successful at enforcing their preferred orthodoxy on those in overlapping scientific disciplines.
Climate scientists aren’t getting rich off of their research. In fact, they’re not getting nearly as rich as the industries which are actively funding climate change denial politics.
Climate scientists are paid as well as any other academics. And, my God, if they weren’t in professorships with tenure and all that they might actually have to work for a living! As noted, there’s a lot of money to be had to expand departments and get more grad students and generate publications and all the other things that constitute status in academia. All you have to do is toe the party line.
The idea that the fossil fuel industry is funneling rivers of cash to “climate denial” seems to be popular on the Left. I wish one of you oh-so-knowledgeable people could point me to exactly where all this filthy lucre is supposed to be going. The only organization I know of that actually has any paid staff and which also does organized climate skepticism is the Heartland Institute. HI is tiny and has other agendas it pursues so it is, at best, a part-time “climate denier.” Their annual budget is trivial by the standards of the many Lefty foundations that push the Warmist line and most of their contributors are not oil companies. Nor are Anthony Watts and Judith Curry exactly raking in the dough.
AEI and Heritage.
Politicians, you moron. Look at the contributions to politicians who go on TV and say, “I’m not a scientist, but…” You don’t need dozens of think tanks providing them with alternative facts on climate, just a few whose “research” will be amplified by right wing pundits and writers who aren’t scientists either. Pols can then site said sources as authoritative.
“I believe that nicotine is not addictive.” – Said every tobacco company executive back in the day when they were being grilled in front of Congress. We’ve seen this game played before. Only with nicotine, everyone knew someone who tried to quit and couldn’t, so the evidence was obvious to the layperson.
Unfortunately, when it comes to global warming, you and I will be dead and gone before the Republican Party admits that the rising ocean levels might have something to do with a greenhouse gas with the name of CO2. Some people are too stupid or stubborn to realize the difference between weather and climate so it’s not as obvious as nicotine addiction that we’re being played by the fossil fuel corporations.
Greedy scientists versus greedy corporations. I know which one in my mind has more money and wields more political influence in the United States.
If you dig into the details of the actual article you will find that currently the melting ice from Greenland is increasing sea levels by 0.8 mm a year, up from 0.53 mm a year from pre-industrial times. That equals an increase in the sea level of 80.0 mm in 100 years, or about 3.14 inches, versus the 2 inches it would have increased at the pre-industrial rate. So the only real impact of this will be the increase flow of icebergs into shipping lanes.
That sounds about right – trivial results having trivial effects. Florida and Manhattan are not going to be submerged in future any more than they were during the warming that allowed the temporary colonization of Greenland a millenniu or so ago. Native Americans from North American coastal areas have no legends of a Noachian flood at this point in history and for good reason – there wasn’t any.
Yes. And in terms of flooding in Florida, the real risk is lowering the level of the land by pumping the fresh water out of the ground.
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