More Bad Climate News: Frigid Top Of Greenland Isn't So Frigid Anymore

There's still an incredible amount of
ice in Greenland, but unfortunately.
recent studies suggest it is 
melting faster than first thought. 

 The top of Greenland's massive ice sheet is something like two miles above sea level. Given how high that is, and how far north it is, it's a frigid place. Thaws are rare, even in the summer. 

But even there, the climate change news is bad, as it seems to be everywhere. It's hotter up at the tippy top of Greenland than it's been in at least 1,000 years.  

Yes, yes, I know nobody was around to take the temperature of the Greenland ice cap 1,000 years ago, but scientists can still figure out how cold it was centuries ago.

As the Washington Post reports, that warmest in at least 1,000 years conclusion was reached by scientists  who looked at oxygen bubbles in ice taken from deep inside the ice sheet. '

The Washington Post tells us: 

"The samples allowed the researchers to construct a new temperature record based on the oxygen bubbler stored inside them, which reflect the temperature at a the time when the ice was originally laid down. '

'We find the 2001-2011 decade the warmest of the whole period o 1,000 years,' said Maria Horhold, the study's lead author and scientists at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany."

Warming has continued to ramp up since 2011, so the study's findings are probably underestimating how much the climate in Greenland has changed, the Washington Post reports. 

As I've said several times in this blog thingy, what goes on in Greenland doesn't stay in Greenland. Obviously, when any ice up there melts, it eventually flows into the Atlantic Ocean. This contributes to global sea level rises. 

If all of Greenland's ice melts, worldwide sea levels would rise by 20 feet. Obviously, the entire Greenland ice cap won't completely melt anytime soon. But any sea level rise, is bad, considering that melting glaciers around the world, and never mind all that ice thawing in Antarctica is feeding into the oceans, too. 

The warming at that high altitude top of the Greenland ice cap will eventually introduce a nasty feedback loop. 

Part of the reason why the ice cap over millennia has maintained itself is it's so high up. The higher you go, the colder the atmosphere is. That's why you have snow capped mountains in the summer if said mountains are high enough. 

But as the top of Greenland's ice cap melts, its surface will inevitably be at lower and lower elevations. So you end up combining increased temperatures from global warming with higher temperature for simply being at a lower altitude. The rate of melting would then increase for two reasons, not just one.

Climate denialists will note that at some point this winter, it was 65 degrees below zero at a station in Greenland. Yes, that's damn cold. But something called "winter" is going on. Greenland is a frigid place, and climate change has not altered that. 

All the warming we're talking about occurs in the summer. It's chilly in Greenland at the height of July, too, as we already explained. But those thaws are getting more and more disconcerting.