Brain Melt

You might have seen the pictures below sometime this past week regarding the ice melt in Greenland, the picture on the left being what the ice sheet looked like on July 8th and the picture on the right, taken on July 12th, showing the same ice sheet to be almost non-existent.

On its face, this seem like something straight out of the movie "The Day After Tomorrow," the prophecies of Al Gore made real.  Naturally this has been getting a lot of coverag in the MSM.

Steven Hayward takes a look at what actual scientists are saying in a press release sent out by NASA:

"The Greenland ice sheet is a vast area with a varied history of change. This event, combined with other natural but uncommon phenomena, such as the large calving event last week on Petermann Glacier, are part of a complex story," said Tom Wagner, NASA's cryosphere program manager in Washington. "Satellite observations are helping us understand how events like these may relate to one another as well as to the broader climate system."

[...]

"Ice cores from Summit show that melting events of this type occur about once every 150 years on average. With the last one happening in 1889, this event is right on time," says Lora Koenig, a Goddard glaciologist and a member of the research team analyzing the satellite data. "But if we continue to observe melting events like this in upcoming years, it will be worrisome."

As Hayward notes, even the title of this press release is "Satellites See Unprecedented Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Melt."  They must have not even read what they wrote before they sent it out.