Greenland Gains Huge Amounts Of Ice For The Second Year In A Row

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.

George Orwell

Summer is over, and Greenland’s surface has gained 510 billion tons of ice over the past year – about 40% above normal.  The surface mass budget is snow/ice accumulation minus melt.  It does not include ice loss caused by glaciers flowing to the sea, which is very difficult to measure, and is driven by processes which have little to do with the current climate.

Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Mass Budget: DMI

Last year Greenland gained a little more ice, about 50% above normal.

Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Mass Budget: DMI

The trajectories were very different last year and this year, but the final result was about the same.

Lining the two graphs up side by side,   you can see the more than one trillion tons of ice which Greenland’s surface has gained over the past two years.

Last year, the Danish Meteorological Institute reported on the gain in ice, and blamed it on Hurricane Nicole. I wonder what their excuse will be this year?

Guest post: How the Greenland ice sheet fared in 2017 | Carbon Brief

Even NOAA begrudgingly admitted that the huge ice gain was a “small increase.”

Greenland Ice Sheet’s 2017 weigh-in suggests a small increase in ice mass | NOAA Climate.gov

Meanwhile, the usual fraudsters in the press continue to report Greenland is melting and we are all about to die.

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33 Responses to Greenland Gains Huge Amounts Of Ice For The Second Year In A Row

  1. DM says:

    Sailors found plenty of ice west of Iceland, too. It crushed their boat. See: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/08/30/arctic-ice-claims-another-ship-this-time-with-a-sinking/

    • Lance says:

      Yes, my tax dollars at work….again….

      • Andy says:

        Can you give me an accurate amount personally you lost in tax dollars?

        Is it

        0?

        Andy

        • AndyDC says:

          Alarmists make so secret of their desire to impose a hefty carbon tax. The only reason that has not happened is because of sensible people like Trump.

          But nevertheless, billions of tax dollars are doled out every year to fake climate scientists. These charlatans are paid to do “research”, with the clear intention of producing a fake predetermined result.

          Someone has to pay for all of this fraud, the money to support it does not grown on trees, it comes directly from your tax dollars.

    • Frank K. says:

      From the story linked above:

      “Sailing yacht gets into drift ice in the middle of the night, gets crushed and sinks within minutes. The crew has to flee to the ice.”

      What? The crew is SAVED by the ice? I thought all the ice had melted! How can they flee to ice that doesn’t exist at NSIDC and NOAA? Impossible!

    • Colorado Wellington says:

      I just posted this on another thread:

      “No lives lost, thankfully.”

      Yes, but just barely.

      This was literally “touch and go”. As their aluminum hull boat got crushed the two Argentines managed to activate their EPIRB and scramble on an ice floe. The transmitter sent a distress signal as the boat sank.

      And then there was this:

      Additional information 30-08-18:
      CCGS Larsen helicopter picked two stranded individuals off ice floe and they appeared unharmed. The conditions were rather heavy fog with little wind. They had spent 11 hours on the ice floe and they were lucky no Polar Bears spotted them. In that time span the ice floe traveled westbound and eastbound in Bellot Strait currents.

      Also, this is not a Ship of Fools story but rather Flotilla of Fools. I understand there is about a dozen boats there maneuvering in the drift ice and defying the Canadian Coast Guard appeals to retreat South or find a safe winter harbor in Baffin Bay. The Argentine skipper followed the advise of another sailor who expects the east-west passage to open this year.

    • Stewart Pid says:

      Crushed and sunk by the ice that the Grifftard sez isn’t there …. what a maroon.

  2. Gator says:

    Where do alarmists think all of that calving ice comes from?

    • AndyDC says:

      I assume the more ice and snow you get in Greenland, the more calving there will be. But then alarmists wet their beds when calving does take place.

      The alarmists again want to create a win/win situation, where they can either claim that the icecap is shrinking due to lack of snow or shrinking due to calving when there is a lot of snow.

  3. Al Shelton says:

    What am I missing? Somebody help me out.

    From above: “It does not include ice loss caused by glaciers flowing to the sea, which is very difficult to measure,”
    Then how is the gain amount accurate if glacier loss is not included?

    • tonyheller says:

      Glacial calving has just about nothing to do with surface melting, and tells you just about nothing about the recent climate. It isn’t relevant to this discussion.

    • Anon says:

      Al,

      This is just a simplistic analogy, but should give you an idea of the complexity and the need for the exclusion:

      Suppose you have a slanted roof with a certain weight tolerance that you don’t want to exceed when it snows. And for whatever reason you can’t get up on the roof and directly measure the snow accumulation. So you adopt the alternative scheme of monitoring the “daily snowfall” and the daily temperature (which controls melting) and do a calculation to get the amount / weight of snow on your roof.

      Now, keep in mind the roof is not a stable platform, as each day some snow is sloughing off on to the ground. And you are monitoring the roof over a period of six months. Say from November to April.

      The question becomes, do you include what sloughs off in your calculation?

      If you measure how much snow sloughed off from November to January, do you then say in February, after a huge blizzard, that you have nothing to worry about because of what sloughed off in November, December and January can be subtracted out from what is on the roof now?

      If you do that, you are courting catastrophe…

  4. steve case says:

    It does not include ice loss caused by glaciers flowing to the sea, which is very difficult to measure, and is driven by processes which have little to do with the current climate.

    BINGO!
    That’s right, ice mass balance is a function of snow fall that over time forms ice which decades or centuries later calves as icebergs into the sea. Temperature doesn’t have anything to do with it.

    But that isn’t anything that our wonderful news media ever reports. You pretty much have to figure that one out for yourself.

    • Eli the Pit Bull dog says:

      Because Gravity is such a hard concept for liberal alarmist.

    • dilin o deamhas says:

      Temperature has LOTS to do with it.

      Heat increases Surface melt; Surface melt goes down through ice and lubricates base of glacier.

      This increases glacier speed, increases calving, increases ice loss. It is not a difficult concept.

  5. Josh says:

    They will blame the stubborn jet stream in Europe.

  6. Colorado Wellington says:

    Last year, the Danish Meteorological Institute reported on the gain in ice, and blamed it on Hurricane Nicole. I wonder what their excuse will be this year?

    I predict that whatever excuse they’ll find it will be something that is at least “broadly compatible” with global warming if not directly caused by it.

    I like people being predictable.

    • Weylan McAnally says:

      It is because global warming causes more water to evaporate into the air. That water vapor can then fall as snow.

      At least that is what every AGW proponent says. Increased ice and snow equals warming.

      Heads I win, tails you lose.

  7. Steven Fraser says:

    Its fascinating to to look at the day-by-day values, and see that there were 4 outstanding periods that stick up above the ‘grey area’. Yesterday was 1 of the 4, with just a bit more than 7 Gt of accumulation.

    The storm that caused this increase is still there, walking slowly up the East coast of Greenland for the next few days, and another storm joins it at the South end on Sept 3. Looks like a good beginning to the next SMB year, if you like ice…

    • Colorado Wellington says:

      “good beginning to the next SMB year, if you like ice…”

      That’s a hard one. Global warming cultists venerate ice but they always rejoice and march around triumphantly when they think it melts and billions will die.

      It’s a weird cult.

  8. Andy says:

    They had a late melt over there this year but not enough for large amounts of snow falling in last 2 years also upping the albedo as well… so double whammy for lowering amount of tonnage lost.

    Andy

  9. cJames says:

    Be prepared for Griff to turn up soon and post his usual alarmist talking points on irrelevant matters. Just remember he has no expertise as he is a Northland (New Zealand) pensioner, just good at doing Google searches, and doesn’t even read or comprehend what he posts.
    With regard to the actual ice gain, the DMI shows the Greenland average temperatures as 70 year sine waves and it is on the way down again, so the ice growth isn’t unexpected.

  10. Chris says:

    Your data on Wild fires is fascinating. I poured through Cal Fire data trying to come up with my own trends. I found it difficult as they have changed the way they report Forest fires, city fires and whether it is a cal fire or usda responsibility so many times it made it hard to compare accurately. But I did come up with a general downward trend from 1943 to about 2012, then a spike recently.

    I still believe Jerry Brown is giving cal fire stand down orders lately. But I’d love to see your graphs dig in to this topic a little more, you always do such a fine job!

  11. Anon says:

    I did not even know this tool existed. Thanks for posting. It is actually very useful!

  12. Jeffrey says:

    greenland-ice-sheet-surface-mass-budget site is now offline. Any idea what happened?

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