Here again, gone again
Interesting
story from the BBC about the rapidly melting Antarctic Ice:
Big ice shelf's disappearing act
Sediments extracted from the Antarctic seafloor show the world's largest ice shelf has disintegrated and reappeared many times in the past.
Fluctuations in the Ross Ice Shelf are revealed by an early look at cores drilled from the seabed underneath the giant ice slab.
The investigation is being carried out by scientists drilling near the US and New Zealand bases on Ross Island.
The team wants to link the data to what is already known about past climate.
The long-term aim of the scientists is to find out what the Ross Ice Shelf - a floating slab of ice the size of France - and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet have been doing over the past 10 million years.
The researchers are part of the first team to drill as part of the international Andrill project to investigate the geological history of Antarctica.
"We're seeing numerous cycles of the ice shelf or ice sheet being present at the site and then being absent," said Dr Tim Naish, a palaeoclimatologist at New Zealand's Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences and one of the chief scientists for the Antarctica Geological Drilling project (Andrill).
"These are dramatic fluctuations."
For every greenie-weenie chicken little running around, there are just as many people doing solid hard-science that shows that global warming and cooling is part of the Earth's natural cycle and human input into it is minimal at the most.
We need to get out from under the mind-set that Carbon Dioxide is a killer greenhouse gas -- it simply is not. It was what could be measured with some accuracy back 15 years ago when people were ramping up to Kyoto but recent work shows that its effects are minimal, it is needed as a plant food and that the major greenhouse gas problem is simple water vapor.
Posted by DaveH at December 4, 2006 10:23 PM