Climatologist Dr. Pat Michaels: ‘Greenland’s Disastrous Sea Level Rise (SLR) Is SOL — ‘A collection of recent papers published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature basically dispels all myths foretelling a large sea level rise this century coming from ice loss on Greenland. Recent research on Antarctica largely does the same’

Projections of a large sea-level rise this century depend on rapid ice loss from Greenland and/or Antarctica. Yes, as ocean waters warm, they expand, but this expansion-induced rise is pretty well constrained and limited to being about 6 inches plus or minus a couple of inches by century’s end. And the contribution from melting glaciers/ice in other parts of the world (not counting Greenland and Antarctica) is even smaller, maybe 2-4 inches. So that adds up to about 8-12 inches of sea level rise by the year 2100—not much different than that which has already occurred over the past century. This is hardly catastrophic.

So getting a good handle on the contributions from Antarctica and Greenland is essential if you want to develop a reasonable expectation for the future. Lacking a good handle leads to unreasonable projections.

Here is an example of the latter.

A breathless passage from the book version of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth:

I flew over Greenland in 2005 and saw for myself the pools of meltwater covering large expanses on top of the ice. …These pools have always been known to occur, but the difference now is that there are many more of them covering a far larger area of ice. …In Greenland, as in the Antarctic Peninsula, this meltwater is now believed to keep sinking all the way down to the bottom, cutting deep crevasses and vertical tunnels that scientists call “moulins.”

When water reaches the bottom of the ice, it lubricates the surface of the bedrock and destabilizes the ice mass, raising fears that the ice mass will slide more quickly towards the ocean.

…If Greenland melted or broke up and slipped into the sea—or if half of Greenland and half of Antarctica melted or broke up and slipped into the sea, sea levels worldwide would increase by between 18 and 20 feet.

Tony Blair’s advisor, David King, is among the scientists who have been warning about potential consequences of large changes in these ice shelves. At a 2004 conference in Berlin, he said: THE MAPS OF THE WORLD WILL HAVE TO BE REDRAWN. [all caps in original]

Gore went on to include page after page of now and then maps of the world’s major cities after a sea level rise of 20 feet (of course, assuming no adaptive measures put in place).

But Gore’s disaster mechanism has been shown to be …

New paper finds Greenland melt ‘strongly influenced’ by natural geothermal heating

New paper finds Greenland melt ‘strongly influenced’ by natural geothermal heating

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2013/08/new-paper-finds-greenland-melt-strongly.html

Greenland ice sheet IS melting but much of the heating is coming from INSIDE the earth

Study suggests melting in an area is due to composition of Earth’s mantle 

The IceGeoHeat team claims they produced more accurate forecasts by adding their new findings to earlier models on climate change

By ELLIE ZOLFAGHARIFARD The Daily Mail

PUBLISHED: 08:04 EST, 12 August 2013 | UPDATED: 08:25 EST, 12 August 2013

Ice in Greenland is melting partly because of heat from the Earth’s mantle, according to a team of international researchers.

The group claims that they are the first to find a connection between melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the high heat flow from the Earth’s mantle.

The findings, they suggest, could have implications for future predictions on climate change and the reasons behind ice melt in the region.

The Greenland ice sheet is often considered an important contributor to future global sea-level rise over the next century or longer.

In total, it contains an amount of ice that would lead to a rise of global sea level by more than seven metres, if completely melted.

The ice loss from the ice sheet has been increasing over the last decade, with half of it attributed to changes in surface conditions with the remainder due to increased iceberg calving – the process by which ice detaches from the glacier to become an iceberg.

The international research initiative IceGeoHeat, led by the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, said that the effect of the Earth’s crust and upper mantle in current climate modelling are too simplistic.

They modelled the Earth’s mantle against the ice sheet and found that melting occurs in a given area due to the composition of the mantle underneath it.

Writing in the current online issue of Nature Geoscience, the group argues that this effect cannot be neglected when putting together data on climate change.

The Greenland ice sheet loses about 227 gigatonnes of ice per year and contributes about 0.7 millimeters to the currently observed mean sea level change of about 3 mm per year.

The team point out, however, that existing model calculations were based on a consideration of the ice cap. 

GFZ scientists Alexey Petrunin and Irina Rogozhina have now combined earlier ice and climate models with their new thermo-mechanical model for the Greenland lithosphere. …