In an article today, Eyes Turn to Antarctica as Study Shows Greenland’s Ice Has Endured Warmer Climates, NYT blogger Andy Revkin says,
"My answer would be that Greenland doesn’t need “saving,” Antarctica needs much more observation and analysis"Here's why Antarctica also doesn't need "saving":
New paper finds Antarctica snow pack will continue to grow during 21st century
New paper finds no change in Antarctic snowmelt since measurements began in 1979
New paper shows Antarctic temperatures haven't increased over past 500 years
Shocking warming in Antarctica - almost back to temperature in 1850
Inconvenient truth: Antarctica sea ice extent growing 1.43% per year
New study finds growth of Antarctic sea ice accelerated 53% since 2006
Antarctica sea ice shows accelerating increase over past 30 years
Antarctic Temperatures and Ice Extent Not Unprecedented
GRACE satellite data shows Antarctica is gaining ice mass
New paper shows sea temperatures near Antarctica were about 10°C warmer 12,000 years ago
Lewis page also sums up today why we don't have to worry about either Greenland or Antarctica:
Greenland ice SIMPLY WOULD NOT MELT in baking +8°C era 120k years ago
Scratch off yet another IPCC doom warning
By Lewis Page • Get more from this author
Posted in Science, 24th January 2013 15:29 GMT
The new research was carried out by analysing a 2.5km long ice core drilled from the Greenland ice last year by a major scientific expedition involving top boffins from around the world. The core data showed that 115 to 130 thousand years ago, temperatures above the Greenland ice were much higher than they are today: 8±4°C, in fact.
Until now it had been generally assumed that any such temperature rise - or indeed a much lesser rise of more than 3°C - would mean that all the Greenland ice would inevitably melt, causing the oceans of Earth to rise by as much as 7 metres. Based on the current IPCC status report, the climate-hardliner hippies at Greenpeace have this to say (pdf):
There is a major risk that the warming expected during the next five decades would trigger meltdown of the Greenland ice sheet ...But we now know that the Greenland ice was exposed to much greater heat for many thousands of years and lost only a quarter of its mass, so the models are evidently wrong and another IPCC doom warning has been consigned to the dustbin of history (previously the organisation has attracted widespread ridicule for suggesting that the glaciers of the Himalayas would all be gone by 2035 and that the Amazon rainforest might suddenly catch fire, burn up and vanish).
Ice sheet models project that a local warming of larger than 3°C ... would lead to virtually a complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet ...
"The good news from this study is that the Greenland ice sheet is not as sensitive to temperature increases and to ice melting and running out to sea in warm climate periods like the Eemian, as we thought," explains Dorthe Dahl-Jensen of Copenhagen uni, one of the lead boffins working on the ice core research.
Some of the participating scientists suggested that even though we are now pretty sure we're safe from the Greenland ice sheet, we may still be flooded out of our homes at some point by meltwater from the even bigger and chillier Antarctic ice. However recent research has shown that big ice shelves down there, which had been thought to be melting, are actually not: that nothing new is going on in the much-discussed Western Antarctic peninsula: and that in fact the mighty sheet froze into being at a time when the atmosphere held much more carbon than it now does. It will also be well known to regular readers that the sea ice around the Antarctic coasts is steadily increasing in area year after year - baffling climate scientists and further undermining confidence in their models.
The new Greenland ice-core research is published here in hefty boffinry mag Nature.