Oscar And The Grouch
Environment: Al Gore’s
Academy Award should be for best actor in an unsupported role. Once Chicago was
under a sheet of ice a mile thick. Just what melted those glaciers, Al?
If Gore’s
“Inconvenient Truth” had failed to win an Academy Award for — and we are not
making this up — best documentary, no doubt the search for more hanging chads
would have begun. It was a political statement by a political town, and we doubt
artistic merit was the yardstick. We didn’t notice if any of those who are
smarter than the rest of us showed up at the Oscars in stretch hybrid vehicles.
Gore’s
opus is built around the premise that Greenland’s 630,000 cubic miles of ice is
melting rapidly and will soon put New York City, and perhaps all those expensive
homes in Malibu, under about 20 feet of water by 2100. Problem is, the ice was
probably melting faster in the cocktail glasses of Oscar celebrators at the
post-show parties.
Satellite
data published in the November 2005 issue of Science did show that Greenland was
losing about 25 cubic miles of ice per year. By our math, Greenland was shedding
ice at the rate of about 0.4% per century, hardly a cause for concern.
Earlier
this month, Science published another paper showing that the recent acceleration
of Greenland’s ice loss had suddenly reversed.
According
to a recent report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, at the 2005 rate,
Greenland’s ice loss would have contributed less than an inch to sea level rise
during the 21st century.
An earlier
study published in Science by Ola Johannessen of the Nansen Environmental and
Remote Sensing Center in Bergen, Norway, found that ice was actually
accumulating on Greenland’s interior glaciers, far away from the news cameras.
British
environmental analyst Lord Christopher Monckton tells us the Greenland ice sheet
“grew an average extra thickness of 2 inches a year” from 1993 to 2003.
A study
published last year by the National Center for Policy Analysis reported that not
only had the Greenland ice mass grown but that “average summer temperatures at
the summit of the Greenland ice sheet have decreased 4 degrees Fahrenheit per
decade since the late 1980s.”
Greenland
is supposed to be melting, but it was warmer when Eric the Red brought settlers
to the appropriately named place in 986. The climate there supported the Viking
way of life based upon cattle, hay, grain and herring for about 300 years,
predating the Industrial Revolution, the sport utility vehicle and the stretch
limousine.
By 1100, a
colony of 3,000 was thriving there. Then came the Little Ice Age, and by 1400,
average temperatures had dropped by about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit and the
advancing glaciers doomed the Viking colony in Greenland.
Petr
Chylek of the department of physics and atmospheric science at Dalhousie
University in Nova Scotia notes that Gore in his movie “suggests the Greenland
melt area increased considerably between 1992 and 2005.”
But,
Chylek points out, “1992 was exceptionally cold in Greenland” and that “if Gore
had chosen for comparison the year 1991, one in which the melt area was 1%
higher than in 2005, he would have to conclude that the ice sheet melt area is
shrinking and that perhaps a new Ice Age is just around the corner.”
Meanwhile,
there’s a planet where the southern ice cap has been shrinking for three
consecutive summers — the red planet, Mars. Could be
due to our Mars landers — they’re electric and solar powered. Maybe, as NASA
reported, it has something to do with the fact that solar radiation has
increased in each of the past two decades.
