Read here. The IPCC's Climategate scientists and Goreian alarmists have claimed that Greenland is in process of substantial and irreversible change due to the global warming over the past few decades. Putting aside the hysterical hyperbole, what is the current condition of the Greenland ice sheet? Is it experiencing unprecedented change?
Recent peer-reviewed research examined the the status of the ice sheet and found that any recent change was not exceptional in the context of the past 140 years.
"In an effort to answer this important question, Wake et al., as they describe it, reconstructed the 1866-2005 surface mass-balance (SMB) history of the Greenland ice sheet on a 5 x 5 km grid "using a runoff-retention model based on the positive degree-day method,.....This they did, in their words, in order to compare "the response of the ice sheet to a recent period of warming and a similar warm period during the 1920s to examine how exceptional the recent changes are within a longer time context.".....The six scientists determined, in their words, that present-day SMB changes "are not exceptional within the last 140 years." In fact, they found that the SMB decline over the decade 1995-2005 was no different from that of the decade 1923-1933.....recent changes that have been monitored extensively (Krabill et al., 2004; Luthcke et al., 2006; Thomas et al., 2006) are representative of natural sub-decadal fluctuations in the mass balance of the ice sheet and are not necessarily the result of anthropogenic-related warming." [Wake, L.M., Huybrechts, P., Box, J.E., Hanna, E., Janssens, I. and Milne, G.A. 2009]
