Real Science

A reader has been spamming the site today with claims that Greenland is rapidly losing mass, which was based on a spectacularly incompetent study out of the University of Texas

Climate Change: Are the Polar Ice Caps Melting Slower Than We Thought?

Those are scary numbers, but a new study published in the September issue of Nature Geoscience suggests that the true melt rate might be much slower than that. (Access a PDF of the study here.) A joint team of American and Dutch scientists took another look at the GRACE data and found that Greenland and West Antarctica may be melting  just half as fast the earlier studies estimated. As researcher Bert Vermeersen, a professor at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, told the AFP, the earlier estimates failed to account for glacial isostatic adjustment—the rebounding of the Earth’s crust after the end of the last Ice Age:

http://science.time.com/2010/09/09/climate-change-a-slowdown-on-polar-melt/

The experts who did…

View original post 7 more words