Ever dipped your foot in a glacial stream? Pretty darn cold it is.
Now, imagine massive quantities of cold, fresh water pouring off the Greenland ice sheet as the sheet collapses. Must be a lot of cold water around Greenland. Not!
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.html
SST anomalies around Greenland are currently the highest in the world.
Freshwater is lower density than sea water and floats on top. If there was a lot of fresh meltwater coming off Greenland, SST anomalies would be far below normal – the opposite of what we are seeing.
Just a few years ago people were forecasting a European ice age due to this idea. But the Greenland meltdown just isn’t happening.
Richard Kerr of Science magazine reports on a presentation at the recent fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in a News Focus article entitled: ‘Galloping Glaciers of Greenland Have Reined Themselves In’
Ice loss in Greenland has had some climatologists speculating that global warming might have brought on a scary new regime of wildly heightened ice loss and an ever-faster rise in sea level. But glaciologists reported at the American Geophysical Union meeting that Greenland ice’s Armageddon has come to an end.