"Goliath" Melting Year Shatters Records in Greenland





The mid-July event, according to Tedesco, “generated liquid water that refroze after a few days, changing the physical properties of the snowpack but very likely not contributing to the meltwater that run offs from the ice and can potentially contribute to sea level rise.”

The cumulative melting index, on the other hand, accounts for longer-term melting trends, during which meltwater can flow into the ocean. According to Tedesco’s research, Greenland experienced “extreme” melting across most regions, especially in the south, west, northwest and northeast, particularly at high elevations.

These high elevation areas, according to Tedesco, “are generally subject to a few days of melting (if it happens at all) and this year they underwent melting for more than 2 months (so far).

But perhaps a map is worth a thousand words. Here you see the 2012 anomaly of the number of melting days with respect to a 20 year average from 1980-1999. The areas in red are where melting lasted for up to 50 days more than that baseline.

Of course, plenty of deniers will argue that Greenland was once green, and that melt events like this occur regularly and Medieval Warm Period and so on and so forth.

To which you can reply: the surface air temperatures in Greenland are warmer now than at any point in recorded history, dating back 172 years, and are likely, according to Jason Box of Ohio State University, the highest they’ve been since the time the Norse colonized Greenland in 982.

And, yes, while temperatures were abnormally warm in Greenland then, during the Medieval Warm Period, globally temperatures were actually cooler than they are today.

As this handy map reveals, over much of the globe, temperatures were actually cooler during the MWP, relative to the averages from 1961-1990.

In other words, the Medieval Warm Period was really a regional, not global phenomenon. The warming trends we see today are global, as this next map clearly shows, also based on temperature variation from the same 1961-1990 baseline.

(Both maps courtesy of Skeptical Science)

And what’s more: the warming of the Medieval Warm Period was caused by factors that simply aren’t in play today, specifically solar radiation. The causes of the Medieval Warm Period’s regional temperature increases aren’t the same as those causing the global increases today. 

So, it's true, as Tedesco warned, that “we have to be careful because we are only talking about a couple of years and the history of Greenland happened over millennia.”

But he continues, “the warming that we see in the Arctic is responsible for triggering processes that enhance melting and for the feedback mechanisms that keep it going. Looking over the past few years, the exception has become part of the norm.”

And it's worth keeping in mind that what we're seeing has been forecast by climate models that warn of sea level rise driven by ice loss from Greenland. The only difference is that these models didn't anticipate so much warming – and melting – so soon. 


Drive by, contradict what scientists studying the problem have to say and provide no evidence or cites for your rubbish. That is all you lot have, fictitious tales and no evidence. Anyone who reads or looks around them can see the effects of AGW but if your head is buried in the sand (or elsewhere) you will not see the results of the effects of excessive burning of fossil fuels.

I’m afraid the only thing typical here is your response, an off-hand denuciation of my respose followed by the usual ad-hom style ‘rubbish’.

Scientist are saying;


Maybe you should do a little more research yourself instead of just hurling insults.

Why a serious scientist should say “Ice cores from Summit show that melting events of this type occur about once every 150 years on average. With the last one happening in 1889, this event is right on time”, when, if you actually look at the data you see that previous to the melting event in 1889 the last one was approximately 1000 years ago.


I don’t know who Lora Koenig is but it certainly was a remark that was not backed up by scientific data. Of course all the denier blogs immediately lapped it up and regurgitated it as if it was in fact true.

Why don’t you spend some time actually reading real reports rather than wasting your time on denier blogs or newspapers? You might learn something.

Ian, Lora Koenig is a NASA scientist (works in GISS) and her quote can be found here: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/greenland-melt.html

But Hank has left out her very next sentence, which appears at that link and which provides a bit more relevant context:

“But if we continue to observe melting events like this in upcoming years, it will be worrisome.” Given Tedesco’s data, I think we have good reason to be worried.

a closed mouth gathers no feet.

Perhaps the reason he got it wrong is that he went to the bible of the stupid and uneducated;


He cut, pasted, and pretended like he actually read something.  This is par for the course for Hank, and in fact all the deniers like him.

Hank… stopping getting your advice from simpletons and university drop outs like Watts….