Greenland really has been melting, can someone tell Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts has decided once again that he, ex-weather announcer, knows all about ice in Greenland, and the real experts "don't know nuffin'". His headline (archived here) is: "Failed claim right out of the gate: Climate change altering Greenland ice sheet & accelerating sea level rise". And he took it upon himself, the ahem Greenland pseudo-scientist at WUWT, to continue:

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:

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

Climate disinformer Patrick Moore talks to deniers at the GWPF

Semi-professional climate disinformer Patrick Moore gave a talk to UK climate science deniers the other day. Anthony Watts posted it under a headline: "Greenpeace founder delivers powerful annual lecture, praises carbon dioxide – full text" (archived here). Powerful? No. Pseudo-scientific rubbish? Yes. I don't know what the audience in general thought of his nonsense. It probably didn't register with many of them. All they wanted was to hear someone they felt was on "their side". The people who invited him most likely knew he would spout a load of nonsense, and couldn't get anyone more credible to talk. Well, who is left these days?

Patrick spent the first part of his talk on himself. He's a hero in his own mind. A born-again denier. I cannot imagine that he believes the words that come out of his mouth, but they help him earn a crust in his chosen field. Science denial.

The basis of his claim was that without CO2 the planet would be dead, therefore the more we have the better. That's like saying to a drowning woman - without water we'd all be dead so suck it up.

Warning: this is a long article, but it covers a lot of ground

Searching for the dragons - with Richard Alley at AGU14

Professor Richard Alley gave one of the first lectures at AGU14. (Click here for how to view AGU14 videos.)

Richard talks in his usual lively manner, with an early reference to the possibility that some things may happen very quickly, much faster than economic discounting allows. He talks about how faster, less-expected changes would be very damaging to economies and ecosystems. He says that "in some sense, we are searching for the dragons that are out there" - in a reference to a fifteenth century map showing where "here be dragons".


He points out that when we discover a possible dragon part we examine it further - and often find that it's "not likely to eat us" - or we may find that it is indeed really dangerous.

Behind the times (in Greenland) at WUWT. The year is not 1855, it's 2014!

Anthony Watts has put up another shonky chart of GISP2 temperatures (archived here). No-one's complained so far, but he's got the current temperature in central Greenland as being about as cold as the Little Ice Age or colder.

Here is GISP2 from the Richard Alley data (Cuffey and Clow). These data go from 95 years BP to almost 50,000 years ago. I've only included the past 20,000 years or so. 95 years before present is 95 years before 1950, which is 1855. I've put in the average temperature at the summit for the decade 2001-2010, which was 29.9°C, as indicated in Kobashi et al (2011), which I discuss a bit further down.

Data source: Alley, R.B..  2004. GISP2 Ice Core Temperature and Accumulation Data. IGBP PAGES/World Data Center for Paleoclimatology Data Contribution Series #2004-013. NOAA/NGDC Paleoclimatology Program, Boulder CO, USA.

Here is the WUWT chart:

See how Anthony Watts reckons that it's as cold as the coldest period in the Little Ice Age? He's put the "present temperature" and "present global warming" the same as the temperature back in 1855.

Look more closely. You'd have thought Anthony and his merry band would have known when the denier's favourite periods, the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period took place. But he gets those wrong, too. [h/t a few people]

He's been told about this over and over and over again. But he won't take any notice. At WUWT it's whatever you can get away with to reject science.

Here are charts from the 2011 paper by Takuro Kobashi and colleagues, showing surface temperatures in Greenland over the past 4,000 years.

Figure 1. (top) Reconstructed Greenland snow surface temperatures for the past 4000 years and air temperature over the past 170 years (1840–2010) from three records. The thick blue line and blue band represents the reconstructed Greenland temperature and 1s error, respectively (this study). The reconstruction was made by two different methods before and after 1950. The “gas method” is as described in section 2, and the “forward model” is described by Kobashi et al. [2010]. Thick and thin black lines are the inversion!adjusted reconstructed Summit annual air temperatures and 10!year moving average temperatures, respectively [Box et al., 2009]. Thin and thick red lines are the inversion adjusted annual and 10!year moving average AWS temperature records, respectively [Stearns and Weidner, 1991; Shuman et al., 2001; Steffen and Box, 2001; Vaarby!Laursen, 2010]. (middle) Past 1000 years of Greenland temperature. Thick blue line and band are the same as above. Black and red lines are the Summit [Box et al., 2009] and AWS [Stearns and Weidner, 1991; Shuman et al., 2001; Steffen and Box, 2001; Vaarby!Laursen, 2010] decadal average temperatures as above. (bottom) Past 4000 years of Greenland temperature. Thick blue line and band are the same as above. Thick green line represents 100!year moving averages. Black and red lines are the Summit [Box et al., 2009] and AWS [Stearns and Weidner, 1991; Shuman et al., 2001; Steffen and Box, 2001; Vaarby!Laursen, 2010] decadal average temperature, respectively. Blue and pink rectangles are the periods of 1000–2010 C.E. (Figure 1, middle) and 1840–2010 C.E. (Figure 1, top), respectively. Present temperature is calculated from the inversion adjusted AWS decadal average temperature (2001–2010) as −29.9°C (Figure 1, top). Present temperature and ±2s are illustrated by lines in the plots. Green circles are the current decadal average temperature as above (−29.9°C, 2001–2010). Source: 

A cosmic event, but no certainty

Anthony's shonky chart was to illustrate a press release about a new paper in the Journal of Geology, which is about the distribution of nanodiamonds, which the authors say support the hypothesis that the Younger Dryas cooling was caused by a cosmic collision, perhaps a comet, crashing here on Earth.

You can read the press release here. If you've a subscription, you can read the paper here.

Neither the press release nor the paper makes the strong claim of Anthony's headline, which was: "Younger Dryas climate event solved via nanodiamonds – it was a planetary impact event". The press release and the paper talk about the evidence being consistent with the cooling 12,800 years ago being caused by a cosmic impact, and inconsistent with it being caused by "natural terrestrial processes".

I'm not making any comment on the paper. Feel free to talk about it if you want to. I was mainly writing this article to talk about the mislabelled chart that keeps resurfacing at WUWT in one guise or other.

From the WUWT comments

By the time I'd finished writing, I see that finally at least one person commented on Anthony's chart. Greg asked:

August 29, 2014 at 9:20 am
What’s the source of the Greenland temp graph in this article?
Showing current temperatures almost as low as LIA :?

gary gulrud would like to see other evidence of a cosmic impact. That's not an unreasonable request.

August 29, 2014 at 10:19 am
Not an expert but 13,000 years is like geologic yesterday. Point me to the crater, please?

There were various other comments and speculation. The deniers are playing sceptic (for a change).

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Kobashi, Takuro, Kenji Kawamura, Jeffrey P. Severinghaus, Jean‐Marc Barnola, Toshiyuki Nakaegawa, Bo M. Vinther, Sigfús J. Johnsen, and Jason E. Box. "High variability of Greenland surface temperature over the past 4000 years estimated from trapped air in an ice core." Geophysical Research Letters 38, no. 21 (2011). DOI: 10.1029/2011GL049444

Charles R. Kinzie et al "Nanodiamond-Rich Layer across Three Continents Consistent with Major Cosmic Impact at 12,800 Cal BP" The Journal of Geology. Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/677046

Greenland has been (partly) white for a very long time, when will it turn green again?

Today Anthony Watts has an article about Greenland (archived here).  He copied a press release about how scientists have evidence that the ice sheet in Greenland could be 2.7 million years old. This could be something of a surprise, because recent thinking was that the ice sheet may have almost disappeared in MIS 11, about 400,000 years ago (eg Alley et al 2010).

I found out that the paper was published yesterday in Science Express. From sciencedaily.com:

The new discovery indicates that even during the warmest periods since the ice sheet formed, the center of Greenland remained stable; "it's likely that it did not fully melt at any time," Vermont's Bierman said. This allowed a tundra landscape to be locked away, unmodified, under ice through millions of years of global warming and cooling.

"The traditional knowledge about glaciers is that they are very powerful agents of erosion and can effectively strip a landscape clean," said study co-author Lee Corbett, a UVM graduate student who prepared the silty ice samples for analysis. Instead, "we demonstrate that the Greenland Ice Sheet is not acting as an agent of erosion; in fact, at it's center, it has performed incredibly little erosion since its inception almost three million years ago."...

The scientists examined the lowest 13 m of the GISP2 core, which had not been examined closely.  GISP2 is in central Greenland.

Source: North Greenland Ice Core Project (2004) 

That lowermost section of the core had a lot of sediment in it. The team used measurements of measurements of atmospherically produced (meteoric) ¹⁰Be, carbon and nitrogen in the sediment to figure out things like where the sediment came from and how old it was.  What they discovered was that below the silty ice in the lowest 13 m of the core was 48 cm of diamict lying over granite. The ice at the summit is frozen to the bed and, through modeling, the scientists estimate it's been in place for "at least the last several glacial cycles".

¹⁰Be comes from the atmosphere (produced by cosmic rays) and precipitates or falls down to the surface and sticks to the soil.  It has been used to date soils and to estimate the rate of erosion.  Measurements of this, plus organic carbon and total nitrogen allow a picture to be built up of the history of the ice sheet and the underlying surface.  From sciencedaily.com:

...The researchers expected to only find soil eroded from glacier-scoured bedrock in the sediment at the bottom of the ice core. “So we thought we were going looking for a needle in haystack,” Bierman said. They planned to work diligently to find vanishingly small amounts of the beryllium—since the landscape under the ice sheet would have not been exposed to the sky. “It turned out that we found an elephant in a haystack,” he said; the silt had very high concentrations of the isotope when the team measured it on a particle accelerator at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

“On a global basis, we only find these sorts of beryllium concentrations in soils that have developed over hundreds of thousands to millions of years,” said Joseph Graly, who analyzed the beryllium data while at the University of Vermont.

Without going into too much detail, what I gather is there was too much ¹⁰Be in the soil for anything but a very long period of exposure to the atmosphere. Longer than would have been possible if the soil had been exposed in more recent interglacials. They concluded that "the data are most consistent with soil formation prior to the existence of the present GIS".  And given that it's still there intact, they concluded that the ice sheet has been very stable at the base and has been there for the best part of the past 2.7 million years. Before that, it was likely tundra. In fact the ¹⁰Be under the Greenland ice sheet was found to at levels very similar to the permafrost tundra in Alaska today.

This of course has implications for what will happen as we heat up the planet.  From ScienceDaily.com again:

Many geologists are seeking a long-term view of the history of the Greenland Ice Sheet, including how it moves and has shaped the landscape beneath it -- with an eye toward better understanding its future behavior. It's 656,000 square miles of ice, containing enough water, if fully melted, to raise global sea levels twenty-three feet -- "yet we have very little information about what is happening at the bed with regards to erosion and landscape formation," said Corbett.

What is clear, however, from an abundance of worldwide indicators, is that global temperatures are on a path to be "far warmer than the warmest interglacials in millions of years," said Bierman. "There is a 2.7-million-year-old soil sitting under Greenland. The ice sheet on top of it has not disappeared in the time in which humans became a species. But if we keep on our current trajectory, the ice sheet will not survive. And once you clear it off, it's really hard to put it back on."

This puts the final nail in the coffin for last year's WUWT article about how Greenland ice sheet was only 650 years old.  That article had a not-so-brief appearance at WUWT before Anthony finally responded to the guffaws (even from deniers) and took it down.

From the WUWT comments

It doesn't suit the crowd, some of whom want to argue about Eric the Red and the vikings. Lee says:

April 17, 2014 at 8:10 pm
Least we forget that the Vikings grew crops on Greenland 1000 years ago where permafrost exists today.

mickgreenhough says:

April 17, 2014 at 11:07 pm
In 982 Eric the Red sailed west from Iceland and found a ‘green land’ He started a settlement there which grew to 4-5000 people and 150 farms. It lasted some 400years until the ‘Little Ice age’ of the Middle Ages saw the return of ice to Greenland. [redacted link]

Colorado Wellington says:

April 17, 2014 at 11:16 pm
“Greenland really was green! However, it was millions of years ago,” said Rood …
Expanding on the authors’ pop commentary we must conclude that Erik the Red knew this and decided to wait it out.

Stephen Singer says:

April 17, 2014 at 5:46 pm
I’d suggest that it’s more likely humankind and other species are likely to disappear before the Greenland ice sheet does. One needs to remember that the earths continents are tectonic plates in very slow motion. Anybody think they know where the current continents are going to be in say 1-100 million years from now and what species will still exist. Your guess on that question maybe more accurate than current prognostications about what a few 100 parts per million increase in CO2 will do to all earths species.

Mike Bromley the Kurd says:

April 17, 2014 at 5:53 pm
“[it] will have a fundamental influence on how fast and high global sea levels rise from human-caused climate change.”

I beg your pardon? Talk about an agenda-powered presupposition, in bold face. That slithered by the reviewers like sub-glacial slime mold.

George Turner raises an interesting possibility and says:

April 17, 2014 at 5:53 pmThis raises the interesting possibility of finding fairly fresh remains of long extinct species, either in Greenland or Antarctica.

William McClenney says (excerpt):

April 17, 2014 at 5:58 pm
Two of the main problems with some of the central Greenland cores, in particular GISP and GISP2 are described in: http://epic.awi.de/10226/1/Nor2004a.pdf

“The two deep ice cores drilled at the beginning of the 1990s in central Greenland (GRIP1–3 and GISP24,5, respectively 3,027m and 3,053m long) have played a key role in documenting rapid climate changes during the last glacial period. However, it quickly became clear that the bottom 10% of at least one (and most probably both) of these ice cores4,6–9 was disturbed owing to ice folding close to the bedrock. The Central Greenland ice core records are fully reliable climate archives back to 105,000 years before present (105 kyr BP), but the disturbances mean that no reliableNorthern Hemisphere ice core record of the previous interglacial (the Eemian climatic period) was known to exist in the Northern Hemisphere.”

The first problem being that ~10% of the bottom core is folded.

The second problem is that no ice dated older than 105,000 years has been described in the literature to my knowledge, which is what makes this somewhat dubious.

It is exceptionally difficult to age date ice, particularly if it has been disturbed. It normally requires layer counting, registration with known tephras (volcanic ash layers) etc. etc. So I will be interested to see how they dated this ice to some 25 TIMES older than the oldest known ice (at least known to me). 

If William had read the paper or the press release or Anthony's article, he'd have seen that the scientists weren't dating ice, they were dating the soil and sediment at the bottom of the ice.


spangled drongo says:

April 17, 2014 at 6:05 pm
What’s our current trajectory? Warming or cooling?

Then there are the conspiracy theorists like DirkH, who says:

April 18, 2014 at 2:37 am
The money quote at the end. Scientists prostituting themselves for the globalist cause. Well, they always wanted to become the benevolent technocrat dictators of the entire world anyway.
They’re all giddy for dictatorship.

James Martin says:

April 17, 2014 at 6:26 pm
What bothers me in reading this is how any climate scientist – or any layperson with an IQ over 90 – not come to realize the true magnitude of global climate variability, and from this see that the amount of increase in the latter part of the last century was nothing new or out of the norm? The spin is so apparent as to be nauseating – and to suggest we are headed for being warmer than any previous interglacial? Really?? Why not post some numbers from prior interglacials and let’s compare, rather than make some comment that some would take as truth because some “expert” said it is so.

Rick K says:

April 17, 2014 at 6:30 pm
What is clear, however, from an abundance of worldwide indicators, is that global temperatures are on a path to be “far warmer than the warmest interglacials in millions of years,” said Bierman.

THAT… is a lie.

Mark 543 says:

April 17, 2014 at 6:33 pm
Even at high end warming estimates it would take hundreds of years to melt the Greenland ice sheet. The problem for future generations is that they will never have stable coastlines.

Eve says:

April 17, 2014 at 6:47 pm
They gave ti add the last bit to get their paper published. Even though they know that this planet has done nothing but cool through it’s life.

SIGINT EX says:

April 17, 2014 at 7:53 pm
For more than three decades, Science and the American Association of Science have been allied to fraud and malfeasance, unethical behavior and lack of morality.
Yet again, “Science” stands up to be beheaded yet again.
A sad epitaph.

Science is moving way too quickly and far beyond the comprehension of asybot who says (and I sympathise):

April 18, 2014 at 12:32 am
I am getting tired of the time frames used in some of these models papers and reports, 2 million years here, 4 million years there. I have lived and farmed on my property for a little over 25 years in some places the land has “settled” 6 to 10 feet (ok, 2-3 mtrs) without a 2 mile icecap. Add to that that in a news item today the “Keppler” scientists have found an earth like “Rockey” planet 500 light years away in a solar system where it is called “Kepler186-F” .

Sorry but can some one help me here ? How can we see a “rockey” planet the size of earth 500 light years away? (We can barely see ice movements in the arctic from a 100 miles up!) In a solar system that has a red dwarf star (less bright than our sun). Can some one put that in physical perspective .

This is a grain of sand and then compare it to what Keppler 186f would look like from our point of view. I know the answers are going to include ” the permutations of the orbits of the other planets etc etc I do not believe for one second the scientists coming to these conclusions are much different than Mann etc . The conclusions they give are almost, if not impossible, to contest they have all the funding to keep on keep on going on. The Keppler project is important but do they have any template to hold up, ( gee maybe I am getting way to skeptical.) to compare their findings of today with? 

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Paul R. Bierman, Lee B. Corbett, Joseph A. Graly, Thomas A. Neumann, Andrea Lini, Benjamin T. Crosby, Dylan H. Rood. Preservation of a Preglacial Landscape Under the Center of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Science, 2014 DOI: 10.1126/science.1249047

Alley, R.B., et al., History of the Greenland Ice Sheet: Paleoclimatic insights, Quaternary Science Reviews (2010), doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2010.02.007

Abrupt climate change at #AGU13 but still no reporting @wattsupwiththat from Anthony Watts

I made time this morning to watch some of the talks at the AGU Fall Meeting.  There was a particularly interesting segment on abrupt climate change.

Sea level rise with Richard Alley in Greenland and Antarctica

It started with a talk by Richard Alley who manages to be forceful about the need to take note of the science in a very engaging way.  (He's also recognised as the only climate scientist who can use the Comic Sans font and get away with it.)

Richard Alley spoke about the potential for abrupt sea level rise, particularly if the ice in Western Antarctica breaks down.  He pointed out that with the pace of change we're forcing, we're in unknown territory.  It reminded me of the Hansen et al paper in PLOS that was published earlier this month.

Richard Alley impresses with his message, like when he spoke of Hurricane Sandy and said in his slow understated way: "So when it comes fast, it's a bad thing." And then said how the sea level rise has not been fast - yet. Later on he put up these sea level projections - with some estimates a bit higher than in the IPCC report:

Richard Alley took a shot at economists who underplay the problems, too. I'm sure they know who they are. Then he got to the big question: What will the ice sheets do?

Thermal expansion alone will result in about 0.4 m (a foot) per degree Celsius.  But that, he said, is a "thousand year problem" because it takes a long time to warm the ocean.  It's the ice sheets that are the biggest problem in the near term.  As Richard Alley said, the uncertainty is "lopsided on the bad side".  In short, the Pine Island and Thwaites Glaciers in Antarctica are flowing quickly but they've got to get through a narrow neck.  If that neck gets unblocked then we're in unknown territory. The ice there represents around 3.3 metres or 10 feet of sea level rise.  It's "jammed up behind a narrow mouth".  Richard said if it retreats "we get into physics that we don't really know what to do with yet".  Ice exhibits tipping behaviour.  Nothing happens for a while then all of a sudden....

Megadroughts and food shortages

There were some other excellent talks in the session on abrupt climate change, including a session on megadroughts - which can occur with or without AGW which is a big worry.  It's like we're daring nature to do her worst.  And a talk about food security and the sort of perils we are likely to have to deal with on that score this century, including the fact that we're soon going to be calling for genetic modification because conventional plant breeding just won't produce the results we need in a changing climate quickly enough.

All up a very informative day and all from the comfort of my home.

How did Anthony Watts fare?

Well, after Day Three there is still no evidence that Anthony Watts has seen anything he's capable of reporting on at the AGU Fall Meeting.  He did manage to muscle a handshake with a real scientist and passed another one he recognised in the corridor.  And he got to ask James Hansen a question, but we don't know the answer.

I get the feeling that Anthony Watts wants to be acknowledged in some way by "famous climate scientists". It might even be the reason he went to AGU13.  On the other hand he has to keep up his image with the denialati and maintain his rage at climate science and his mocking stance towards those same "famous climate scientists" - like his tweet about a slide from Richard Alley's talk this morning.

Given Anthony hasn't been able to produce any actual reporting or commentary like he promised, and he's had no luck getting any attention from anyone who's at AGU for the science, I wonder if this is the last time he'll venture into the lions' den or was it a den of thieves?

Of course he might surprise us and, using the video camera he has in a box, provide some polished in-depth interviews with some of the world's leading scientists who attended AGU13.  I won't hold my breath.

(I just watched Sharknado which, as everyone knows, was caused by climate change.  It was at least as credible as most of the comments at WUWT!)