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posted by martyb on Friday March 29 2019, @08:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-about-all-the-other-ones dept.

A major Greenland glacier that was one of the fastest shrinking ice and snow masses on Earth is growing again, a new NASA study finds.

The Jakobshavn (YA-cob-shawv-en) glacier around 2012 was retreating about 1.8 miles (3 kilometers) and thinning nearly 130 feet (almost 40 meters) annually. But it started growing again at about the same rate in the past two years, according to a study in Monday’s Nature Geoscience . Study authors and outside scientists think this is temporary.

“That was kind of a surprise. We kind of got used to a runaway system,” said Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland ice and climate scientist Jason Box. “The good news is that it’s a reminder that it’s not necessarily going that fast. But it is going.”

Box, who wasn’t part of the study, said Jakobshavn is “arguably the most important Greenland glacier because it discharges the most ice in the northern hemisphere. For all of Greenland, it is king.”

A natural cyclical cooling of North Atlantic waters likely caused the glacier to reverse course, said study lead author Ala Khazendar, a NASA glaciologist on the Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) project. Khazendar and colleagues say this coincides with a flip of the North Atlantic Oscillation — a natural and temporary cooling and warming of parts of the ocean that is like a distant cousin to El Nino in the Pacific.

While this is “good news” on a temporary basis, this is bad news on the long term because it tells scientists that ocean temperature is a bigger player in glacier retreats and advances than previously thought, said NASA climate scientist Josh Willis, a study co-author. Over the decades the water has been and will be warming from man-made climate change, he said, noting that about 90 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases goes into the oceans.

https://www.apnews.com/b19abfb0a0534b51925aa121806255a8


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @09:22AM (9 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @09:22AM (#821717)

    Really?? WTF? Why are we posting this clickbait bullshit? Someone wanting to get famous by measuring an anthill increase in size while the bulldozer is about to fuck you over?

    https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/state-of-climate-2018-shows-accelerating-climate-change-impacts [wmo.int]

    “The data released in this report give cause for great concern. The past four years were the warmest on record, with the global average surface temperature in 2018 approximately 1°C above the pre-industrial baseline,” Mr Guterres wrote in the report.

    “These data confirm the urgency of climate action. This was also emphasized by the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C. The IPCC found that limiting global warming to 1.5°C will require rapid and far reaching transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport and cities and that global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide need to fall by about 45% from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching net zero around 2050,” wrote Mr Guterres.

    “There is no longer any time for delay,” said Mr Guterres, who will convene a Climate Action Summit at Heads of State level on 23rd September 2019. The State of the Climate report will be one of WMO’s contributions to the Summit. Mr Taalas has been appointed Chair to the Summit’s Science Advisory Group.

    Mr. Guterres need a cluebat too. People will fuck themselves over and then blame people like him for not saving them from themselves. CO2 emissions will continue to increase by 2030, not decrease. We are well up from 2010 levels of emissions. We are heading for 5+C warming this century people.

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @10:54AM (8 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @10:54AM (#821727)

    This started two years ago, it's related to Trump getting elected somehow:
    https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/tempByPres.png [columbia.edu]

    Possibilities:
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunspots_(economics) [wikipedia.org]
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Chizhevsky [wikipedia.org]

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @11:03AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @11:03AM (#821730)

      This speech is pretty funny since the only president who overseas more warming than Obama was FDR:
      https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u2pZSvq9bto [youtube.com]

      Wouldn't be surprised if Trump oversees the most cooling ever.

    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @03:34PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @03:34PM (#821846)

      God bless our President Trump, whom our elites recognize as having the power to compress geological time down to a few months.

    • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday March 29 2019, @05:58PM (5 children)

      by DeathMonkey (1380) on Friday March 29 2019, @05:58PM (#821935) Journal

      Goddamn that is stupid.

      Notice how quickly they toss aside correlation!=causation when it suits their needs.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @07:02PM (4 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @07:02PM (#821977)

        Where did I throw away correlation!=causation? I said they are related somehow.

        • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday March 29 2019, @07:10PM (1 child)

          by DeathMonkey (1380) on Friday March 29 2019, @07:10PM (#821980) Journal

          Correlation DOES NOT prove a relationship. That's the entire point....

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @07:53PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @07:53PM (#821996)

            Correlation means there is a relationship. Existence of a relationship between A and B means either A causes B, B causes A, or there is some third (or more) factor(s) in common with A and B. The third possibility is what correlation!=causation refers to.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @07:26PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @07:26PM (#821986)

          I always suspected Hell might freeze over, I just thought we'd see flying pigs instead of. Oh. Wait. He uses Airforce One all the time. NEVERMIND! Everything makes sense now.

          Hell is freezing over in a paradoxical twist saving humanity from its own sins. Looks like the whole "antichrist" stuff was just bullshit propaganda to keep the pews full and the tithe plate moving.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @07:47PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @07:47PM (#821992)

            I am now convinced that there is a connection to this S-turn variation in ice coverage. Trump get elected and hell freeze over, he is blowing so much hot air that things will go back to normal.