Western Greenland Ice Growing; Still Global Warming

By Lynn Davidson | February 16, 2008 | 21:00

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The lynchpin in the anthropogenic global warming theory is the shrinking Arctic ice, but now that some of that ice is actually increasing, scientists claim, without a trace of irony, it is normal for temperatures and ice sheets to fluctuate.

Greenland's Sermitsiak reported, “The ice between Canada and southwestern Greenland has reached its highest level in 15 years.” Denmark's Meteorological Institute used satellite images to track the southward expansion of the ice and when the paper asked how these findings “fit in with” continual reports of Arctic ice “melting at a record rate due to increasing temperatures,” global warming was, of course, affirmed (map) (bold mine throughout):

If it's up to meteorologists from Denmark's Meteorological Institute, there is not anything inherently contradictory that extreme cold is replaced by higher temperatures than average. Or that melting sea ice occasionally is replaced by expanding ice sheets.

'Weather is a phenomenon which changes from year to year and right now the atmosphere has changed so we have cold weather. That will certainly mean that melting ice in the North Pole will be less this year, but next year the situation can look completely different,' according to [no first name given] Henriksen.
To sum things up, global warming hasn't been called off. In the meanwhile, western Greenlanders will have to accept that the cold weather continues for some time. At least until next Tuesday when milder weather could be on the way, according to Polarfronten online.

Well, isn't that what some “skeptics” have been saying about the recent temperature spikes? That climate changes over time, and it has been warming since the Little Ice Age?

Interestingly, Sermitsiak published an article the same day, reporting scientists are “almost certain,” based on satellite data, Greenland is “sweating” and has “lost twice as much ice last year as it did three years ago.” Of course, there are no admonitions that this decrease in overall Greenland ice could just be part of weather's “phenomenon which changes from year to year” and “next year the situation can look completely different.”

There was no mention of the increasing Western Greenland ice in this second piece, even though it was updated the day after both articles were published. But to be fair, once published, articles are rarely edited in a way that alters the original slant, and in the paper's favor, most of the other media ignored the story altogether. At the end of the article about a melting Greenland, the qualification that the scientists are “almost certain” about the Arctic island's ice melt was buried at the bottom with the expected standard superfluous global warming alarmism:

If all the inland ice on Greenland was lost, the oceans would rise about seven metres. Antarctica contains about ten times as much ice.

Global warming skeptics wouldn't be so skeptical if these double standards weren't employed to support a popular theory. It's hard to believe in global warming when warm weather and shrinking ice is certain evidence of global warming, but cold weather and ice growth is either dismissed or chalked up to the all-encompassing “climate change.”