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Earth

Greenland Is Melting Even Faster Than Experts Thought, Study Finds (cnn.com) 265

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Climate change is eliminating giant chunks of ice from Greenland at such a speed that the melt has already made a significant contribution to sea level rise, according to a new study. With global warming, the island will lose much more, threatening coastal cities around the world. Forty percent to 50% of the planet's population is in cities that are vulnerable to sea rise, and the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is bad news for places like New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Mumbai.

Researchers reconstructed the mass balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet by comparing estimates of the amount of ice that has been discharged into the ocean with the accumulation of snowfall in the drainage basins in the country's interior for the past 46 years. The researchers found that the rate of ice loss has increased sixfold since then -- even faster than scientists thought. Since 1972, ice loss from Greenland alone has added 13.7 millimeters (about half an inch) to the global sea level, the study estimates. The island's ice sheet is the leading source of water added to the ocean every year.

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Greenland Is Melting Even Faster Than Experts Thought, Study Finds

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  • Climate scientists tend to be cautious in thier work for obvious reasons both scientific and political but this leads to the science underestimating the problem time and time again. Each time confidence increases it seems to center around a worse spot than before. In order to do the most good in the most efficient and effective ways, we need more satellites, more measurements, more research, more detailed models, and use more processing power to get ahead of the curve and try to start finding out what's g
    • Each time confidence increases it seems to centre around a worse spot than before.

      While this might be true this is where you can legitimately argue media bias in that media are going to deliberately select the studies with the worse possible outcomes and predictions since these are the most newsworthy. While it may be that we have underestimated the impact on human-caused climate change you cannot tell this by looking at the media because there are more and more studies being done which means that there will be more studies with large statistical deviations.

      For example, take a simple

  • Iceland is really Greenland and Greenland is really Iceland. Somebody got the backward all naming.

  • Heads in the sand (Score:5, Informative)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Monday April 22, 2019 @11:49PM (#58475538)

    Meanwhile, the US media & politicians have their heads in the sand. The consistently fail to make the connections between the dramatic increase in frequency & intensity of extreme weather events that climate change models predict. We hear more from climate change deniers that from climate scientists. Internet forums are awash with dismissive comments & denialism. The USA is already suffering $billions in damages & losses, & it's only going to get worse. Just accept it:

    • Climate change is real
    • We're feeling the effects now
    • It's going to get a whole lot worse
    • It's going to affect the quality of life & standards of living of most people
    • It'll take massive international government intervention to effectively mitigate the effects of climate change, while things are getting worse
    • The science facts don't care about your feelings
    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by fatwilbur ( 1098563 )
      Except that when news organizations make the same claims as you do re: "dramatic increase & frequency of extreme weather events, they have been forced to retract their claims [financialpost.com] because they aren't true.
    • So.... who is right then? CNN or NASA?

      https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]

    • This is a modification of a previous post. It's all well and good for researchers study climate change. To me, it's pretty clear that climate science has the general picture right, even if individual models are all imperfect and we don't know exactly when the effects are going to hit.

      We can shout about the coming problems until we're blue in the face, but I seriously doubt anything will be done until it becomes an IMMEDIATE problem that simply can't be denied. It will have to smack us in the face with
    • Climate change is real

      Absolutely! The climate is constantly changing because it's large and complex. We also live in an "open system", so the climate here on the surface is affected by outside forces. The #1 influence is the Sun and our orbit around it.

      We're feeling the effects now

      I certainly hope so, because if you can't feel the effect, you're either dead or in a vacuum. :)

      It's going to get a whole lot worse

      That's pretty subjective. I think we can also say it'll get a whole lot better too. See your first item about how the climate is changing. Now, the change is on a geological scale so yo

  • by Anonymous Coward
    Apparently for the last 2 years [wattsupwiththat.com] Greenland has been gaining ice, it's well above the mean level, in terms of mass balance. BTW, for the haters here, the link has data from the DMI... Gaining mass means not melting... So who's right?
  • Key Greenland glacier growing again after shrinking for years, NASA study shows
    “That was kind of a surprise.
    https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/s... [nbcnews.com]

    • (Disclaimer: I didn't R either FA)

      Glacier melt rate is only the negative portion of the first derivative (rate of change in glacier's size). How much water is leaving the glacier every year?

      Whether the glacier is growing or shrinking would be the sum of the negative and positive portions of the first derivative. How much water is leaving the glacier every year? Plus how much snow/ice is being added to the glacier every year. You could very well have a case where the glacier is melting faster than
  • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @09:27AM (#58477128)

    ... than a good 100 meter rise in the sea level to moderate the unchecked growth of human population on this planet.

  • The researchers found that the rate of ice loss has increased sixfold since then — even faster than scientists thought.

    Completely meaningless.

    Any methodology is based on a model. The model provides a bound. Scientists evaluate the paper, and then decide whether they trust the methodology, its execution, and its interpretation. For many reasons, however, extremely rough models are considered par for the course (aka "more funding required").

    Meanwhile, no scientist is wedded to the notion that a superior

  • What's the issue here? The planet has always changed and people have always moved to better pastures. Not sure why we expect or want the planet to be static.
  • With a rush of freshwater, it might stop the Atlantic conveyor which would help refreeze the Arctic.

"It might help if we ran the MBA's out of Washington." -- Admiral Grace Hopper

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