@86 TheBlackCat
If you had read the full article, it would be clear that the Summit melt referred to was the same event as the larger Greenland-wide melt event:

Even the area around Summit Station in central Greenland, which at 2 miles above sea level is near the highest point of the ice sheet, showed signs of melting. Such pronounced melting at Summit and across the ice sheet has not occurred since 1889, according to ice cores analyzed by Kaitlin Keegan at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather station at Summit confirmed air temperatures hovered above or within a degree of freezing for several hours July 11-12.

Clearly, the one is the subset of the other. The Summit was given particular mention most likely due to the extreme altitude and remoteness, but it was one and the same event.

@87 Messier…
Your thoughts are precisely addressed by the linked article. The glaciologists found a ~150 year pattern in widespread melt events, stretching back …dammit, the article makes no mention of the time spanned but they seem quite confident about this cycle. As TheBlackCat so kindly pointed out, they do indeed know their own work better than I, or he, or you ever could.

Cyclic event? Definitely so.
They even make mention of exactly the same concern you did. As I quoted at #82, the melt event itself is not a concern unless it repeats.

Remember, these are glaciologists, and it has been pointed out to me that they know far more than me about this stuff. Good thing I read the article in its entirety, though. I’d hate to pass judgement on it after reading only a snippet…

Finally, please note that I am not trying to use this as some kind of ammunition against the warming of the planet, or any of that ilk. I consider it important to be at least as critical of my own ‘side’ of a matter as I am of the other, and this headline strikes me as being considerably more strong in tone than the article would warrant, not to mention misleading.

I love the ability to edit my commenst for 15 minutes here – and even then there’s a lot I still miss & plenty of times I run out of editing time too I know!

@80. Torbjörn Larsson, OM :

#38:“‘anthropogenic” is a technical weaselword”. -MTU
Of course not, it is the commonly used term in these cases, compare with “anthropic principle” et cetera. If it is the best term considering the outcome no one thought we would have to live in is another thing,* but it is not a priori ‘weaselly’.
* Yes, scientists can be naive about the human ability to resist knowledge.

Okay. Maybe calling “anthropogenic ” a weasel word (euphemism) was a bit too harsh but I still prefer the plainer less technical english description here for clarity, ok?

@85. Lee :

Why yes I did, “unprecedented melt”, only to go on and say that it is a cyclic event. As the researcher said, it is only a matter for concern if we see it repeat quickly. Seems like a misnomer to me.

To me, not-so-much although I do see a slight point to what you noted there. Cyclic event? Maybe. Just maybe.

Or maybe not. If this sort of melting happens again within the next year or even decade or two’s time then it’ll look a lot less like a freak cycle and a lot more like a pattern starting to develop. We’ll see what happens.

But so much of Greenland melting so quickly in the same year as this record low sea ice is certainly food for thought I reckon. Also certainly an extremely rare and extraordinary melting event.

This is clearly the case, since your quote is only talking about melting at one particular location, Summit Station, while the “Unprecedented Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Melt” refers to Greenland at a whole.

@catalyst – The Michelson Morley experiment was deemed to be an invalid experiment when it was unable to show the presence of the ether wind, which strongly reflects the strong scientific consensus at the time.

I think you need more than a bald assertion to make that argument.

OK, you claim that the existence of the Aether was accepted as a consensus, so there must be many references to it. Perhaps you could provide a few?

I was more trying to point out that the vast majority of scientific breakthroughs come as a result of opposing thoughts which are generally against the accepted ideas of the time.

Such as what?

The only “discovery” that comes to mind in which a lone individual went against the scientific consensus was Wegener’s idea of continental drift, and there is reason his arguments were dismissed – the evidence was not strong enough.

Later, as more and better evidence was obtained, he was shown to have been right, kind of.

Einstein’s breakthroughs on relativity built on earlier work (Special Relativity) and explained an anomalous observation that did not fit the prevailing Newtonian paradigm (General Relativity), but for neither did he have to fight against a consensus. His evidence and his arguments were strong enough from the word “go” to convince most physicists stright away.

So, have you any examples?

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/greenland-melt.html

“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.”