they have been predicting ice-free summers for the past 3 years and since that has never happened how do you claim it is FASTER than predicted?
Source or it didn't happen. I'm tired of correcting your unsupported statements.
And this is what I mean, the rate of decline accelerating faster and deeper than the worst case scenario projected by climate models. I've made this point to you before, climate models are only wrong in the sense that they tend to conservatively underestimate the impact of AGW.
Polar Ice Sheets Melting Faster Than Predicted
The thick glaciers covering Greenland and Antarctica are melting faster than scientists expected
By Lauren Morello and ClimateWire | March 9, 2011 | 11
Ice loss from the massive ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica is accelerating, according to a new study.
If the trend continues, ice sheets could become the dominant contributor to sea level rise sooner than scientists had predicted, concludes the research, which will be published this month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
"The traditional view of the loss of land ice on Earth has been that mountain glaciers and ice caps are the dominant contributors, and ice sheets are following behind," said study co-author Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California, Irvine. "In this study, we are showing that ice sheets, mountain glaciers and ice caps are neck-and-neck."
But that could soon change, Rignot said, because the rate at which ice sheets are losing mass is increasing three times faster than the rate of ice loss from mountain glaciers and ice caps.
"I don't think we expected ice sheets to run neck-and-neck with mountain glaciers, which basically sit in a warmer climate, this soon," he said. "At the same time, the mass loss on the ice sheet is not very large compared to how much mass they store."
Rignot was part of a research team that also included scientists from Utrecht University in the Netherlands and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.
The researchers based their analysis on a comparison of two different methods to measure ice loss.
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