re: greenland meltdown..quick burn more coal 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
