“While the president rages, the world melts,” keened The Washington Post in an editorial over the weekend.
As President Trump spent another week rage-tweeting, the world continued to warm, and the consequences became ever-clearer — and more alarming.
A consortium of 89 scientists released in the journal Nature on Tuesday a study showing that Greenland’s enormous ice sheet is losing seven times as much ice now as a quarter-century ago. . . .
Greenland’s melting has already driven up sea levels by more than a centimeter, with much more to come.
That certainly sounds like bad news, and the Post has plenty of company in bewailing it.
Stories about Greenland’s unprecedented level of melting ice appeared in recent days in The Guardian, Fox News, the BBC, Business Insider, and CNN — and those are from just the first page of results obtained by googling news stories for “Greenland”+ “ice” + “melt.”
All quite dire, no doubt, and apparently a phenomenon that every right-minded person should be lamenting. Greenland’s ice sheet thawed in 2019 at a scary rate? We’d all better drop everything and pay attention.
And I would — really, I would — if it wasn’t for the fact that climate alarmists and their media chorus deplored the same terrible news in 2018 (“Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at its fastest rate in centuries”).
And in 2017 (“As Greenland Melts, Where’s the Water Going?”).
And in 2016 (“Greenland is Melting”).
And in 2015 (“Greenland Is Melting Away”).
And in 2014 (“Greenland ice sheet loses its last grip”).
And in 2013 (“Why Greenland’s Melting Could Be the Biggest Climate Disaster of All”).
And in 2012 (“Rare Burst of Melting Seen in Greenland’s Ice Sheet”).
And in 2011 (“Greenland ice loss continues to accelerate”).
And in 2010 (“New melt record for Greenland ice sheet”).
And in 2009 (“Greenland’s shrinking ice hurts native tribe”).
Perhaps it is really true, as the Washington Post grieves this weekend, that Greenland’s ice melt is calamitous and the point of no return is at hand.
But while such stories appear at around this time every year, the world-ending catastrophes caused by climate change never quite seem to materialize.
Doesn’t there come a point at which the boy who so regularly cries “Wolf!” ought to be taken a little less seriously?
Maybe mankind’s dependence on fossil fuels will indeed make the world less livable and more dangerous.
Maybe Greenland’s melting ice really does presage lethal flooding and soaring numbers of climate-related deaths. But it hasn’t happened yet.
On the contrary: the rise in worldwide use of fossil fuels has led to less loss of life from floods and other natural disasters.
As climate scientist Patrick J. Michaels (past president of the American Association of State Climatologists, and contributing author of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) pointed out a few years back, the statistic that should be front and center in these discussions is “climate-related deaths.”
And on that score, the era of modern global warming has also been the era of improved livability:
In the decade from 2004 to 2013, worldwide climate-related deaths (including droughts, floods, extreme temperatures, wildfires, and storms) plummeted to a level 88.6% below that of the peak decade, 1930 to 1939.
The year 2013, with 29,404 reported deaths, had 99.4% fewer climate-related deaths than the historic record year of 1932, which had 5,073,283 reported deaths for the same category.
That reduction occurred despite more complete reporting, an incentive to declare greater damage to gain more aid, and a massively growing population, particularly in vulnerable places like coastal areas, in recent times.
In the alarmists’ view, Michaels observes, the global climate system is a naturally stable and safe place that humans make more volatile and dangerous through the reckless use of coal, oil, and natural gas.
But the opposite is true: “The global climate system is naturally volatile and dangerous. We make it livable through development and technology.”
Perhaps all this good news is on the point of being washed away by Greenland’s runoff. Perhaps our era of greater worldwide climate livability will be seen, in retrospect, as merely a benign interlude before the climate disaster erupted.
Perhaps all the climate Cassandras will have the last, bitter laugh. But on the record so far, I’m not counting on it.
I’ll make a different prediction: About 12 months from now, a spate of stories will appear in the media about the shocking amount of melting ice in Greenland in 2020, and why we’d all better drop everything and pay attention.
h/t John P.
Read more at Boston Globe
Its natural climate variability. The tipping point is coming, but its cooling, not warming.
Driven by cycles we have measured in the observed record and have determined their periodicity by Fourier analysis of that record. This is the scientific analysis equivalent equivalent of a fingerprint or DNA test of the natural cycles. This simple and proven test was applied to the Vostok and other ice core records find the longer term frequencies in ice age cycles, and immediately showed the fingerprints of the various MIlankovitch cycles, working in varying combination from ice age cycle to cycle.
The same very well proven tell-tale forensic approach to the much shorter term human civilisation time scale seems to have been avoided by climate “scientists”, perhaps, as with serial killers and DNA testing, for very obvious reasons. But it was was recently captured by Ludecke and Weiss. This is the nearest thing there is to proof of guilt from actual forensic evidence, given the variable quality of the proxy record. To understand better than I can write here, watch Weiss present it, VERY clearly. If you like the movie, read the paper. This is real science, looking for causes in real observations, rather than attempting to prove beliefs in the VR of a computer game.
The tipping point is coming, but its cooling, not warming.
The Vikings colonised Greenland around 110AD, with dairy farms, sheep. Green land.
They had to abandon it around 1350, as it froze over. No doubt due to the jet planes they used, and cars on the island. Or maybe those Viking ships had diesel motors.
The actual data show cyclical behavior over many years (melting in the summer, ice accumulation in the in the winter) with no trend whatsoever.
“The oldest ever recovered DNA samples have been collected from under more than a mile of Greenland ice, and their analysis suggests the island was much warmer during the last Ice Age than previously thought.”
“The DNA is proof that sometime between 450,000 and 800,000 years ago, much of Greenland was especially green and covered in a boreal forest that was home to alder, spruce and pine trees, as well as insects such as butterflies and beetles.”
“From the genetic material of these organisms, the researchers infer that Greenland’s temperature once varied from 50 degrees Fahrenheit in summer to 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit in winter—the temperature range that the tree species prefer.”
“We have shown for the first time that southern Greenland … was once very different to the Greenland we see today,” said study leader Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen.”
Any idea what CO2 levers were back then???
It doesn’t matter what the CO2 level was back then, since it has little to no impact on climate. The genius Climate Alarmist have cause and effect backwards.
Warming climate releases CO2. Not the other way around.
“It doesn’t matter”…. EXACTLY right Dave O!
Have a Merry Christmas & Happy New Year
“We’re all going to die any day now” must be true because the self admitted mentally ill teeny bopper and bubble gummer climate scientist Greta Thunberg promised us it’s all true.
Dial up all the archive footage of Greenland glaciers calving off into iceburgs, an annual summer-time rite of passage. Then claim that this has never happened before, and the world will be ending because of what you are seeing. Repeat thousands of times and squelch any scientific or logic responses.
The Washington Compost is just your typical liberal news rag lying to its readers 24/7 fake news fake polls and fake headlines