The Ice Age Cometh! Forget Global Warming!

Auroral Evidence of Upcoming Mini or Little Ice Age?

Guest Blogger / 8 hours ago March 9, 2019


Guest Opinion; Dr. Tim Ball
A recent article in the British newspaper The Express titled, “Northern Lights in the UK: Can you watch Aurora Borealis from UK? Where can you see it?” raises interesting questions and comparisons with historical events. It also appears to reinforce the climate forecasts for the next few decades.
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Source: Daily Express
Sir Edmund Halley (1656 – 1742) was one of the great astronomers in history. He proved his science in the best way possible by making an accurate prediction. He predicted the return of a comet that they then named after him. I became familiar with his work while working on the climate record of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) at Churchill, Manitoba.
The record was given a great scientific boost when in 1768/9 two astronomers, William Wales and Joseph Dymond arrived in Churchill to measure the Transit of Venus. Halley first identified this event and devised a procedure to gather data to determine the distance of the Earth from the Sun. This distance was critical to accurately testing Newton’s theory of gravity. A Transit occurred in 1761, but lack of knowledge and a useable technique resulted in failure. The 1769 Transit was critical because another Transit would not occur for 105 years.
Sir Neville Maskelyne, President of the Royal Society, sent the astronomers. They brought a range of instruments made specifically for them by the Society to carry out a range of scientific measures including thermometers and barometers. They left them at Churchill where the HBC employees continued to maintain some of the earliest instrumental records in North America.
In an interesting irony, Halley’s life spanned the coldest portion of the Little Ice Age with the nadir in 1680. To my knowledge, he did not write about this, but he did write about astronomical events related to it. For example, he was invited by the Royal Society to visit Scotland to observe and submit a report on the newly seen Aurora Borealis. His submission was published in their Philosophical Transactions, in 1714 under the magnificent title,
An account of the late surprizing appearance of the lights seen in the air, on the sixth of March last; with an attempt to explain the principal phænomena thereof; as it was laid before the Royal Society by Edmund Halley, J. V. D. Savilian Professor of Geom. Oxon, and Reg. Soc. Secr.
His abstract is very different from those we see in today’s academic or scientific journals, but this is a time when the title scientist did not exist. He wrote,
The Royal Society, having received accounts from very many parts of Great Britain, of the unusual lights which have of late appeared in the heavens ; were pleased to signify their desires to me, that I should draw up a general resation (sic) of the fact, and explain more at large some conceptions of mine I had proposed to them about it, as seeming to some of them to render a tollerable solution of the very strange and surprizing phænomena thereof.
He knew about them from earlier reports, and he also knew about their relationship with sunspots. He knew about sunspots from Galileo’s work but had not seen them either because his life also spanned a period with very few sunspots. The diagram shows the most accepted reproduction of sunspot numbers with only a few over Halley’s lifetime.
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Aurora borealis or northern lights are among the most spectacular atmospheric displays. Called Aurora australis in the southern hemisphere they are visible evidence of the relationship between the sun and climate. In early days they called them Petty Dancers from the French petite danseurs. In England, they were also called Lord Derwentwater’s lights because they were unusually bright on February 24th, 1716, the day he was beheaded. A bad omen for him, but they were also an indicator of the bad weather and harvest failures of the period.
Ionized particles streaming out from the sun are called the solar wind. The term is misleading because they are solid electrically charged particles. Activity on the Sun is seen as sunspots and solar flares and coincides with variations in the strength of the solar wind. When these charged particles reach the upper levels of the earth’s atmosphere, they collide with the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen. This collision creates electrical charges that make the gas molecules glow. The gas determines the colours of the Aurora. Nitrogen produces red and oxygen the shades from almost white through yellow to green.
Many northern North American First Nations people used them to predict the weather. The Cree in Manitoba expected three to four weeks of cold weather after a prolonged period of display. This is very accurate as it relates to the average eastward movement of the Rossby Waves. Henry Youle Hind, leader of a scientific expedition across Canada, wrote on the 19th of September 1858 about Ojibway predictions:
We arrived at the mouth of the river at 10 A.M. and hastened to avail ourselves of a south-east wind just to rise. Last night the aurora was very beautiful, and extended far beyond the zenith, leading the voyageurs to predict a windy day. The notion prevails with them that when the aurora is low, the following day will be calm; when high, stormy.
Samuel Hearne spent two and one-half years with the Chipewyan, (then called the Northern Indians.) His report on their explanation of the aurora is fascinating.
The Northern Indians call the Aurora Borealis, Ed-thin; and when that meteor is very bright, they say that deer is plentiful in that part of the atmosphere;,,, Their ideas in this respect are founded on a principle one would not imagine. Experience has shewn tham, (sic) that when a hairy deer-skin is briskly stroked with the hand in a dark night, it will emit many sparks of electrical fire, as the back of a cat will.
This describes the phenomenon of static electricity and is remarkably close to the current explanation of the Aurora.
The composite image from NASA shows the Aurora from space as a circle around the Magnetic Pole.
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Although at a higher altitude it is coincident with the dome of cold air that sits over the Pole.
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The auroral ring expands and contracts as the cold air dome expands and contracts. This means when the Aurora is seen closer to the Equator there is cold pervading the Northern hemisphere. This is the situation of the last several years. It is accentuated by the change of pattern in the Rossby Waves along the Polar Front from low to high amplitude Waves. It results in more extreme outbreaks of cold air pushing further toward the Equator and warm air penetrating further to the Pole as the cold air moves out of the way.
Similar conditions occurred in the 17th century. Diarist Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) wrote about the conditions on many occasions. They were especially concerned about the mild winters, so the government recommended action. On January 15, 1662, Pepys wrote,
And after we had eaten, he (Mr. Bechenshaw, a friend) asked me whether we have not committed a fault in eating today, telling me that it is a fastday, ordered by the parliament to pray for more seasonable weather it hitherto had been some summer weather, that is, both as to warm and every other thing, just as if it were the middle of May or June, which doth threaten a plague (as all men think) to follow, for so it was almost all last winter, and the whole year after hath been a very sickly time, to this day.”
The prayers paid off. On January 26th Pepys wrote,
“It having been a very fine clear frosty day. God send us more of them, for the warm weather all this winter makes us fear a sick summer.”
Pepys’ concern mirrors an old English saying that,
“A green winter makes a fat churchyard.”

His concern was well-founded because the plague returned, reaching London in 1665.
When you read the entire series of weather entries in Pepys’ diaries that cover the period 1660 – 1690, the pattern of remarkably variable weather is symptomatic of a Meridional Rossby Wave flow.
It was a similar pattern described in Barbara Tuchman’s 1978 book “A Distant Mirror; The Calamitous Fourteenth Century.” It was another example, like Halley of an important person, the nobleman Enguerrand VII de Courcy, whose life spanned an important climate period the 14th century, with weather comparable to the 17th century and the early 21st century. It lasted longer and was more profound because it was a transitional century as the world cooled from the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) to the Little Ice Age (LIA).
The current debate attracting more and more people is that we are cooling with the only question left as to the extent and intensity. Will it be weather similar to the cooler period coincident with the Dalton Minimum from 1790 – 1830? Alternatively, will it be colder with similar conditions to those by the early fur traders in Hudson Bay or those that spanned the life of Sir Edmund Halley? The appearance of Aurora in northern England suggests the latter, although I can predict who will protest this suggestion.
 
Ionized particles streaming out from the sun are called the solar wind. The term is misleading because they are solid electrically charged particles. Activity on the Sun is seen as sunspots and solar flares and coincides with variations in the strength of the solar wind. When these charged particles reach the upper levels of the earth’s atmosphere, they collide with the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen. This collision creates electrical charges that make the gas molecules glow. The gas determines the colours of the Aurora. Nitrogen produces red and oxygen the shades from almost white through yellow to green.
I was interested in the colours, but came upon an explanation of why auroras are even visible during the night when the earth is turned away from the Sun. It turns out some of the particles get caught by the tail of the Earth magnetosphere, the part that turns away from the Sun:
The details of the colour generating process is shown in an illustration from The Vivid Lights: What Causes the Colour of the Aurora? :
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The colour display depends on the altitude and the atoms excited, as the next illustration shows. Notice the curtains at the right which shows red at the top, green in the middle and pink, reddish or crimson at the bottom. The illustration is from Why are there Colors in the Aurora?
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In reality the situation is somewhat more complex, which might explain that the details of what colours appear at what height varied from web page to web page. The light we see is the outcome of several different interactions according to a page from a German university in Hannover. Atomic spectra
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They comment below the picture/flash:
Typical spectrum of (greenish) polar light. By removing or setting checkmarks the different components can be identified. © UCAR, source: COMET® site.
The units of the left scale are kR (kiloRayleigh). These units do not measure perceptual lightness, but the number of photons per unit area and time. The apparently strong lines below 400 nm (4000 Å) and above 700 nm (7000 Å) are hardly visible (and those between 670 and 700 nm are only very faint).
One reason why we see different colours at different heights is that the distribution of the different particles and gasses change with altitude, as illustrated by the following picture/flash from the same German page:
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Explaining the relationship between height and colour they write:
Currents of energetic charged particles are flowing at high altitude along the magnetic field lines (the single particles following coiled paths). They come closest to the ground at high latidudes [sic]. In collisions, energy is transferred to the particles of the upper atmosphere and is then radiated off as visible light. The polar light originates from heights between roughly 100 and 200 km; in times of strong solar activity also much higher, then it can be seen even at middle latitudes. The composition of the atmosphere at these heights is very different from that of the lower layers: nitrogen molecules and oxygen atoms are much more abundant than all the rest.

The red line of oxygen (630 nm) is dominant at high altitudes, but fades below 150 km, as the excited oxygen atoms in the 1D-state are de-excited by collisions with nitrogen molecules much faster than by radiation. The green colour of the aurora below 150 km height stems from the 558 nm line of Oxygen. It is not seen at larger heights since the 1S-state is not reached from the 3P ground state in collisions with electrons or protons. It is assumed that this state is produced in collisions of O(3P) with excited nitrogen molecules which give off their energy and take over angular momentum:

N2* + O(3P) → N2 + O(1S)
This line vanishes at high altitudes where the concentration of N2 is too low.
They don't explain it, but from what they write I reason that if the magnetic field lines are closer to the ground at high latitudes, then the field lines must be higher up at lower latitudes. If this is the case one might expect the red colours associated with high altitude auroras to be relatively more prominent in auroras observed at lower latitudes.
Auroras are not common in Germany, being too far south of where most auroras are observed, may the above hypothesis explain why the photographer. Ulrich Rieth got so many red colours in Wiesbaden?
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If by chance a comet dumps a huge amount of dust in the ionosphere or the comet dust is carried here by the solar wind, would the spectral lines we might observe during the auroras change? Hard to say, but at least dust and auroras sometimes show up when not expected, as this case from Mars shows: NASA Spacecraft Detects Aurora and Mysterious Dust Cloud around Mars – NASA’s Mars Exploration Program as this artist representation shows:
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If we begin to see an increase of "northern light" quite far south or worse some new colours, then we know something is happening. In the article Laura quoted the author actually ends by saying:
The current debate attracting more and more people is that we are cooling with the only question left as to the extent and intensity. Will it be weather similar to the cooler period coincident with the Dalton Minimum from 1790 – 1830? Alternatively, will it be colder with similar conditions to those by the early fur traders in Hudson Bay or those that spanned the life of Sir Edmund Halley? The appearance of Aurora in northern England suggests the latter, although I can predict who will protest this suggestion.
 
Really interesting observations and data concerning these remarkable lights! To imagine that those indians could predict the weather so accurately just by observing the Aurorae is incredible! Thank you for sharing!
 
“It having been a very fine clear frosty day. God send us more of them, for the warm weather all this winter makes us fear a sick summer.”
Pepys’ concern mirrors an old English saying that,
A green winter makes a fat churchyard.”

His concern was well-founded because the plague returned, reaching London in 1665.

Whoa, that was a great read from Tim Ball, thanks for posting it!
 
Whoa, that was a great read from Tim Ball, thanks for posting it!

Pepys diary is a great read in general. So is "A Cold Welcome" and "The Plundering Time" and "A Land as God Made It" all about early colonial America and all the stuff going on in the background of people fleeing Europe, more or less, to come to the New World.
 
Two new icebergs have broken off the Grey Glacier in Chile's Patagonia in recent weeks, amid fears that such ruptures are becoming more frequent, scientists told Reuters.

Fresh iceberg ruptures in Chile's Patagonia raise alarm
Two new icebergs are seen after breaking off from the Grey glacier in Patagonia, Chile March 9, 2019. Picture taken March 9, 2019.  Ricardo Jana/Courtesy of Chilean Antarctic Institute (INACH)/Handout via REUTERS


The breaks, which occurred on Feb. 20 and March 7, came after a larger block of ice the size of three soccer fields, (380 meters (1,247 feet) by 350 meters, separated from the glacier, which sits in a glacial lake in Torres del Paine National Park in southern Chile, in November 2017.


The most significant rupture to the glacier before that was recorded in the early 1990s. Scientists link the increased frequency of breaks to rising temperatures.

“There is a greater frequency in the occurrence of break-off in this east side of the glacier and more data is required to assess its stability,” said Ricardo Jana, researcher and member of the climate change area of the Chilean Antarctic Institute (INACH).

In recent days, “temperature rises above the normal average and intense rainfall were registered together with an increase in water level in the lake, factors that could explain the separation,” he added.

Researchers from universities in Germany and Brazil, together with experts from INACH and other local entities, have been studying the Grey Glacier since 2015 under an international cooperation program.

In December of this year, Chile will host the United Nations climate change summit, COP 25.
 
On SVS: Arctic Sea Ice Maximum 2019 they write:
After growing through the fall and winter, sea ice in the Arctic appears to have reached its annual maximum extent. The 2019 wintertime extent ties with 2007’s as the 7th smallest extent of winter sea ice in the satellite record, according to scientists at the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and NASA.

On March 13, the extent of the Arctic sea ice cover peaked at 5.71 million square miles (14.78 million square kilometers). This winter’s maximum extent is 332,000 square miles (860,000 square kilometers) below the 1981 to 2010 average maximum – equivalent to missing an area of ice larger than the state of Texas.
See also the video:
and the map and graph from Polar Portal
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In Greenland the accumulation of ice during the winter has been low according to Polar Portal. Red indicates lost surface mass, blue is gain.
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The blue line has been in the lows all winter and the distance to the average has been growing. Even with moderate melt in summer it will most likely end up with a net loss.

Still the ice at the North Pole has not melted:
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And the thickness of the ice:
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In Mammoth, the snow is so deep residents must tunnel out. There’s a history to that

By February, the snow made many neighborhoods here feel subterranean.
Twenty-foot walls of white, corniced by the wind, leaned over the plowed roads. Residents worked feverishly to keep the snow from swallowing their homes. They dug tunnels and narrow passageways to the street, opened portals to get light through second-story windows, shoveled dangerous weight off their roofs.

Unoccupied homes were so buried that a child might unknowingly sled down one. On still nights, when the wind stopped and the plows had passed, the silence was absolute. Only the streetlights and spirals of smoke from unseen chimneys suggested human life.
This year’s record-setting February and continued storms have reconnected residents to a historic rite of passage in California’s highest town, a place that largely came to be because of its monumental snowfall.

Brenda McCann had gone through the many harsh Mammoth snowfalls since her first autumn here in 1998, when four feet fell in two days at Thanksgiving. The old-timers called her neighborhood of Old Mammoth “Moleville” because of its propensity to get buried, turning homes into burrows.
The long drought began to make those eerie winters feel distant, a fading quirk of a town just five hours from Los Angeles that regularly made winters in Buffalo look moderate.
But the heavy snows of 2017 brought back memories. Many homeowners were unprepared, and roofs collapsed.
This winter, the town was ready, as 17 feet of snow landed in February, with more storms following in March.
“My whole house is encased in snow,” said McCann, 54, last week. “I’m in an igloo.”

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While her house sits a good four feet above her driveway, she had to climb five feet over a frozen berm to get out, until she had someone plow it away. In the backyard, the snow rises straight up over the two-story roof of her next-door neighbor.
“I’ve seen a lot of dogs on roofs this winter.”
During and after white-out days, people spend so much time shoveling, blowing, shoveling, that their backs wince and their abs feel like they’d done a couple hundred sit-ups. Members come into the gym where McCann works, they say, “I worked out all day, I just need the Jacuzzi.”
One of her friends, who had moved back to Mammoth in summer after many years away, told her: “I’m outta here. Now I remember why I moved away in the first place.”
The sheer volume of the snow creates a logistical puzzle. Where to put it?
The town’s public works crews and the California Department of Transportation use large ribbon-bladed blowers to shoot it up on hills between homes, where it builds until it looms over the roads like a wave ready to take a ship down. Dump trucks haul the rest to a site down Highway 203, where it’s bulldozed off the side of the mesa.
From the huge ski operations on the mountain to town hall to condo complexes to small cabins and trailer homes, the urgent matter day and night has been “snow management.”
“People can’t understand this type of snow,” said Grady Dutton, the town’s public works director. “Fifty-three feet fell at the top of the mountain.”

During storms, his crews hack away at it 24 hours a day. County employees scrape 104 miles of street with seven plows and five massive Kodiak snowblowers, delivering the snow to scattered spots and the “snow pit” off the mesa. “We have a good idea of every nook and cranny in town,” Dutton said.
The machinery keeps the resort town functioning at the height of the ski season.

 
Sorry, but I don't believe NASA's cooked data.
In this post I will try to analyse the maps of Greenland showing ice accumulation, ice melt and relate it to what I could find out about the behaviour of ice and water in cold climates in order to see if NASA is doing any ice cooking, or if a devil is hidden in the details. The post is quite long, but at least I got to a point, where some questions can be asked about the validity of the data.

When I posted, what I was wondering the most about, but did not question further, was the model showing a disappearance of the ice sheet since September 1st, that is during the winter season.

If one goes to Surface Conditions: Polar Portal one can scroll on a slide and see the development since September. Notice that around October 1st there is not much red and that there has been hardly any melting all winter. So how did the red colour, or the loss of ice from the ice sheet occur? What were the causative factors?
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A lack of snow fall over Greenland if true could be explained, if the humid air from the south encountered cold air at a lower lattitude. Since people have reported heavy snow fall in Canada, this may indeed be a possibility.

A disappearing of the ice sheet mass without melting, could also be explained by sublimation, the transition of ice to water vapor without the intermidiate phase of liquid water. The correctness of the map would then be a matter of the correctness of the model and the research at the base of the model. I do not know much about this field of ice sublimation and tried to look for research, but it is not so easy to come by. The papers that score highest on scholar.google.com are not that recent either. One abstract from 2001 has:
Greenland Climate Network (GC‐Net) surface meteorological observations are used to estimate net surface water vapor flux at ice sheet sites. Results from aerodynamic profile methods are compared with eddy correlation and evaporation pan measurements. Two profile method types are applied to hourly data sets spanning 1995.4 to 2000.4. One method type is shown to accurately gauge sublimation using two humidity and wind speed measurement levels. The other “bulk” method type is shown to underestimate condensation, as it assumes surface saturation. General climate models employ bulk methods and, consequently, underestimate deposition. Loss of water vapor by the surface predominates in summer at lower elevations, where bulk methods agree better with two‐level methods. Annual net water vapor flux from the two‐level method is as great as −87±27 mm at 960 m elevation and −74±23 mm at equilibrium line altitude in western Greenland. At an undulation trough site, net deposition is observed (+40 mm ±12). At the adjacent crest site 6 km away and at 50 m higher elevation, net sublimation predominates. At high‐elevation sites, the annual water vapor flux is positive, up to +32±9 mm at the North Greenland Ice core Project (NGRIP) and +6±2 mm at Summit. Sublimation is mapped using trend surface fits to calculated sublimation in terms of elevation and latitude. The resulting ice sheet total sublimation is −0.62 ± 0.25 × 10^14 kg yr−1 for the two‐level profile method and −1.2 ± 0.65 × 10^14 kg yr−1 for the one‐level method, indicating 12% or 23% precipitation loss, respectively.
In other words if 77% to 88 % of the precipitation in their set up was not lost due to sublimation. If it was lost, it could be because of glacier movement or melting. Notice in the above abstract, admittedly from 2001, that one model commonly used then, underestimated deposition. One wonders which models they use at NASA?

With the studies on sublimation in Greenland being unavailable or limited, I turned to Antarctica where Japanese researchers on the location near 70°41′57″S 44°16′45″E at an altitude of 2000 meters made real life measurements in the 1970'ies. One abstract from https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2006JF000580 has:
Three methods were used to determine the sublimation and condensation at Mizuho Station in 1977–1978, that is, direct observations with an evaporimeter filled with ice and repeated measurements of offset stakes and indirect estimation using an empirical formula derived from meteorological parameters. A comparison of three methods shows satisfactory agreement, especially in the weekly average of sublimation in the 1977–1978 summer, while condensation is insignificantly small. Condensation prevailed from the middle of April to the middle of September and sublimation in the remainder of 1977. The annual amounts of condensation and sublimation in 1977 are estimated to be 0.6 g cm−2 and 5.4 g cm−2, respectively. The daily amount of sublimation showed its maximum of 92 mg cm−2 on December 22, 1977, at the summer solstice. The annual amount of sublimation much affected the annual net accumulation of 5.8 g. The sublimation and condensation contributed in the formation of glazed surface consisting of multilayered ice crusts. This glazed surface is representative in the katabatic wind region in Mizuho Plateau, and the structure of the ice crust reflects the mass balance due to sublimation and condensation on both sides of the crust. Sublimation rate varies with the direction of the sloping faces of sastrugi, being the maximum on the north‐facing slope, which receives the maximum solar radiation.
The Japanese did small experiments, but they say that sublimation at their location is dominant for 7 months and condensation for 5 months. They also say that sublimation is the more important factor.

The lattitude of the Mizuho station corresponds to the upper half of Greenland. Since September there has not been much sunlight in this region, which according to the Japanese study would increase sublimation. If one distributes seven month, the figure the Japanese arrived at, around solstice, then sublimation should be insignificant in northern Greenland from mid October to early March. Still if we look at the map pretending to show the accumulation of mass there is a negative value, marked pink or red for these areas, so what is happening? Is it due to melting going on? Here is a map of the current melting situation and diagramme showing the situation since September. The map does not show anything, but it goes with the diagram showing the trends since last Fall.
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Admitted there is a bit of melting in September, but then it is over, so what removed the ice from the ice sheet in the "red areas" especially the north, as shown in the previous map, where there was not only hardly any melting, but also little sunshine and we guess as a consequence little sublimation? Were there dry winds blowing over the ice sheet leading to increased sublimation or did the glaciers melt from below?

One problem is that we can not go to Greenland and make observations, and local people live near the coast, but if you meet someone from Greenland, here are some names of the glaciers: and ice flows from NYT KORT OVER INDLANDSISEN – Greenlandtoday

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From the colours we read that the ice is flowing , but in most places not quickly. The size of the Greenland ice sheet problem looks very large on a rectangular world map, but it is like the Northern Canadian islands according to New Greenland Maps Show More Glaciers at Risk and on a globe Greenland is not as large as South America making the problem even smaller.
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From the topology of Greenland an interesting conclusion can be made. The presence of a large lake like area in the middle of Greenland surrounded on all sides by low to high mountains makes it likely that the central part of the Greenlandic glaciers are unlikely to just slide into the oceans and disappear, at least with the present rotational axis of the Earth. Perhaps one could even go as far, as to suggest that the very presence of the lake is an important reason there even are glaciers in Greenland. The lake protected by mountains would collect cold air falling down from the mountains. In Spring the thick ice on the lake and not moved by storms and ocean waves would just sit still while the high albedo of the ice would reflect sunlight thus preventing the ice on the lake from melting completely before Autumn. Does this hypothesis mean that the scare scenario of the Greenlandic ice melting is unlikely in any case?

Regarding Greenland and the data presented, we are scratching our heads, and so it seems are others. Here are some tweets I found via @PolarPortal In the first Tweet it is said that in spite of cold weather and storms the mass balance is well below average. Really?
And there was this also:
And if you wish to see what cold weather looks like in Northern Greenland, here is some surface data from Camp Century Camp Century Climate which shows that the relative humidity has been above 90 % since November.
And it is still cold over Greenland:
To sum this up: The loss of ice mass in Greenland this winter is hard to explain, or did NASA cook my ice? As we read in the tweets, some researchers are wondering too although they point to previous instances. With lack of access to all information and not knowing how models are designed and maps later coloured, is there much else to do than noting what the official sources including not only satellite but also surface instrument say and hold them up against what on the ground researchers see and write and then read between their lines to try and figure out what is happening? What I would like is for the researchers to spend some time explaining how the loss of mass in a cold winter like this takes place. What are the mechanics? On what math are the models based? Do their models really match reality better than, to make a comparison, some of the politically motivated conclusions prevalent in the US that have led to wars and scandals for really no good reason except the need for money and control.

From a political point of view I can understand why it would be very much needed to prove the ice sheet over Greenland is disappearing. Last summer was cold and last year: September 2017 to the end of August 2018 actually saw an acknowledge increase in the mass of ice. At the same time every ton of ice lost over Green-land is worth many, many $ and Euros in "Green" projects while ice gained or even stable on the ice sheet is bad news for those earning careers, generous subsidies and solid fortunes on its disappearance. The UN would loose face and so would countless politicians and scientists across the world.
 

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As I closed down open tabs after writing the previous post, there were a couple of helpful ones, including one explaining glaciers in Antarctica. They have this illustration of the factors contributing to the formation and change og glaciers An introduction to Glacier Mass Balance
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One factor here that I did not consider in the previous post is wind redistribution. So could it be that wind redistribution is responsible for the areas over the ice sheet in Greenland that according to NASA have lost mass this winter, that have gone in red, as shown and described in the previous post? From a logical point of view, I would think that if there is a melt in summer then the surface on refreezing would harden up. I don't know what it is like walking at the center of the ice sheet, but in summer the edge is hard, you can walk on it. so if NASA would explain the net loss as wind redistribution, then how did this happen?
Here is another illustration from the same site:
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and finally:
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The equilibrium zone is the area where the melting and accumulation is in balance, this line would probably change from year to year.
In one article they comment on the issues related to calculations of surface mass balance:
estimates are constantly improving as scientists gain better understandings of glacio-isostatic adjustment, improve glacier modelling techniques and gain access to higher resolution satellite datasets over longer timescales3. Surface mass balance estimates therefore tend to improve over time, but are subject to large uncertainties4. For this reason, there tends to be differences between the results of different techniques used to measure surface mass balance. Surface mass balance of the grounded Antarctic Ice Sheet is currently estimated at ~2000 gigatonnes per year2, 5, 6, and it is subject to large variability across the ice sheet and through time.
In the case of Greenland, there is not much available in terms of alternatives to NASA models and estimates.
 
Closing one more tab I found that another reason for the NASA numbers could be the ground under Greenland or parts of it are sinking and that this has not been factured into the model. As late as last June there was an article from DTU Space Landet hæver sig hastigt nede under isen på Antarktis - DTU Space, that communicated parts of Antarctica is still rising after the last ice age and that therefore the loss of ice may have been 10 % greater than previous estimates. Now large parts of Greenland are not as Antarctica rising, they are sinking as this map illustrates:
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If one compares the map of Greenland to a previously posted map of Greenland showing a large lake in the middle, it appears that the lake area and surrounding areas are still sinking. One wonders why?
 
Yes, there is good reason to be very sceptical about those numbers. From what Thorbiorn has posted it also seems clear that they are adjusting their models and interpretation of the data to fit a very clear agenda.

In the latest Adapt 2030 iceage rapport Adapt 2030 Ice Age Report: Greenland glaciers start to recover as solar activity declines -- Sott.net it is mentioned that gletschers are growing on Greenland. And that comes from NASA. The article referred to in the video is this one:

NEW NASA STUDY FINDS KEY MELTING GREENLAND GLACIER, ONCE THE POSTER BOY FOR GLOBAL WARMING, IS NOW GROWING AGAIN
MARCH 26, 2019 CAP ALLON
A major Greenland glacier, once one of the fastest shrinking ice/snow masses on Earth, is growing again, a new NASA study published in Nature Geoscience finds.
Jakobshavn Isbrae was the single largest source of mass loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet over the last 20 years. In 2012, the glacier was retreating 1.8 miles (3 km) and thinning almost 130 feet (40 m) annually, and was used in literally hundreds of MSM articles as the poster boy for an AGW apocalypse.
But how times have changed.
The study’s authors, using airborne altimetry and satellite imagery, have discovered that since 2016, Jakobshavn has in fact been “re-advancing, slowing and thickening”.
Greenland-Glacier.png
A map of Greenland showing the location of Jakobshavn and Disko Bay (orange box) and major ocean currents.
Ala Khazendar, the study’s lead author, names a natural cyclical cooling of North Atlantic waters as the likely cause of the glacier reversing course — a flip of the North Atlantic Oscillation.
Key words there: “Natural,” “Cyclical,” and “Cooling.”
Greenland ice and climate scientist Jason Box notes the waters in Disko Bay, where Jakobshavn meets the ocean, are a staggering 2C colder (3.6 F) than just a few years ago.
“That was kind of a surprise. We kind of got used to a runaway system,” said Box. [Because they believe the AGW agenda, their models and in linearity. No understanding of Nature and the Life system]
Well that’s because a runaway system is all that’s been forced down our throats for decades, Box. For the last 30 years a natural cycle of historically high solar output has been used to worry, manipulate and control the western world.
Just imagine if the waters in Disko Bay had risen 2C in temperature over the last few years. Just picture the furor, the headlines, the number of school days all those poor brainwashed kids would miss. AGW alarmist get uppity at a bunk model simply predicting a 2C climb, this is a realized 2C drop.
The ruse is so clear.
Khazendar and his colleagues go on to push the standard AGW call to arms, hinting that this mass gain is only temporary –well how else would their paper have obtained funding– but we know the truth.
Here’s a link to the study at nature.com.

The sun is experiencing its deepest solar minimum for over 100 years.
Even mainstream models predict a sharp drop-off in solar output, lasting decades.
The next Grand Solar Minimum is upon us.
The glaciers are growing again.
The cold times are here.
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The authors of the study probable realised how absurd they would sound if they had blamed the growing of the gletscher on AGW.

Jakobshavn gletscher is significant sized gletscher. According to wiki:
Jakobshavn Glacier drains 6.5% of the Greenland ice sheet[1] and produces around 10% of all Greenland icebergs. Some 35 billion tonnes of icebergs calve off and pass out of the fjord every year.

In the Adapt2030 video there is also a graph of the snow mass for this winter in the Northern hemisphere. And that graph is pretty astounding. It gives an idea of the flooding problems that will be in the news in the next few months as the melt season gathers speed.

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[...]
In the Adapt2030 video there is also a graph of the snow mass for this winter in the Northern hemisphere. And that graph is pretty astounding. It gives an idea of the flooding problems that will be in the news in the next few months as the melt season gathers speed.

View attachment 29567
One is tempted to think we have not yet reached "peak ice".
And then as an extension of the discussion about Greenland, there is little reason to think the ice sheet will disappear in its totality.
This link Fossil DNA Proves Greenland Once Had Lush Forests; Ice Sheet Is Surprisingly Stable a link from 2007 shows:
Climate theories over-turned
The research results are the first direct proof that there was forest in southern Greenland. Furthermore Willerslev found genetic traces of insects such as butterflies, moths, flies and beetles. But when was that? According to most scientific theories to date, all of southern Greenland and most of the northern part were ice-free during the last interglacial period 125,000 years ago, when the climate was 5 degrees warmer than the interglacial period we currently live in.

This theory however, was not confirmed by Willerslev and co-workers subsequent datings. He analysed the insects' mitochondria, which are special genomes that change with time and like a clock can be used to date the DNA. He also analysed their amino acids which also change over time. Both datings showed that the insects were at least 450,000 years old.
The ice-core researchers are experts at analysing the fine dust which blows onto the ice and is preserved year by year. They advocate two further datings. One is dating by optically stimulated luminescence. It is a method where the examined minerals can be affected to give off a type of light, which depends on how long it has been since the minerals were last exposed to sunlight.
The other method is radioactive dating. "We can fix when the ice was last in contact with the atmosphere," says Jørgen Peder Steffensen who is a researcher in the Ice and Climate group at the Niles Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University. He explains that the special isotopes, Beryllium-10 and Chlorine-36 both have a particular half-life of radioactive decay (just like Carbon-14). The relation between them can date when the ice and dust were buried and no longer came in contact with the atmosphere.
The dating of dust particles also showed that it has been at least 450,000 years ago since the area of the DYE-3 drilling, in the southern part of Greenland, was ice-free.

Sea Level Rise?

That signifies that there was ice there during the Eemian interglacial period 125,000 years ago. It means that although we are now confronted with global warming, the whole ice sheet will probably not melt.
It turns out that during the last interglacial, Greenland did not contribute with as much sea level rise as previously thought:
Please note: The scientists do not want to put into question the rise in sea level predicted to occur due to global warming. During the last interglacial period 125.000 years ago, temperatures in Greenland were 5 degrees higher and global sea level was 4-5 meters higher than it is today. However, since the new scientific results show that the ice sheet also covered southern Greenland, the melting of the Greenlandic ice cap can only have caused a sea level rise of about 2 meters. Therefore some of the melting ice contributing to the sea level rise must have come from other sources, for instance the Antarctic. Furthermore, thermal warming of the oceans will cause expansion of the sea water and result in a sea level rise of half a meter, and the melting of small glaciers around the globe will likely result in an additional half meter rise.
The results have just been published in the journal Science.
And gets even better. In another article, published in 2013 and done by researchers from the University of Copenhagen, they found the temperature had actually been 8 degrees higher, and as we saw above the ice sheet over Greenland did not disappear entirely. In the article they include graph with explanation below:

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The climate graph shows the temperature from the previous warm interglacial period, the Eemian (left) throughout the entire ice age to present time. The blue colours indicate ice from a cold period, the red colour is ice from a warm period and yellow and green is from the climate period in between. The new results show that during the Eemian period 130,000 to 115,000 thousand years ago the climate in Greenland was around 8 degrees C warmer than today.
Looking at the graph above one gets the impression the global temperature is anything but stable over time, fairly stable in terms of allowing conditions for life, but as stable as a thermostat in a modern residence - no way.
 
I noticed that the guy who makes the videos Ice Age Farmer, has started to make an ice age wiki: Ice Age Farmer Wiki

Welcome to the Ice Age Farmer wiki!

The purpose of this wiki is to act as a shared resource for our community as we map a path forward to prosperity, build resilient, self-sufficient communities, and share knowledge in the Grand Solar Minimum.

Where to Start
Start learning:

Maps:

Start growing!


In the historical section one can learn about previous Grand Solar minimums and the symptoms they share such as weather anomalies and crop losses. At the moment they have a featured article about
Extreme Weather during the Maunder Minimum (1645-1715 A.D.)

The source to this article is an article by James A. Marusek who is a retired nuclear physicist and engineer at the US department of the navy.

That article is from 2016 and is called Little Ice Age Theory https://nextgrandminimum.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/little_ice_age_theory.pdf


I. Introduction

General Discussion
The sun is undergoing a state change. It is possible that we may be at the cusp of the next Little Ice Age. For several centuries the relationship between periods of quiet sun and a prolonged brutal cold climate on Earth (referred to as Little Ice Ages) have been recognized. But the exact mechanisms behind this relationship have remained a mystery. We exist in an age of scientific enlightenment, equipped with modern tools to measure subtle changes with great precision. Therefore it is important to try and come to grips with these natural climatic drivers and mold the evolution of theories that describe the mechanisms behind Little Ice Ages.


[...]
I propose two mechanisms primarily responsible for Little Ice Age climatic conditions. These two components are Cloud Theory and Wind Theory. At the core of Cloud Theory are galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) and at the core of Wind Theory are diamond dust ice crystals. During Little Ice Ages, there is an increase of low level clouds that cause a general global cooling and an alteration of the jet streams that drives cold air from upper latitudes deep into the mid latitude regions. Little Ice Age conditions are defined not only by colder temperatures but also by a shift in the patterns of wind streams. They produce long-lasting locked wind stream patterns responsible for great floods and great droughts.

The entire article is 15 pages long with a few appendixes, the first of which details a lot of extreme weather events during the Maunder minimum.

James Marusek has a website called Impact, where he has articles and links about cometary impact, mass extinctions, super novas, solar storms etc. for those interested.
 
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