Canadian Glaciers, Ice Caps Melting Too

Glaciers and ice caps in the Canadian Arctic Archipelego have started melting.  This will contribute to sea-level rise for the remainder of the 21st century.  That’s a problem because the area contains one-third of the global volume of land ice outside the ice sheets.

Researchers found that the islands lost about 61 gigatonnes of ice per year from 2004 to 2009, enough to raise global sea levels about a millimeter in that time.

That rate of melt will only increase in the years ahead.  More mass into the world’s oceans and more heat accumulated from global warming means the rate that sea level rise is increasing will also increase.  And because of the out-sized influence of the dirty energy industry and its apologists, we remain unprepared for that situation.  Preparing for it will only become more expensive with time.

Quick Hit: Ice Sheet Melt Picks Up

I’ve encountered folks writing or saying that the globe and/or poles are actually cooling and that melting glaciers are completely natural and people aren’t influencing them significantly.  The truth (based on actual observations) is that the poles have warmed more than the rest of the globe.  The truth is that the land-based ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica are melting at faster rates than they did during the 20th century.  Those land-based ice sheets are what will cause sea level rise to reach dangerous rates and levels unless we do everything we can today to slow down their melt rate.

From an MSNBC article:

The ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are melting faster than expected, Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, an expert with the Center for Ice and Climate at the University of Copenhagen, told the Arctic Council conference in the Arctic town of Tromsoe.

The 2007 IPCC report issued a sea level rise forecast of a couple of feet – at worst.  Observations since that report was issued, including ones Ms. Dahl-Jensen are basing her warning on, are outpacing the rates that were in the 2007 IPCC report.  The only 2-year old forecast of a couple of feet of sea level rise (in itself catastrophic for geopolitical stability) is already an antique.  More realistic levels based on rates seen in the past two years point toward 5-foot sea level rise, which would be even more devastating to global societies and ecosystems.

Climate Change News: The Poles and Warming Trends

Interested parties were smart to start the most recent International Polar Year, which actually lasted from 2007 to 2009.  As a result, lots of study findings and papers are being issued as it wraps up.  It’s not any time too soon for it.  One summary study found that the Arctic and Antarctic regions are warming faster than before and as a result, more ice mass is being lost than was predicted just a short two years ago.  Numerous glacier fields on Greenland and Antarctica are moving toward the ocean much, much faster than they were 10 and 20 years ago.  It’s these glaciers that have many worried since they reside on land and not water.  Once they move into the water, they will raise sea levels.  If they’re doing that faster than climatologists currently account for in models, current predictions of sea level rise are no good.  The threat to global societies is higher than most people currently think:

A 2007 IPCC report predicted a sea level rise of 7 to 23 inches by the end of the century, which could flood low-lying areas and force millions to flee. The IPY group said an additional 3.9 to 7.8 inches rise was possible if the recent, surprising melting of polar ice sheets continues.

The increase in seaward speed has led glaciologists to call for additional monitoring.  East Antarctica, for instance, has millions of square miles of ice that could potentially melt.  Right now, they have only the barest of ideas of the behavior of the ice.  That’s the kind of thing that has to be pinned down so scientists can monitor conditions so they can offer policy makers the best information possible moving forward.

Meanwhile, the corporate media continue to misreport the problem.  Take this MSNBC article, for instance.  It’s lede?  “Warming might be on hold, study finds”.  Global warming isn’t on hold.  Temperatures do not have a linear relationship to greenhouse gases.  The relationship is nonliner, which means that for a given increase in GHGs, the climate system can and will exhibit different temperature changes.  That isn’t discussed anywhere in the article.  I not only fault MSNBC for this, but scientists related to the article.  The public does not understand these kinds of details because the media doesn’t relay it correctly and scientists don’t ensure that the media does so.

Contrary to what the article says, warming hasn’t “flatlined” since 2001.  Global average temperatures were higher five out of the seven years since 2001.  2007-08 saw a moderate strength, long-lived La Nina that helped depress temperatures somewhat.  But the warming has by and large continued.  If the rate of warming has slowed down somewhat, it doesn’t change what’s happened already.  It simply means we have a little bit of time to pursue aggressive, necessary and technologically-available solutions before even more warming occurs and we’re in a worse situation in 5 to 10 years than we are in today.