New Orleans

[dave birch]

Just to add something else to the debate.

This, courtesy of the ABC (Australia) and Reuters.

Greenland icecap thickens despite warming

Greenland's icecap has thickened slightly in recent years despite wide predictions of a thaw triggered by global warming, a team of scientists says.

The 3,000-metre thick icecap is a key concern in debates about climate change because a total melt would raise world sea levels by about seven metres.

Satellite measurements showed that more snow was falling and thickening the icecap, especially at high altitudes, according to the report in the journal Science.

Glaciers at sea level have been retreating fast because of a warming climate, making many other scientists believe the entire icecap was thinning.

"The overall ice thickness changes are ... approximately plus 5 cms a year or 54 cms over 11 years," according to the experts at Norwegian, Russian and US institutes led by Ola Johannessen at the Mohn Sverdrup centre for Global Ocean Studies and Operational Oceanography in Norway.

However, they said that the thickening seemed consistent with theories of global warming, blamed by most experts on a build-up of heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars.

Warmer air, even if it is still below freezing, can carry more moisture.

That extra moisture falls as snow below 0 degrees Celsius.

The scientists said that the thickening of the icecap might be offset by a melting of glaciers around the fringes of Greenland.

Satellite data was not good enough to measure the melt nearer sea level.

Most models of global warming indicate that the Greenland ice might melt within thousands of years if warming continues.

Oceans would rise by about 70 metres if the far bigger icecap on Antarctica melted along with Greenland.

Antarctica's vast size acts as a deep freeze likely to slow any melt of the southern continent.

The panel that advises the United Nations has predicted that global sea levels might rise by almost a metre by 2100 because of a warming climate.

Such a rise would swamp low-lying Pacific islands and warming could trigger more hurricanes, droughts, spread deserts and drive thousands of species to extinction.

-Reuters