NYT: Maybe Greenland Isn't Melting After All

For years, climate alarmists in the media have loved showing video footage of Greenland glaciers slipping into the ocean in order to evoke feelings of global warming gloom and doom in the citizenry.

On Friday, the journal Science is publishing a seventeen year study of Greenland's ice sheet that flatly contradicts all such hysterical reports and claims.

In fact, the paper concludes that such melting is a normal summertime event, and that when looked at over a longer period of time, there has been little change in the ice sheets in this region, and even possibly a slowing in glacial movement.

Imagine that.

Somewhat surprisingly, the New York Times' Andrew C. Revkin appears to be the first to report some of the findings (emphasis added):

[A] new Dutch study of 17 years of satellite measurements of ice movement in western Greenland concludes that the speedup of the ice is a transient summertime phenomenon, with the overall yearly movement of the grinding glaciers not changing, and actually dropping slightly in some places, when measured over longer time spans.

The work, the authors and other experts caution, does not mean that more widespread surface melting could not eventually destabilize vast areas of the world’s second-largest ice storehouse. But for the moment, the study, which is being published in Friday’s edition of the journal Science, throws into question the notion that abrupt ice losses in Greenland are nigh.

“The positive-feedback mechanism between melt rate and ice velocity appears to be a seasonal process that may have only a limited effect on the response of the ice sheet to climate warming over the next decades,” said the paper.

If the findings in this study prove accurate, one of the cornerstones of the global warming myth will have been completely debunked.

As such, I'm sure this will be headline and front-page news all weekend long once this paper is officially published. And, I imagine climate alarmists like Nobel Laureate Al Gore and NASA's James Hansen will not only be asked to comment about these new revelations, but will also be available for interviews with curious media members in the days ahead.

As this will likely not be the case, readers should keep an eye on NewsBusters for more details as they come available.