Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Greenland Ice - Stop Press

I interrupt this series of, ah... long winded posts to bring you this debunking of the Great Greenland Ice Sheet Scare, from Cliff Ollier, School of Earth and Geographical Sciences of the University of Western Australia, which came to me by Benny Peiser's excellent email list.

The following is the abstract from a lengthy paper:

Hansen is a modeller, and his scenario for the collapse of the ice sheets is based on a false model. Hansen has a model of an ice sheet sliding along an inclined plane, lubricated by meltwater, which is itself increasing because of global warming. The same model is adopted in many copy-cat papers. Hanson’s model, unfortunately, includes neither the main form of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets, nor an understanding of how glaciers flow.

The global warming doomsday writers claim the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting catastrophically, and will cause a sudden rise in sea level of 5 or more metres. This ignores the mechanism of glacier flow which is by creep. Glaciers are not melting from the surface down, nor are they sliding down an inclined plane lubricated by meltwater. The existence of ice over 3 km thick preserving details of past snowfall and atmospheres, used to decipher past temperature and CO2 levels, shows that the ice sheets have accumulated for hundreds of thousands of years without melting. Variations in melting around the edges of ice sheets are no indication that they are collapsing. Indeed ‘collapse’ is impossible.

1 comment:

flashgordonnz said...

I am a simple man: I like beer.
I was taught at school that water is denser than ice. Therefore I have always been skeptical that, should all the ice in the world melt, the sea lvel would rise much.
But I stand to be corrected.