From Pater Tenebrarum at acting-man.com:
Panic! 9,000 Billion Tons of Ice Lost in Greenland!
Have you ever wondered why they called that place up north “Greenland” instead of, say, “Whiteland”? The reason is that at the time humans first moved there, much of the place was in fact green….as it was a lot warmer than it is today, when allegedly, we are shortly all going to be roasted due to global warming (those living in coastal ares are supposed to drown before they have a chance to burn for their carbon footprint sins).
We’re losing ice so fast, we soon won’t know what to put into our scotch. Clearly, global warming is evil.
Image credit: Valentyn Volkov
Never mind that we are actually in an interglacial period, which essentially means “a brief time-out within an ice age before everything freezes again.” Brief in geological time-scales that is, which is thankfully not really relevant in terms of human lifespans. And we are currently firmly on the long term down-slope:
Earth’s climate over the past 65+ million years (today is on the left hand side of the chart). The temperature maximum is estimated to have occurred about 50-55 million years ago, since then the trend is pointing down.
A more near term chart (this one has to be read from left to right, i.e., today is on the right hand side) also shows this trend quite clearly. The recent period of warming is an unremarkable blip, indistinguishable from any of the other unremarkable blips that have occurred in the past. In fact, we should be eternally grateful that the downtrend has been briefly interrupted. The “little ice age” as it is known today was not a happy time. There were frequent crop failures and the winters were bitterly cold. The Thames in London tended to be frozen in Winter.
The red blip to the right is the small recovery in temperatures since the terrible cold of the little ice age. Who exactly almost warmed us beyond recognition 8,500 years ago is not quite clear – can we blame Cro-Magnon, the Neanderthal genocide perp? The Romans probably had too many cows or something. The main point is however the long term downtrend. This may indeed be worth worrying about, if one wants to insist on worrying about something.
The point of this introduction is to bring the following into proper perspective. In the short term, there has been a minor warming trend since the last cooling cycle ended in the mid- to late 1970s (at the time, even the CIA produced papers discussing the much-feared return of the ice age). In the course of this period, the Antarctic has continued to gain ice, with the result that sea ice coverage on the South Pole keeps reaching new record highs year after year.
However, it is different in the Arctic, where sea ice has been in retreat in spite of the fact that global temperatures have barely changed over the past roughly 20 years. Greenland is clearly losing ice. We all know the scary images of calving glaciers and polar bears lost on drifting ice sheets (although recent research into the miraculous fact that the polar bear population is absolutely thriving has concluded that the species has no problem with warmer temperatures).
So how bad is the situation? Well, it’s really scary. Greenland has lost 9,000 billion tons of ice over the past 115 years! Or, as others have put it, 9 trillion tons of ice, which sounds even scarier. As David Middleton points out though, it is indeed very much a question of how one decides to put it. There is a completely different way of formulating the headline, but one must suspect that this version wouldn’t sell any papers. Here it is:
Greenland has Retained 99.7% of its Ice Mass Over the Past Century
To continue reading: An Ice Cube for Gulliver
