Arctic warming
There has been a recent spate of horror-stories about how the polar ice cap is melting and how this will raise the sea level (pure bunk since the ice cap is floating and floating ice will not raise the fluid level if it melts).
Richard Bennett at
Mossback's Lunch links to a great article at National Geographic which points out that:
bq. Speaking of meltdowns, Arctic ice has been melting like crazy for the past 250 years or so, since the end of the Little Ice Age that peaked in 1650.
National Geographic has the scoop on how far this recession has come:
He then quotes from the Geographic article:
bq. To put this in perspective, when European explorers first sailed along the Alaska coastline in the 1790s, they noted only a small embayment along the coastline. By the 1880s the glacier that filled what became known as Glacier Bay had retreated, leaving a bay that extended nearly 40 miles (64 kilometers). The glacier has continued to retreat and today Glacier Bay extends more than 60 miles (96 kilometers) into the Alaskan coastline.
bq. What complicates the human-induced global warming question is the fact that some of the glaciers in Alaska began their retreat more than 250 years ago, before the human population expanded and the industrial revolution. Some of Alaska’s glaciers began their retreat only in the last 25 years.
We are undergoing a period of warming, I have talked about it before on this blog. In the 1600's, rivers in Europe froze every winter. before that, in the 900's, there were wine grapes growing in Greenland. The Earth's climate cycles between warm and cool about every 400 years and our CO2 emissions (or panicked attempts at reduction of same) are not having any major effect.
The famous Mann "hockey stick" temperature graph has been reliably shown to be bad science (he cherry-picked their data).
Posted by DaveH at November 24, 2004 12:38 PM