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One of the catastrophic results of global warming always cited by climate change alarmists is the melting of the ice sheets covering Greenland. Some even speculated that global warming had pushed Greenland past a "tipping point" into a scary new regime of wildly heightened ice loss and rapidly rising in sea levels. Now, from the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, comes word that Greenland's Ice Armageddon has been called off.
In the late 1990s, streams of ice flowing into the sea from the great Greenland ice sheet had begun speeding up. As the glacial ice faces receded global warming proponents pointed to the shrinking ice cap as proof that catastrophe lay just around the corner. But then came reports of a broad slowdown from a survey of glacier conditions across southeastern Greenland. Researchers reported in 2007 that two of the area's major outlet glaciers - Helheim and Kangerdlugssuaq - had slowed significantly by the summer of 2006. Then at the 2009 AGU meeting, glaciologist Tavi Murray and ten of her colleagues from Swansea University in the United Kingdom reported the results from their 2007 and 2008 surveys.
© Ian HowatHelheim Glacier's flow to the sea sped up in 2005, as evidenced by the 5-kilometer retreat of its leading edge, but by 2006 it had slowed back down.
"It has come to an end," Murray said during a session at the meeting. "There seems to have been a synchronous switch-off " of the speed-up, she said. Based on the shape and appearance of the 14 largest outlet glaciers in southeast Greenland, outlet glacier flows have returned to the levels of 2000 nearly everywhere. "There's a pattern of speeding up to maximum velocity and then slowing down since 2005," Murray reported. "It's amazing; they sped up and slowed down together. They're not in runaway acceleration."
Glacial modeler Faezeh Nick of Durham University in the UK and her colleagues found similar behvior when they modeled the flow of Helheim Glacier. In their model, as they report recently in Nature Geoscience, Helheim's flow is extremely sensitive to disturbances at its margin but can quickly adjust. "Our results imply that the recent rates of mass loss in Greenland's outlet glaciers are transient," the group writes, "and should not be extrapolated into the future."
So add the disappearance of Greanland's ice cap to the list of bogus "catastrophes" predicted by the global warming pundits, along with rising sea levels, higher temperatures, mass extinctions, and increased hurricane activity. In science, theories are judged by the accuracy with which they predict the behavior of nature. The eco-alarmists have been preaching widespread disaster for more than a quarter of a century and no disaster has occured. It's time to for scientists to start speaking up, as 650 climate scientists did recently at the UN global warming conference held in Pozan, Poland.
Criticizing the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and activists like James Hansen, Al Gore, and innumerable Hollywood celebrities, over 650 international scientists, many current and former UN IPCC scientists, have proclaimed global warming a hoax. This is just the latest evidence of the growing groundswell of scientific opposition to the media-hyped view of global climate change promoted by the UN. Scientific meetings are now being dominated by a growing number of skeptical scientists. The prestigious International Geological Congress was held in Norway in August 2008 and prominently featured the voices and views of scientists skeptical of man-made global warming fears.
"Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly....As a scientist I remain skeptical," said atmospheric scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a PhD in meteorology. Simpson, formerly of NASA, is the author of more than 190 studies and is among the most preeminent climate scientists. According to Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist and former IPCC member, global warming scaremongering is the "worst scientific scandal in the history...When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists."
Remember those claims of "consensus" within the scientific community? "It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don't buy into anthropogenic global warming," according to Stanley B. Goldenberg, an atmospheric scientist at the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA. Why the seeming change in the scientific zeitgeist? Could it be because there is no global warming? Consider the tropospheric temperature data shown in the graph below, data collected by NASA satellites.
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"For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?" asks geologist Dr. David Gee, the chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress who is currently at Uppsala University in Sweden. According to atmospheric physicist James A. Peden, formerly of the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh, "many [scientists] are now searching for a way to back out quietly, without having their professional careers ruined."
Don't misunderstand, the IPCC and their ilk will not go quietly. They have been riding the government funded global warming gravy train for most of their professional lives. It is going to get nasty out there. "After reading [UN IPCC chairman] Pachauri's asinine comment [comparing skeptics to] Flat Earthers, it's hard to remain quiet." said Dr. William M. Briggs, a climate statistician who specializes in the statistics of forecast evaluation. Briggs serves on the American Meteorological Society's Probability and Statistics Committee and is an Associate Editor of Monthly Weather Review. Be safe and stay skeptical.
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