Roling Stone on alleged unusual Greenland melting: It's far faster than scientists expected, and scientists weren't baffled at all

The Arctic Ice Crisis | Politics News | Rolling Stone

Greenland’s glaciers are melting far faster than scientists expected
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[Drama queen Bill McKibben] There's no place on Earth that's changing faster – and no place where that change matters more – than Greenland. Late last month, NASA reported that ice all across the vast glacial interior of the world's largest island was melting – a "freak event" that hadn't occurred for at least 150 years. The alarming discovery briefly focused the media's attention on a place that rarely makes headlines. RAPID ICE MELT BAFFLES SCIENTISTS, The Wall Street Journal declared.

In fact, scientists weren't baffled at all – a paper published just weeks before had predicted that an abrupt, islandwide melt was imminent....What's more, in a vicious feedback loop, soot from the wildfires raging in Colorado and Siberia – themselves spurred by climate change – may be helping to darken the surface of the ice. (Box hasn't been able to raise the funds to send a graduate student to do the sampling that would provide a definitive answer.)
..."If the world allows a substantial fraction of the Greenland ice sheet to disintegrate, all hell breaks loose for eastern North America and Europe," says NASA's James Hansen, the world's foremost climatologist....Simply by changing the albedo of the Greenland ice sheet, Box calculates, the island now absorbs more extra energy each summer than the U.S. consumes in a year...
Amid this summer's drama of drought, fire and record heat, the planet's destiny may have been revealed, in a single season, by the quiet metamorphosis of a silent, empty sheet of ice.