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Jonathan Gregory, a climatologist at the University of Reading, UK, says global warming could start runaway melting on Greenland within 50 years, and it will "probably be irreversible this side of a new ice age". The only good news is that it a total meltdown is likely to take at least 1000 years.
Hyperbole and exaggeration don't help. Do I think the models are weak enough that Greenland Ice might melt faster than predicted? Sure. But this guy isn't saying it will be "gone in 50 years tops"
Professor Slawek Tulaczyk and Ian Howat, of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, say that new melt evidence could easily cut previous melt estimates in half.
Yet here, we have another team saying the melt time is in "thousands" of years.
And here are scientists who aren't even sure the Greenland cap is melting at all.
The estimates reported seem to have wide variance (though not as wide as I originally thought). And further, none of the existing global warming models of which I am aware accounted for the sudden increase in melt over the last 5 years. Most climatologists seem to have been taken by surprise, as I noted previously, by the rapid increase in melt rate which was not accounted for by existing models.
I think my point remains - our models are incomplete and at this stage inevitably subject to errors. Also, at this point, the errors have all been too cautious. Given the immense potential impacts of these changes, both now and in the future, I think we are being foolish to ignore the longer term trend. But hey! The economists assure us that the market will solve everything so be happy, and spend, spend, spend, right?