[Names Ash Housewares]

So do these findings mean that Greenland is safe from global warming?

"Safer than was feared at the last IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] Assessment Report," Shepherd told OurAmazingPlanet. "Our data suggest that one potential threat to future sea level rise from Greenland will have little or no impact. However, we are still not sure how ocean warming will affect glaciers that flow into the sea."

[steelyourfaith]

 

Beam me to Planet Gore !

[pnh102]

I shoveled quite a bit of global warming this morning. Ugh.

[Army Air Corps]

The IPCC wrong? I am shocked! /sarc

[ETL]

"Each summer, rising temperatures cause ice at the surface of the glaciers to melt, and this water runs down a series of channels to the base of the glacier where it acts as a lubricant, allowing the ice sheet to flow rapidly across the bedrock toward the sea."

In other words, the rate that glaciers retreat increases after each summer warm up. It accelerates over time. Another factor that would speed up the natural process of glacial melting is, as sunlight-reflecting white ice melts a bit during the summer, more dark heat-absorbing surface below is exposed to sunlight.

[Smokin' Joe]

Greenland has what, 15,000 feet of ice (thickness of the glaicers in the interior)??

It isn't as if it is all going to go away any time soon.

[colorado tanker]

They have to start backpedaling as their dire predictions aren't coming true.

[Wuli]

While this is a good report, and shows good reason to be less alarmed about climate change, some statements, even in this article, cannot avoid their alarmist tone based on unscientific positioning of facts; as in:

The Greenland ice sheet covers roughly 80 percent of the surface of the massive island and holds enough water to raise sea levels by 23 feet (7 meters) if it were to melt completely.

The statement is scientifically incomplete and in error in promoting the idea that if the total amount of ice covering Greenland all melted, that sea levels would rise by 23 feet.

For that to happen, it would not only have to melt "completely" it would have to melt all at once and so rapidly that it immediately added to the sea levels. None could melt so slowly that it would be taken up in evaporation from the sea, adding to the clouds, adding to precipitation, which falls on land as well, and some of which becomes part of lakes and not the seas, and some of which becomes part of the vast ground waters from which civilization makes wells to take it back up.

No. For the the alarmist phrase to become a reality, it would never be from the gradual melting of climate change, but some catastrophe that melted it AT ONCE.