Scientists Confirm Dramatic Melting of Greenland Ice Sheet (theguardian.com) 163
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: There was a dramatic melting of Greenland's ice sheet in the summer of 2019, researchers have confirmed, in a study that reveals the loss was largely down to a persistent zone of high pressure over the region. The ice sheet melted at a near record rate in 2019, and much faster than the average of previous decades. Figures have suggested that in July alone surface ice declined by 197 gigatons -- equivalent to about 80 million Olympic swimming pools. Now experts have examined the level of melting in more detail, revealing what drove it. Crucially, the team note, the high pressure conditions lasted for 63 of the 92 summer days in 2019, compared with an average of just 28 days between 1981 and 2010. A similar situation was seen in 2012, a record bad year for melting of the ice sheet.
Writing in the journal the Cryosphere, [researchers] report how they used satellite data, climate models and global weather patterns to explore the melting of the surface of the ice sheet last year. Among their findings the team report that almost 96% of the ice sheet underwent melting at some time in 2019, compared with an average of just over 64% between 1981 and 2010. Using models, the pair also found that about 560Gt of meltwater runoff was generated in the summer of 2019. The surface mass balance, the amount of ice the sheet gained from rain and snowfall minus the amount lost through meltwater run off and evaporation, was just 54Gt a year -- about 320Gt a year lower than the average across the earlier decades, and the greatest such drop on record. Further analysis showed the level and distribution of melting to be closely tied to a number of factors, including levels of snowfall and reflection of sunlight -- known as albedo -- as well as cloudiness and absorption of sunlight. All of these, they note, were influenced by the persistent high pressure zone over the ice sheet last summer.
Writing in the journal the Cryosphere, [researchers] report how they used satellite data, climate models and global weather patterns to explore the melting of the surface of the ice sheet last year. Among their findings the team report that almost 96% of the ice sheet underwent melting at some time in 2019, compared with an average of just over 64% between 1981 and 2010. Using models, the pair also found that about 560Gt of meltwater runoff was generated in the summer of 2019. The surface mass balance, the amount of ice the sheet gained from rain and snowfall minus the amount lost through meltwater run off and evaporation, was just 54Gt a year -- about 320Gt a year lower than the average across the earlier decades, and the greatest such drop on record. Further analysis showed the level and distribution of melting to be closely tied to a number of factors, including levels of snowfall and reflection of sunlight -- known as albedo -- as well as cloudiness and absorption of sunlight. All of these, they note, were influenced by the persistent high pressure zone over the ice sheet last summer.
learn to swim (Score:1)
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North coast, Interesting, but really challenging on a technical front.
Connection? (Score:1, Troll)
It disappears right after Trump tried to buy it.
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It disappears right after Trump tried to buy it.
Quoting because the trolls apparently want to censor you. But why? I don't even get the joke. I think it was a joke, right?
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It disappears right after Trump tried to buy it.
Quoting because the trolls apparently want to censor you. But why? I don't even get the joke. I think it was a joke, right?
A while ago Trump suggested that he'd like to buy Greenland (with USA money of course). I'm not sure it's entirely a joke. If Trump was threatening to buy you, you'd want to disappear wouldn't you?
I'm assuming that the Trumpkins would like to forget this stupidity and try to pretend he's been a serious leader who could never do something silly like wait around for 6 weeks to act on news where they claim a 6 day delay can be seen as causing a disaster (and have a small point - 6 days delay probably cause
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I do remember the Greenland fiasco or joke or brain fart. It would be interesting to see (though I won't live that long) how historians will cover it, but I think it should get a mention of some sort. Evidence of Trump's deranged mental state? But I'm still having trouble figuring out the freshly attempted joke.
On the 6-day delay, the significance depends on the doubling times. The most interesting graph I've seen compares many countries using the 100-case date as a zero point to make the lines more compara
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My concern is that going from 10% more cases per day to 5% more cases per day because of measures implemented looks like we're flattening the curve but if we get stuck at 5% more cases per day then we're still on an exponential upcurve but we've simply slowed it down by 50%. My hunch is this is happening in a lot of places that have implemented some good measures but are still not strict enough to stop growth of the virus. Growth needs to be under 1% (per day) or we still end up with the whole population ge
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Basically concurrence, but that mostly helps make it clear why testing is so crucial. If Trump had any understanding of or interest in anything beyond the coming election, then February would have been focused on ramping up our testing capacity in a really gigantic way.
This graph https://www.visualcapitalist.c... [visualcapitalist.com] makes your point quite clearly. The calibration lines show the various doubling times. You can see that America was near the 2-day line, as bad as it gets, while Japan was much closer to the 10-day
well (Score:5, Insightful)
we are in the middle of a real life disaster with the pandemic and depression. And you can see how many people don't take that seriously. And you want people to take seriously an abstract risk thing like climate change?
Man there will be people denying it when all the coastal cities are underwater. If the pandemic has taught me anything its that a lot of people are simply clueless and think reality does not apply to them if they simply believe the problem is not happening. That works for a short while. Then of course, its someone elses fault and they still have an excuse not to participate. Some dense people out there only seem to get shit retrospectively, no matter how upfront you are with them.
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"Cities underwater" (Score:2)
Cities are easily modified and replaced over time. They aren't static and exist for purely economic reasons. Cities are are mere collections of buildings and infrastructure most of which needs modernization. The idea rising sea levels threaten anything not easily replaced is absurd. Demolish and move inland, problem solved as it's been solved for thousands of years. It's not as if they'll be flooded fast enough to interfere with function, a few tourist traps excepted.
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These are by and large the same people who belong to conservative evangelistic religions, so their thought processes are already suspect.
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Australia has only recorded 63 deaths
Because Australia implemented strict lockdown laws. Up until then, cases were quadrupling every week.
At that time, there were only 7 deaths - but even the politicians could see that exponential growth would blow that out fast - expected ~450 deaths by now, reaching 100,000 deaths in another month - and potentially a lot more, when our hospitals overflowed.
Italy, Spain, France, UK - they're all seeing thousands die in a single week. The US had over 10,000 deaths last week, and this death rate is still growin
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I've seen pictures of Australia. It's got, like, three people per square kilometer.
Not surprising the person-to-person transmission rate is low.
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This may surprise you, but we're not all spread out evenly.
Like I said, cases were quadrupling every week - pretty close to most other Western nations at the time, up until lockdown.
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we are in the middle of a real life disaster with the pandemic and depression. And you can see how many people don't take that seriously
what pandemic ? Australia has only recorded 63 deaths..
you can rest your case!
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Australia may not yet have a virus problem, but it does have a climate problem.
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https://www.abc.net.au/news/st... [abc.net.au]
Re: well (Score:2)
Verified troll
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Americans' notion of what a "pandemic" is is shaped by our popular entertainment, where of course it's always an existential threat everywhere.
That's not the case. A pandemic is an outbreak that crosses multiple national borders. People who live in a country where a pandemic has spread to might not even notice any changes in their daily lives -- the the US in the 2002 SARS pandemic. We had 27 cases.
The practical implication of a "pandemic" declaration is you shift your focus away from things like travel
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Think back to 2002, how many people traveled internationally? Even once in a lifetime? And how frequent was that travel? Today people go to Phuket or Machu Picchu for vacations without thinking twice, and we have 70 million refugees residing in other countries than than where they were born.
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Recent research indicates that the bat coronavirus may have migrated to dog lungs first rather than the wild animals previously blamed, probably from feral dogs eating dead bats.
https://medicalxpress.com/news... [medicalxpress.com]
Use a different unit (Score:2)
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So,:
A typical high school competition pool is half that length, so that's be about 160 million high school pools.
The Dinosaurous Fill 'N Fun Pool holds 426 gallons, or 1212 L, so this loss is about 124 billion Dinosaurous kiddie pools!!!!
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unless of course a piece of ice the size of a few dozen cubic km breaks of and slides into the water at once creating a hypertsunami
it is just me or... (Score:2)
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Which is why the temperature goes up as you climb in altitude into lower-pressure air? (Hint: the temperature actually goes down at lower pressure higher altitudes.)
High pressure weather patterns are much more complicated, and involve winds, waves of air, moisture content of the atmosphere, and rising and falling air currents.
Misleading Headline (Score:1, Interesting)
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And if you read the article even more carefully, the positive balance of precipitation, melting, and evaporation does not include the loss of mass from the glaciers sliding into the sea. (Which means the ice sheet actually grew smaller in mass.)
Ivory Tower (Score:2)
Comments on stories like this are usually the most entertaining. There's a few I would deem informative but the rest, well, they are pure entertainment. First it's the deniers or folks that try to make an argument about something in the article they feel is wrong. Next we have the folks who are 100% sure climate change is man made who instantly belittle the denier and then attempt to associate them with the president which they feel makes someone dumber.
I don't care about either "side". I try to do my best
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Comments on stories like this are usually the most entertaining. There's a few I would deem informative but the rest, well, they are pure entertainment. First it's the deniers or folks that try to make an argument about something in the article they feel is wrong. Next we have the folks who are 100% sure climate change is man made who instantly belittle the denier and then attempt to associate them with the president which they feel makes someone dumber.
looking through the commentary, the main mention of Trump here has been a discussion of how he wanted to buy Greenland.
Marginally off-topic, I'd say, but hardly "belittling the denier and then attempting to associate them with the president".
Quick (Score:2)
Meaningless Comparisons (Score:2)
This doesn't mean anything to me or anyone really. Wow 80 million swimming pool! WTF. It's a number beyond what people can put into real world comparisons. How about telling us how many inch rise in sea level it represents? Maybe combined with what percent decrease in the glacier/ice mass on the island. Something concrete. Last I heard, swimming pools were not an official S.I. unit.
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Re:Science (Score:5, Insightful)
Why can't (..)
197 Gigatonnes.
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Re: Science (Score:3)
Shorter of breath, one day deeper in debt.
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But don't worry, a small group in Lansing, Michigan has figured out a way to 3D-print a nuclear power plant, and they open-sourced the designs.
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Because math.
Let me guess. You're home schooled.
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I don't think we need to bring the ability to believe Trump (TDS) into this.
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I don't think we need to bring the ability to believe Trump (TDS) into this.
Quoted to annoy the censorious trolls and it's certainly part of the topic. At least for the sincere fools in contrast to the paid trolls.
Re:Weather, not climate (Score:5, Informative)
Nice strawman. Nothing in the article, summary, or comment that you didn't reply to claimed that the loss was due to climate.
Now the persistent melting of the Greenland ice sheets for more than the last 30 years, at increasingly faster rates [forbes.com], that's climate.
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The word 'huge' would have been better used, but then it's The Guardian...
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No, but it used the word 'dramatic', so that's setting the minds to drama, as in climate scare.
The word 'huge' would have been better used, but then it's The Guardian...
Stop being so dramatic. You're being a huge pedant.
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I understand that you're desperately trying to prop up your strawman while ignoring that much of the big, trumpeted melt from last year WAS from climate. I understand that a lot of the gloom-and-doom reports over the last 6 months about Greenland were about climate. You just choose to pretend that this report was one of them while ignoring the ones that focused on trends across decades, like the one that I linked and you ignored.
I understand quite well. You do too, but comment in ba
Re: Weather, not climate (Score:2)
But facts wonâ(TM)t stop them from wanting to grab more power. Itâ(TM)s all about power and control.
Re:Weather, not climate (Score:5, Informative)
Well, yes. Because it being cold, and ice advancing, have been transient and unsustained events.
It being hot, and ice melting, has persisted and accelerated for more than the last 30 years [pnas.org].
Weather = short term, climate = long term. Do you disagree with that dichotomy or not?
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It's just a coincidence that it's accelerating in lock-step with atmospheric CO2 concentrations and anthropologic releases of CO2 that are causing those concentrations to spike in a way that they didn't for about 12,000 years.
The accelerating heat bit hasn't been happening in the way that you pretend it has. Try again.
Re:Weather, not climate (Score:5, Insightful)
What if wingnuts stopped being willfully obtuse? Why is Venus hotter than Mercury? Why is it that an 8th grader can prove the CO2 greenhouse effect for a class science project but you remain in denial?
Re: Weather, not climate (Score:2)
Hear hear
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If you say so.
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Why is it that an 8th grader can prove the CO2 greenhouse effect for a class science project
How does that work?
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What type of measurement instrument? A thermometer? A light intensity meter? And what exactly are you "proving" here? That a transparent vessel lets infrared light through? How does that show the earth is heating up?
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What if wingnuts stopped being willfully obtuse?
I think you missed that sentence.
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Earth is not an open system except on geological scales. If you're actually serious about the second half of that sentence then you really have no clue how complex systems work, and I'm not going to waste the time educating you.
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The transparent vessel isn't a closed system either, so once again you've viciously attacked a strawman. The straw can be reused, but where do you get the clothes?
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And thus, using LynwoodRooster's logic, we can prove that gravity doesn't exist, since we are unable to come up with an analytical solution for gravitation between more than 2 bodies.
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Easily. [youtube.com]
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What if wingnuts stopped being willfully obtuse? Why is Venus hotter than Mercury? Why is it that an 8th grader can prove the CO2 greenhouse effect for a class science project but you remain in denial?
Atmospheric density.
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Hardly just density. Is your willful obtuseness generator powered by fusion?
oh common mods that was funny (Score:2)
Well, yeah, not that it would be wrong if I was.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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I think both men and women will agree
it's fine [youtube.com]
to love [youtube.com]
this sort [youtube.com]
of Mercury [youtube.com]
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What if the earth is just returning to what were long term climate norms? [livescience.com]
We all die? In the "long term" the Earth is a cooling lava ball with no possible breathable atmosphere and no living creatures. At one end far too hot, at the other far too cold as the universe heads towards heat death. There seems to be some feeling that environmentalism is some kind of wishy washy "save the planet" thing. No. The planet will likely be fine even when every every living thing on it is dead. This is about maintaining the nice, likely metastable, temperate environment together with the
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This is about maintaining the nice, likely metastable, temperate environment together with the whole supporting set of ecosystems that allow us, humans, and our children to live in comfort.
Good. Since that's the goal, let's get the CO2 up to about 1000 ppm, warm it up 2-4 degrees, and plants and animals and humans will thrive!
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The climate of the planet has never changed as rapidly as it is now. If we were returning to long term climate norms over a period of 10000 years no one would give a shit. Do the same in 100 years (which you can directly blame humankind for) and you will fuck up much of the planet.
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Well, to be accurate, we can't measure past rates of change over such short time frames that precisely when looking back millions and billions of years.
Never may be too strong of a word, even if this rate of change is quite unusual and pobably unique within the history of mankind and its ancestors.
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Really?
Yes. If you don't believe me you can read your own links.
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He's also aware (or at least should be by now) that the Little Ice Age was in part the result of the Black Death followed by the Great Dying in the Americas causing reforestation. A hundred years after bubonic plague ripped through eastern Europe travelers said, "A squirrel could travel from Budapest to Krakow without leaving the trees." By the time the population of Europe and Central Asia had recovered 70-90 percent of everyone in the Americas was dying.
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The Black Death tore through eastern Europe and central Asia later than western Europe (less filth and poverty than in the west), and still had periodic eruptions well into the 17th century. Forests take centuries to regrow to the point where they can sequester a meaningful amount of carbon. By the time that population had rebounded sufficiently that they were cutting the forests down again the civilizations of the Americas were in collapse and forests were regrowing. When the European barbarians arrived
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Perhaps not, they are too busy denying the pandemic.
https://skepticalscience.com/c... [skepticalscience.com]
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https://xkcd.com/2278/ [xkcd.com]
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Like the conflict between quantum theory and relativity. Wow, making moronic comparisons is easy!!
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If you're referring to the second Iraq war by Bush the Younger, then yes, all the US mil experts were fairly certain that Iraq did not have any significant WMD capability. Unfortunately, Cheney & his cronies politicized the intelligence reports in order to push their agenda to make money.
Is that question even a sentence? Anyway, the actual military assessments were secret, remember the P
Re: Its CHI-na (Score:3, Interesting)
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Really have no clue at all what unions are about, do you?
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Teamsters?
My dad organized the iron foundry where he worked in the 1960s. When he started guys were pouring molten iron wearing tennis shoes and sunglasses because the company was too cheap to buy safety equipment. Two guys had died in the shop in the decade before the union came in, and others were crippled or blinded (which almost happened to Dad). You can take your "All unions are useless" crap and shove it where the sun don't shine.
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I think you mean "JI-na".
China emits about twice the CO2 as the US, but it emits less than half on a per capita basis.
Also complicating this is that a lot of US manufacturing is outsourced to China, so some of what they're emitting is to make things consumed by us. The US is somewhat more efficient at electricity than China on a CO2 per kwh basis, because of China's reliance on coal.
So the notion of bringing back manufacturing jobs from China would help CO2 somewhat, but only if we don't follow through on
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Re: Its CHI-na (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: Its CHI-na (Score:1)
Have you been there? I have. China is a fucking wasteland of inefficiency and brute force stupidity.
Take 1.5 billion rice farmers out of the equation who produce essentially zero CO2 due to subsistence farming and the per capita numbers show just how horribly inefficient their CO2 producing industries are.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics. Which were you using?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita
The best
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Rice paddies generate massive amounts of methane and with deforestation by other farmers may have been at least partly responsible for stopping the re-glaciation we should be experiencing now.
Answer depends on the question [Re:Its CHI-na] (Score:2)
I regret responding to an AC, but China spits out 9056.8MT of CO2, to our 4833.1MT. Its not whataboutism, its fucking science.
Depends on what you're measuring. If you measure which country has put more CO2 into the atmosphere? the answer is, the United States has put the most CO2 into the atmosphere (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions).
If you're asking, what is the current rate of emitting CO2, the answer is China is currently emitting more than the U.S.. But it will take a very long time before they catch up to what we've already emitted.
...and if you're measuring CO2 emissions per person, the U.S. is nu
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"Most of the CO2 emitted and in the atmosphere now was emitted by western countries over the last century,"
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Yeah, just the the Bugblatter Beast (Douglas Adams) who assumes if it cannot see you, you cannot see it.
Re: Scientists Confirm Dramatic Melting of Greenla (Score:2)
Nah. We are run by vogons.
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You got it backwards. If you can't see the Bugblatter Beast, it assumes it can't see you, which is why the best way to escape it is to shut your eyes.
Of course that doesn't make sense. That's why it's funny.
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That's because Fox News is an entertainment network rather than actual news network.
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If you remove the ice sheet Greenland is a bunch of large islands that would be bare rock. Ever been to northern Ontario? Granite, bogs, wimpy trees growing in paper-thin soil, and the most amazing clouds of mosquitoes you've ever imagined. After 10,000 ice-free years Greenland might possibly be as productive as that.