Greenland Melting More Than Twice As Fast As Previously Believed - WP

[hatrack]

WASHINGTON - Greenland's glaciers are melting into the sea twice as fast as previously believed, the result of a warming trend that renders obsolete predictions of how quickly the Earth's oceans will rise over the next century, scientists said Thursday.
The new data comes from satellite imagery and give fresh urgency to worries about the role of human activity in global warming. The Greenland data is mirrored by findings from Bolivia to the Himalayas, scientists said, noting that sea-level rise threatens widespread flooding and severe storm damage in low-lying areas worldwide.

The scientists said they did not yet understand the precise mechanism causing glaciers to flow and melt more rapidly, but they said the changes in Greenland were unambiguous - and accelerating: In 1996, the amount of water produced by melting ice in Greenland was about 90 times the amount consumed by Los Angeles in a year. Last year, the melted ice amounted to 225 times the volume of water that LA uses annually. "We are witnessing enormous changes, and it will take some time before we understand how it happened, although it is clearly a result of warming around the glaciers," said Eric Rignot, a scientist at the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Lab.

The Greenland study is the latest of several in recent months that has found evidence that rising temperatures are affecting not only Earth's ice sheets but such things as plant and animal habitats, the health of coral reefs, hurricane severity and droughts, and globe-girdling currents that drive regional climates. The ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are among the largest reservoirs of fresh water on Earth, and their fate is expected to be a major factor in determining how much Earth's oceans will rise. Rignot and University of Kansas scientist Pannir Kanagaratnam, who published their findings Thursday in the journal Science, declined to guess how much the faster melting would raise sea levels but said current estimates of around 20 inches over the next century are probably too low.

EDIT

http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20060217/1045223.asp

[autorank]

1. Great post RECOMMEND And see this link--a mind blower

From "The Independent" -- The tipping point has passed on global warming...

http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.german/browse_thread/thread/4265e20386883b41/d56b05de9318b0ca

[Dogmudgeon]

3. Even these figures are conservative

I've seen several little factoids indicating that CO2 observations made a Hawai'i have been above 390 ppm for the last two years.

And Keith Shine's CO2-equivalent methane concentration data may be too low by as much as 50% by now. His most recent work is two years old, which is an entire epoch in these days. If his work only considers industrial sources, and not the massive methane release from newly-thawed Arctic bogland, which is more land area than the Amazon bason, he will miss a large new source of GHGs. Dr. Shine has been in the news several times since 2003 for his climate research, but I have not seen any indication that he has included these biotic sources of methane in his calculations -- there may be far too much "play" in those data to allow them to be used reliably. The same thing must be said about seabed methane release due to increased seawater temperatures melting the clathrate ices in which the methane is trapped. It is potentially a huge source of methane, but we have only begun to survey the extent of it.

This is not to deprecate Dr. Shine's contributions to climatology. We are fortunate to have him at work on the problem. But one underfunded scientist and a handful of colleagues and grad students can only do so much in an era when climate changes are coming on so quickly that most of them will be missed anyway -- even by those who die from them.

I am beginning to think that what- and wherever this tipping point is, we passed it some years before we reached the neck of the "hockey stick" in the early 1990s. It has become clear that "all of the sudden", a number of climate change indicators have jumped, sped up, increased, and otherwise moved into undesirable territory. Another story that was released today informed us that the fresh-water flow from melting ice from Greenland is twice as strong as previously thought. After the worst Atlantic hurricane season in history, the Northern Hemisphere has had a winter of extremes unlike anything seen since the 1930s, and the records on the 2005 meteorological year indicate that it was the second warmest in history.

In other words, it appears that we have already "tipped", and from this point on, we'll be rushing to find our new equilibrium, although that process may take some time.

--p!

[phantom power]

4. I have that feeling too.

As we speak, positive feedback mechanisms we haven't even identified yet are out there, piling on top of each other. Any prediction we try to make based on available data will be insufficiently pessimistic.

[autorank]

7. Wow! Thank you. Erudition abounds. What a pleasure.

The Soviet tundra is a real wild card, I've been told. Apparently when the ice melts there, we're in for a real shock.

About the only thing I can see hopeful is the end of the Mayan long count calender in 2012;) which could mean an evolution of consciousness. Pretty hopeful huh.

Thanks again!

[Boomer]

9. Or the end of life as we know it

I've been warily watching the year 2012 for awhile now, wondering just what changes it will herald. I'm more inclined to the Chinese curse interpretation: "May you live in interesting times."

[Dogmudgeon]

2. Output doubling in 8-9 years?

This "kinda-sorta" implies 400 times the volume of Los Angeles' water demand per year by 2014, and 1000 times the volume by 2025. I wonder what the figures would be for glacial ice melting in Alaska, Canada, northern Russia/Siberia, and coastal Scandinavia.

And where is that newly-liberated fresh water from Greenland going? Right into the North Atlantic, where it will freshen several groups of thermohaline currents, reducing their heat-carrying capacity and shutting them down -- most of them fairly quickkly.

We just don't know how many times the Los Angeles water demand there are in the remaining ice on top of Greenland. And we don't know what the critical points are for water salinity and heat transfer. We only have a general idea about the lag times of the various parts of this climate-control system. And we're completely in the dark about the effects of the change in isostatic force -- the deformation of the Earth's crust caused by the weight of glacial ice -- over Greenland.

Another couple feet of ocean won't make much of a difference compared to an ice-locked Europe, China, and Canada. And once the new ice sheets start forming, the ocean levels will fall back.

Of course, we could be saved by some other mechanism that snaps into place to prevent that scenario. But that's a bet I wouldn't take. We'd all be better off figuring out our energy problems, as pronto as Tonto can learn Esperanto.

--p!
"Kiun vi konstatas kiel 'ni', Blankulo?"
("Who are you calling 'we', White Man?")

[Name removed]

5. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Dogmudgeon]

6. Yeah, but imagine the beauty of Northampton Beach

Can you imagine UMass Amherst as a seashore town and Smith College as a latter-day surfers' paradise?

:evilgrin:

--p!
Wicked tubulah!

[FULL_METAL_HAT]

8. Global dimming --> Unfortunately Frightening :(

Global dimming From Wikipedia

The effect varies by location but worldwide it is of the order of a 5% reduction over the three decades 1960-1990; the trend has reversed during the past decade. Global dimming creates a cooling effect that may have led scientists to underestimate the effect of greenhouse gases on global warming.

Read the whole thing -- it's verified and quite frightening.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming

[senegal1]

10. I am no scientist but sounds like you guys are

I have been following Global Warming for sometime now. I get science news and BBC has good reporting. I also read a book about how the ocean currents can suddenly shut down. With a 5 year old and a 16 year old I wonder what the world will be like very soon. What bothers me most is not the ocean`s rise or the ice age effect but rather the seeming capacity to choke ourselves to death with the released methane and other gases which seem to be stored all over the place. I recently read an article in Science News about how the dinosaurs could grow so big because (I can`t remember) they either had a lot more oxygen in the air or I think it was much less. Extrapolating from that there seems to be large climate effect which seems to have gone less noticed having to do with ~what will we be able to breathe~ or maybe I just don`t understand here. Can someone comment?

[jasmeel]

11. 60 minutes has a story on global warming this week

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/16/60minutes/main1323169.shtml

The preview for it is chilling. It shows icebergs melting and falling into the ocean. It's amazing and horrifying to watch.