Background
The authors write that "the mass balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS), and its contribution to sea level rise, are of high interest in the context of global warming," because "according to the latest IPCC report, melting of the whole GrIS would contribute nearly 7 meters to sea level rise." However, they indicate that the results obtained so far "are highly dependent on the length of the GRACE time series, the chosen data set, the nature of the post-processing, and the method for computing linear trends."

What was done
In an attempt to overcome these several difficulties, Bergmann et al. "re-evaluate the Greenland mass balance over a longer time span (October 2002-July 2010), using Level-2 GRACE data from the Science Data Centre (UTCSR, GFZ and JPL) and different post-processing techniques (Gaussian and Independent Component analysis-based approaches) at continental and ice field scales." In addition, they analyze the interannual variability of the mass balance using "the robust Seasonal Trend Decomposition by Loess (Locally wEighted Scatterplot Smoothing) approach," after which "the non-stationarity of the mass balance is then related to climate forcings from the atmosphere and the ocean through comparisons with snow depths and sea surface temperatures."

What was learned
The three researchers report that "the most recent observations show, for the very first time since the launch of the GRACE mission, a decrease in mass loss of the GrIS for all the considered sources (UTCSR, GFZ and JPL) and several filtering methods (Gaussian and Gaussian + ICA for averaging radii of 300, 400 and 500 km)," additionally noting that "the GrIS mass balance is governed inside the continent by the snow accumulation and by the dynamics of glaciers in the coastal regions." And in this regard, they say that "the increase in snowfall since winter 2008-2009 in the south and since 2009-2010 in the north, and also a deceleration of the glacier discharge since 2008 reported in several studies using independent data, are responsible for the decrease in mass loss of Greenland."

What it means
Climate alarmists have historically claimed that evidence for the catastrophic climate changes they have projected is growing stronger by the day; yet we see that this is not the case with the increase in sea level they associate with the loss of ice from Greenland that they calculate should occur in response to the overly-inflated CO2-induced global warming that they feel should be occurring currently, and which they actually claim is occurring currently, but which in reality actually isn't. Enough said.