Any fossil fool executives out there that want to rebuild the planet’s ice caps?
Feedback loops make the problem of a warming Arctic that much worse and according to Thomas Growther, a professor at the Department of Environmental Systems Science of ETH Zurich, “It’s already begun, the feedback is in process”. Yahoo news, reports that “carbon dioxide and methane emissions from thawing soils are “accelerating climate change about 12 to 15 percent at the moment,” and said past IPCC reports that left out the feedback “were way more optimistic than they should have been.”
From Polar Portal on the ice melt on Greenland:
Today DMI scientists announced the start of the Greenland melt season, the second earliest in a record that stretches back to 1980. “The start of the melt season occurs on the first of three consecutive days where more than 5% of the ice sheet has melted at the surface.” said scientist Peter Langen. “We use a pretty strict definition as we want to make sure it is a consistent start to melting and not just a blip due to unseasonal weather”. This year’s start of 30th April is second only to 2016 when a very unusual weather pattern caused a very early start to the melt season in mid-April.
The early melt onset (left), red shows areas where melting is occurring. Centre: the dry winter over most of Greenland compared to normal is shown in red, the blue area shows places where more snow than usual has fallen since 1st September 2018. Warmer than usual air over Greenland, the Baffin Bay and the central Arctic is visible in red (right), the North Atlantic Oscillation is shown in the graph underneath.“This winter a persistently positive north Atlantic Oscillation – the weather pattern that also largely controls how cold and wet northern European winters are has led to a generally dry and cold winter in Greenland,” said climate scientist Martin Stendel. “IN many ways Europe and Greenland have opposite weather patterns, a mild wet winter in Europe often means a relatively cold and dry winter in Greenland”.
The persistent dry winter followed by a mild April has consequences for Greenland glaciers.
xHumanity inexorably destroying our planet’s habitability. Lets hope Plato was right when he said ‘necessity is the mother of invention!’ https://t.co/VlWAOsy6KG
— Mark Drinkwater (@kryosat) May 5, 2019“Through most of the winter, the majority of the ice sheet has been unusually dry, which sets it up for enhanced melting - if the right weather conditions occur – in the summer this year,” said scientist Ruth Mottram. “A period of warm sunny weather will soon melt this winter’s thin snow cover exposing the darker glacier ice underneath. If this happens we would then expect much faster melting as the dark glacier ice absorbs more energy from the sun than snow. But it all depends on the weather”.
There is an exception though, southeast Greenland, where most of the snow in Greenland falls has had an exceptionally wet spring with a lot of snow and rain associated with storms tracking through the North Atlantic. “Actually, there have been several records broken in Greenland for extreme weather in April. Tasiilaq in southeast Greenland had its wettest April on record. Aputiteeq, Tasiilaq, Ikermiuarsuk, and Summit had their warmest April on record and the Summit station on the top of the ice sheet measured the warmest temperature ever in April, -1,2C on April 30, which is incredibly warm for more than 3000m in altitude. The old record was -6.5C, though this record only goes back about 20 years.” said DMI climatologist John Cappelen.
xI never expected to see waterfalls this time of year in Greenland pic.twitter.com/TSySiRQCgH
— Michalea King (@Michalea_King) May 5, 2019 xAnother video from Russell glacier showing the intensity of this early season melt episode in western #Greenland. The heatwave appears to be widespread over the whole island. pic.twitter.com/DHCn0SxMFd
— Santiago de la Peña (@ice_santiago) May 5, 2019 xDescent from the ice sheet margin in SE Greenland just minutes after a polar bear was spotted. Note how sea ice is blue with slush - dogs criss-crossed between melt ponds to reach our boat rendezvous @PromiceGL@IntarosProjectpic.twitter.com/HAY5doJ8GF
— Andreas P. Ahlstrøm (@AhlstromAndreas) May 4, 2019 xA fairly big calving event at #Jakobshavn#glacier captured by #Sentinel2 this week, see the #icebergs just in front - hard to tell when it happened, lots of #Sikkusaq (#ice melange) holding everything in place but... 1/3 pic.twitter.com/U4D8ctSvKy
— Ruth Mottram (@ruth_mottram) March 1, 2019