Is Greenland’s ice melting away?

Although Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth," and its opus – built around the premise that Greenland's 630,000 cubic miles of ice is melting – won an Oscar, it's not based in reality, says Investor's Business Daily (IBD).

Consider:

Satellite data published in the November 2005 issue of Science did show that Greenland was losing about 25 cubic miles of ice per year, meaning Greenland was shedding ice at the rate of only about 0.4 per cent per century.

Earlier this month, Science published another paper showing that the recent acceleration of Greenland's ice loss had suddenly reversed.

According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, at the 2005 rate, Greenland's ice loss would have contributed less than an inch to sea level rise during the 21st century.

Additionally:

An earlier study published in Science by Ola Johannessen of the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center, found that ice was actually accumulating on Greenland's interior glaciers.

British environmental analyst Lord Christopher Monckton says the Greenland ice sheet grew an average extra thickness of 2 inches a year from 1993 to 2003.

A study published by the National Center for Policy Analysis reported that not only had the Greenland ice mass grown, but that average summer temperatures at the summit of the Greenland ice sheet have decreased 4 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since the late 1980s.

Further, Petr Chylek of the department of physics and atmospheric science at Dalhousie University notes that Gore in his movie suggests the Greenland melt area increased considerably between 1992 and 2005. But, as Chylek points out, 1992 was exceptionally cold in Greenland and if Gore had chosen for comparison the year 1991, he would have to conclude that the ice sheet melt area is shrinking and that perhaps a new Ice Age is just around the corner.

Source: Editorial, Oscar And The Grouch, Investor's Business Daily, February 27, 2007.

For text: http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialcontent.asp?secid=1501&status=article&id=257387017974717

For more on Global Warming/Science: http://eteam.ncpa.org/issues/?c=science

For more on Global Warming: http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=32

FMF Policy Bulletin/ 06 March 2007