Greenland’s Glaciers Expanding Again

By Paul Homewood

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Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Mass Balance 2017/18

http://www.dmi.dk/en/groenland/maalinger/greenland-ice-sheet-surface-mass-budget/#

As I reported last September, Greenland’s ice sheet mass balance had grown at close to record levels for the second year running.

To clarify again, the mass balance calculation accounts for:

1) Snowfall

2) Ice melt

3) Ablation

In other words, it does not include calving.

DMI’s Polar Portal has now published its report for the year. This is the summary:

Whilst NW Europe was enjoying a hot summer, Greenland’s was pretty miserable. This dipole is well known, and is sometimes known as the Atlantic see-saw. Often, when Europe enjoys hot weather, Greenland gets the opposite, and vice versa.

Greenland’s last really mild summer was in 2012, which Brits will not have forgotten was when we had record rainfall!

One statement which stands out is whilst glaciers have continued the development seen during the last six years in which they have more or less maintained their area.

We have been repeatedly told that these glaciers are disappearing quickly, but now we find that they have been stable since that warm summer of 2012.

DMI also add this graph:

DMI do not tell us how much this ice loss is in relative terms, and inevitably the y-axis is presented in true alarmist fashion!

They do admit that satellite monitoring of these 47 glaciers only began in 1999, so we have no way of knowing longer term trends prior to then.

Nevertheless, ice loss at glacier termini has been virtually insignificant in the last six years.

Given the positive surface mass balances seen every year, the ice sheet has almost certainly grown in overall terms since 2012.

The Polar Portal also provides easy to retrieve temperature data for the main sites:

At each station we find that temperatures since 2000 have been very similar to the 1930s and 40s, with the exception of 2012.

But perhaps even more significantly, the 1960s to 1980s were as cold at times as the extraordinarily times of the late 19thC. We must remember that the 19thC is well recognised to be probably the coldest period in Greenland since the end of the ice age.

Why anybody would regard the period 1960-90 as “normal” remains a mystery. Yet that is precisely what the so-called experts maintain.