Fate Of Greenland’s Ice Already Set, PSI’s Jeff Kargel Says

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2019-10-14

PSI Senior Scientist Jeff Kargel paints a gloomy outlook for ice in Greenland challenged by global climate change.

“The death spell for Greenland’s ice has already been cast,” Kargel said in the newspaper story “Global warming ‘a death sentence’ for Greenland ice” by Jon Sharman appearing in the British daily The Independent. The story may be found at https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/greenland-ice-melt-climate-cha...

Kargel said that ice melt on the island, particularly at higher altitudes, has for some years “exceeded what is common, judged by the 20th century.

“We know that human industrial activity and our exponentially growing reliance on fossil fuels is the cause of this epoch of warming and melting. Whereas we should not make too much of a single year’s anomalous warmth and melting, when it happens year after year it is alarming because global and especially Arctic warming is continuing,” Kargel said.

“It does appear, based on models, that the death spell for Greenland’s ice has already been cast. Nearly complete melting and disappearance of the ice will likely take a couple millennia to go to completion, but it should be a scene of continuous, increasing melting for decades and centuries to come,” he said. “There seems to be no stopping it at this point.”

Source: Planetary Science Institute