by P. Gosselin, August 16, 2020 in NoTricksZone

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German skeptic site Die Kalte Sonne here debunks a recent alarmist article appearing in Spiegel aimed at shocking its readers. The reality, it turns out, is not shocking at all.

Greenland ice doomed?

According to Spiegel, the Greenland ice sheet is already doomed (that is unless we skip the usual democratic process and just act immediately).

Spiegel claims Greenland “glaciers are continuously losing huge masses of ice” and that the system there is “dramatically off balance”. The leftist Hamburg-based weekly reported:

The melting of the glaciers on Greenland has apparently passed the point of no return. Even if the global rise in temperature were to stop immediately, the ice sheet would continue to retreat, report researchers led by Michalea King of Ohio State University report in the journal “Communications Earth and Environment“.

Read more at Spiegel

4°C warmer 11,000 years ago

But Die kalte Sonne wondered if this were really so, and needed only 2 mouse clicks to find a recent temperature reconstruction for Greenland’s past (Lecavalier et al. 2017, pdf here). The paper’s Figure 4a  shows the temperatures, with the temperature of 1950 at the far right which in paleo-climatology is always meant as “present”.

Thus, 11,000 years ago, it was up to 4°C warmer than in 1950 over long periods of thousands of years, and today the warming has been about 1°C since then. Since we can see an ice sheet of 2,850,000 km³ (that is roughly Gt) today, the “point of no return” cannot have been exceeded 10,000 years ago. How does the heading then come about? We take a look at the associated work by King et al. 2020:

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