Spiegel Report: “Greenland Melting More Slowly Than Expected” …Sea Level Rise Alarm Called Off!

GreenlandmountainsOnline Spiegel magazine (SPON) has an article today by Axel Bojanowski titled: “Sea level rise: Greenland melting more slowly than expected“.

Bojanowski writes:

Melting in Greenland is a decisive factor on how fast the sea level rises. Now research on five glaciers on the country are showing: The northern ice cap will indeed melt more gradually than assumed.”

This dumps cold water on the global climate catastrophe scenarios that the German government-funded climate institutes, media, and politicians of every party like to trumpet.

The Spiegel article cites a new study here that finds “melting Greenland glaciers will lead to less sea level rise over the next 200 years than earlier feared” and that “the accelerated ice loss of the past decades will not continue at the same rate.”

The Spiegel story contradicts an older 2010 New York Times 2010 doom and gloom portrayal of Greenland, which cited Stefan Rahmstorf, who said:

The past clearly shows that sea-level rise is getting faster and faster the warmer it gets. Why should that process stop? If it gets warmer, ice will melt faster.”

Of course we know that it hasn’t gotten warmer at all in 15 years, and may have even cooled slightly, and so the process naturally will not accelerate.

Rahmstorf is a leading scientist at the notoriously climate-catastrophe-obsessed Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. He once accused Spiegel of “climate scientist bashing” and “defamation”. Why? Because Spiegel dared to question his brand of bed-wetting alarmist climate science.

Bojanowski at SPON writes that the scientists reported here at Nature that a melting calculated under strongly rising temperatures for all of Greenland would lead to a sea level rise of maximum 18 cm…”well within the prognoses of the UN IPCC.”

But with global temperature data showing no warming in 15 years, oceanic cycles like the PDO and AMO turning negative, solar activity tanking, and many scientists projecting a slight to moderate cooling over the next decades, these newest prognoses may very well turn out to be exaggerated as well, especially for the next 50 years. Many parts of Greenland are indeed thickening.

In summary, it’s all very much in dispute. But we know things just don’t disintegrate like they do in Rahmstorf’s wild collapsing-world fantasies.

Bojanowski writes that glacier behavior is complex, and that predictions are fraught with uncertainty: “…the strong increase in ice loss of the past years will not continue in a linear manner, but instead will tend to moderate, the scientists suspect“. Remember – the scientists are assuming strong warming, which is not even happening.

The scientists say their predictions are “only a rough estimation that has to be fine-tuned with respect to the strong individual different dynamics“. Spiegel adds: “Calculations over ice melt in Greenland fluctuate because only very few glaciers have been systematically observed over many years.”

Photo credit: John at en.wikipedia, GNU Free Documentation License.

 

7 responses to “Spiegel Report: “Greenland Melting More Slowly Than Expected” …Sea Level Rise Alarm Called Off!”

  1. DirkH

    I get the feeling that all these scientists build or train models that more or less wiggle around current trend lines (i.e. are no better than a simple linear extrapolation) – and the scientists will release the model and the paper when they are satisfied that they have adaequatly expressed the simple trendline with a lot of complications added so that it is now sophisticated enough to shine in the scientific pantheon.

    Then, when the model fails, they make a new “improved” model, but again, it will be made in such a way that it does what the current linear trend does…

    So, this sciency business is the most expensive way to get linear trends.
    And it seems to have been done like that for 150 years; toggling between extrapolating warming and cooling:
    http://butnowyouknow.wordpress.com/those-who-fail-to-learn-from-history/climate-change-timeline/

    1. goldminor

      That is a great snapshot of how we adjust to climate change. Thanks for the share. We {society} keep adjusting after the fact and nature is already moving off in another direction. I have started including the term, 30yr cycle, in recent comments. Looking at the different term tree ring graphs plus graphs based on other proxies, it is easy enough to see an approximate 30 year grouping that will move warm or cold. In particular that tree study from JG/U published last year clearly shows the Sporer Minimum at 1470. Just prior to the onset of the Sporer take a look at the warm spike that precedes the GM.http://www.realclimate.org/images/N-Scan.jpg. It looks like it could be about a 25yr group, and it is also a part of a longer upward trending line. All of the GMs seem to share that similar several warming steps up than the downturn, with the last 30 year warm period before the cooling tending will be near record breaking or record breaking.

      1. DirkH

        That would make sense. If you see the sun as doing its thing with a constant intensity for about 200 years, then doing something less of it for 30 or 50 years, then the thermal inertia of the oceans works as an integrator, and so you would see a steady climb up during normal solar activity and a drop down during the “pauses”. Over the long term it averages out. Where that average is in absolute temperatures is dictated by the Stefan-Boltzmann law, as the integral of the thermal radiation out must be equivalent to the radiation in.

  2. Graeme No.3

    The original piece in Nature made it onto the front page of The Australian, May 9.

    The times they are a’changing.

  3. stephen richards

    The past clearly shows that sea-level rise is getting faster and faster the warmer it gets. Why should that process stop? If it gets warmer, ice will melt faster.”

    Rahmsdorf is of course correct in the statement. You have to understand that english is his second language.

    ” The past clearly shows that sea level rises faster and faster the warmer it gets. IF it gets warm ice melts. This process won’t stop. ”

    Voilà, he is correct. A nonsense statement that’s all.

  4. Wily Wayne

    The glaciers in the South American Andes need replenishment. Maybe someone can come up with a sensible method. Just put up an irradiance blocking satelite (IBS) to shade the mountain tops.

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