Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Temperature in Greenland

Hi Everyone.

I think many of you have heard about this big news – temperature rising in Greenland causes Greenland ice sheets melt very quickly, and the melt in the summer 2012 could be the fastest on records! Oh my god!!! What does it mean? What is the world telling us? Will it be dangerous? And what does the ice melt imply the situation of today’s Earth climate?

Recent studies show that the weird conditions of temperature rising is Greenland are not caused by external variability or ‘anthropogenic warming’, but from internal variability of the climate system itself. Kobashi et al. (2011) explained the trend of temperature in Greenland as follows;

      “The Greenland temperature trend diverges from the global trend in the last 168 years, which raises the possibility that much of the trend is due to natural variability, not the recent warming owing to increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the atmosphere” (cited in Kobashi et al., 2011: L21501).

Besides, Chylek et al. (2006) observed temperatures from eight stations in Greenland and found that although the temperatures considerably increased in the past decade, compared to 1920s-1930s when the temperatures were higher, it represents that present Greenland temperature is colder.

                  “The Greenland warming of 1920 to 1930 demonstrates that a high concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is not a necessary condition for period of warming to arise” (Chylek et al., 2006, cited in World Climate Report, 2007).

The 1995–2005 and 1920–1930 warming periods at Greenland stations show a similar behavior. Source: Chylek et al. (2006), cited in World Climate Report, 16 October 2007
                So, now we can relieve (at least for a while) that the variation of temperature in Greenland is not implying anything bad. However, further studies are required and we still have to carefully observe from the records and see the future trend of Greenland temperature which can be more abnormally fluctuant. Who knows???