Are Greenland’s Glaciers Growing and Temperatures Cooling?

One of the keys to the manmade global warming myth being espoused by soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore and the good folks at the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is that glaciers in Greenland have been melting in the last fifty years at an alarming rate.

In fact, both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-California) claimed to witness such evidence of global warming during recent trips there.

Yet, a paper written by the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide & Global Change, and published Monday by the Science and Public Policy Institute stated that not only have temperatures been declining in Greenland in recent years, but also glaciers have actually expanded a bit (emphasis added):

The Greenland ice sheet would appear to have experienced no net loss of mass over the last decade for which data are available. Quite to the contrary, in fact, it was likely host to a net accumulation of ice, which Zwally et al. found to be producing a 0.03 ± 0.01 mm/year decline in sea-level.

[...]

Hanna and Cappelen (2003) determined the air temperature history of coastal southern Greenland from 1958-2001, based on data from eight Danish Meteorological Institute stations in coastal and near-coastal southern Greenland, as well as the concomitant sea surface temperature (SST) history of the Labrador Sea off southwest Greenland, based on three previously published and subsequently extended SST data sets (Parker et al., 1995; Rayner et al., 1996; Kalnay et al., 1996). Their analyses revealed that the coastal temperature data showed a cooling of 1.29°C over the period of study, while two of the three SST databases also depicted cooling: by 0.44°C in one case and by 0.80°C in the other. In addition, it was determined that the cooling was "significantly inversely correlated with an increased phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation over the past few decades."

In an even broader study based on mean monthly temperatures of 37 Arctic and 7 sub-Arctic stations, as well as temperature anomalies of 30 grid-boxes from the updated data set of Jones, Przybylak (2000) found that (1) "in the Arctic, the highest temperatures since the beginning of instrumental observation occurred clearly in the 1930s," (2) "even in the 1950s the temperature was higher than in the last 10 years," (3) "since the mid-1970s, the annual temperature shows no clear trend," and (4) "the level of temperature in Greenland in the last 10-20 years is similar to that observed in the 19th century." These findings led him to conclude that the meteorological record "shows that the observed variations in air temperature in the real Arctic are in many aspects not consistent with the projected climatic changes computed by climatic models for the enhanced greenhouse effect," because, in his words, "the temperature predictions produced by numerical climate models significantly differ from those actually observed."

Hmmm. So, glaciers are actually expanding, and temperatures in this region are currently cooler than in the '30s and '50s.

Not what the alarmists on the left and in the media want you to think, is it?

For those interested, the entire paper is available in PDF form here. Those that want to receive e-mail notification when new studies and papers are published by SPPI should send an e-mail message to bferguson@sppinstitute.org.