From the “why worry, the 99.7% of the ice is still there” department and York University comes this climate claim that has to do with a natural event in 2012, and just doesn’t hold up as being driven by “climate change”. More details on that below.If 20% of the ice in Greenland melted, there'd be a rise in sea level of about 1.2 metres or 4 feet. But leaving his "why worry" aside, Anthony was protesting a new paper in Nature Climate Change by Horst Machguth and a large team of scientists. The paper was related to the widescale melt of the surface, such as happened in 2012. It's also to do with the overall warming of Greenland and surface melting in general, particularly the implications for melt runoff and sea level rise.
The latest Arctic report card shows that last year (2015), more than half of the ice sheet had a surface melt, which was the most widespread melt since 2012, and was "above the 1981-2010 average on 54.3% of days (50 of 92 days)".
It's not just a random surface melt that ices up again quickly, either. Greenland is losing ice mass, as the chart below (from the same report) shows:
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| Fig 1. | Cumulative change in the total mass (in Gigatonnes, Gt) of the Greenland Ice Sheet between April 2002 and April 2015 estimated from GRACE measurements. Each symbol is an individual month and the orange asterisks denote April values for reference. Source: Arctic Report Card |
