Cold, hard facts defy the doomsayers
- From: Dave Gerecke <dave.gerecke@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2006 21:12:33 +1100
Cold, hard facts defy the doomsayers
Andrew Bolt
22feb06
ANOTHER week, another global warming scare. And another case of
doomsayers telling you only half the story.
This time the news was that Greenland, home of 8 per cent of the
world's ice, was melting twice as fast as first feared.
Evacuate St Kilda now. If all the ice in Greenland slips into the sea,
the oceans will rise 7m.
The headlines from Moscow to Melbourne were predictably alarmist:
"Flooding fears as glaciers melt faster", "Island nations at risk from
melting glaciers", "Greenland's glaciers are speeding to the ocean" and
so scarily on.
There was not a word of doubt or caution in any of the reports I saw.
Man-made global warming is a religion after all, and to question is
heresy.
But heresy is an overrated sin, so here's why there's no need yet to
believe Greenland will soon be as green as its first Viking found it,
or to fear Sydney will sink into the sea this century, as Red Cross
once warned.
This latest spooking came from researchers from the California
Institute of Technology and the University of Kansas, who used radar
measurements from satellites to work out Greenland's glaciers had been
dumping ice into the sea at twice the "normal" rate over the past
decade.
The researchers also used models to figure how much surface ice over
the rest of Greenland was melting, then added the two figures to claim
in Science that the oceans were rising by an extra .57mm a year, thanks
just to Greenland. Scary.
So why won't I panic?
Because it was only last October that Norwegian and Russian scientists
led by Professor Ola Johannessen reported -- also in Science -- that
their own satellite data showed the ice over Greenland was actually
getting thicker each year by more than 5cm on average.
Naturally, such reassuring news got close to zero publicity. Global
cooling, after all, is still tomorrow's scare.
But less understandable is that the American paper did not mention this
earlier report either, and this puzzles Professor Patrick Michaels, a
global warming expert and past president of the American Association of
State Climatologists.
"Why would Science publish this paper with no reference to
Johannessen's earlier paper showing that Greenland is accumulating ice
.. . .?" Michaels asks.
"Johannessen even used data from some of the same satellites. What's
more, Johannessen used real data and (the Americans) used a model of
surface melt."
Michaels has since added the amount of ice actually growing on
Greenland to the amount being lost by the glaciers as they meet the
sea, and found the total loss is less than half what the American
researchers said.
He also points out that the temperature swings around Greenland are a
regular phenomenon known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation that
has occurred for centuries: "There is no need to invoke global warming
for any of this."
And the bad news for fans of global drowning continues. Greenland is
cooler than it was 50 years ago. Antarctica, home of 90 per cent of the
world's ice, is getting colder, not warmer.
Too many facts for you? I'm sorry, I know how they get in the way of a
good story. Especially this one.
http://heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,18227401%255E25717,
00.html
.
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