Perseus:
"Julatron betrays his intellectual limitations when he refers to "the science" as if it was one, homogenous entity that supports his opinions. It is not a case of the science but rather which science."

time and time again perseus, you push out endless amounts of baseless rhetoric and cherry picked facts in some attempt to add weight to the rapidly diminishing deniers argument. you like to ask everyone else for references and replies but you seem incapable of doing the same when challenged yourself.

there will always be differing hypotheses and methodologies, but i dare you to try and suggest that the methodology of the miniscule numbers of scientists, papers and reports vainly attempting to discredit peripheral issues of climate change are scientifically more valid than the framework of scrutability and peer review as the constantly reviewing, reassessing IPCC method.

you cant keep flogging the 'fallability of science spivs' dead horse in one breath and then use junk science and google to try and disprove it in the next. well you could choose to, but no one is going to take you seriously.

Perseus,
"The Greenland Ice sheet will not melt anywhere near as fast as sea ice because the rock underneath it does not circulate heat in the same way that water does."

Where did you get this info from? Are these sources more scientific than the research done by NASA climate scientists?

As far as I know, there have been satellite studies by NASA, that show that the ice cap is melting TWICE as much as five years ago.
The implications can be dramatic if this is not slowed down.

Even two years ago the ice sheets were in balance.

Is that a classic weasle, Julatron. What I provided was some simple maths based on verifiable facts about the Greenland ice sheet. Any projection or wild extrapolation that is inconsistent with those basic facts is exposed as bollocks.

And Celivia, are you seriously telling me you need a cyber link to confirm for you that water under ice produces different melting outcomes to solid rock under ice? That is an incredibly stupid question, ma'am. Next you'll need a web site to confirm that mothers are female.

The NASA stuff did not show a doubling of melting of the entire ice sheet. Some of the glaciers have speeded up on the coast but there has also been increased snow deposition in the interior.

At the current melt rate it will take 11,000 years to melt the entire ice sheet and that assumes that no ice deposition takes place at all. And at that rate, melt water from Greenalnd will only raise sea level by 6.4cm by year 2100.

I'm terribly sorry if this clashes with your religious beliefs but thems the facts. If you want dumb superstition then best get a voodoo doll.

If anyone would care to google "Greenland Ice Melt" they will get a good look at some of the sensational reporting on this issue. But amongst the froth and hype you will also find some basic facts to test the data yourself.

Greenland has an area of about 1.68 million Km2, the ice sheet is average 1.5km thick which makes for a volume of 2.5 million KM3. One report puts the volume at 2.84 million KM3 but in the interests of avoiding overstatement, lets just use the lower number.

The paper by Rignot of NASA estimates that the glacial melt rate has increased from 62KM3 in 1996 to 162KM3 in 2005 and other melting has taken this to 220km3 each year. This was based on modelling, not hard data.

But what he did not mention was that Johannessen had determined that snow and ice was adding 5.4cm each year to the top of the ice sheet and this amounted to 91KM3 of new ice each year for a net decline of 131KM3.

So when the 2.5 million KM3 is divided by the net annual melt rate of 131KM3 we get 19,084 years for this ice sheet to melt.

Rignot has tried to claim that a rapid collapse could start to take place soon as the lower altitude of the ice sheet would expose the ice to even warmer weather but this is pure bollocks. At this rate, the ice sheet will still be 1000m thick in 6000 years if the snow stops falling on it.

It should also be noted that the satellite scans that detect some summer melting on the ice sheet do not tell us what happens to these pools of melted water after the six weeks of summer is over. It freezes again, of course, as it has done for millenia.

Just one minor correction to the post above. The 220 cubic KM of annual melt from Greenland, minus the 91 KM3 of ice formation equals 129 KM3, not 131 as per my post above. (it was 12.44am).

So the 2,500,000 KM3 of ice sheet, divided by 129 KM3 of net melting will take 19,380 years to melt away completely. Even if there is no more ice formation, it will still take 11,363 years to completely melt.

And I think that gives the kids more than enough time to come up with low cost, high tech solutions to our so-called carbon crisis, don't you? We will certainly be in a post-oil, post-coal economy by then.

But if you must have a panick attack, at least do it in the privacy of your own home.

Perseus

For someone who often warns of the inaccuracy of computer models, it is astonishing to see you sucked in by their ancestor, the calculator and scrap paper model. But I guess that as it is your own creation it must be infinitely more credible that that created by the coordinated efforts of many scientists.

I'll indulge your egomania though, Perseus. You mention that the net melt of the Greenland Ice Sheet is 129 cubic kilometres per annum. Now according to the boffins, the rate of ice melt has been increasing at a rate of 20% per annum for the last 21 years.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/06/020625063721.htm

http://www.physorg.com/news10948.html

So if this trend continues I can use it as a basis for my own spreadsheet model. And guess what? There is no more ice sheet by the mid 2050s! Such is the power of exponents. Try it for yoursely, though you you will definitely have to use your own software.

(Perhaps Perseus can now confidently return to his inherrent distrust of mathematical modelling?)