A "Goliath" Inconvenient Truth

Just this past August (2012), the chicken littles were out in full force warning us of imminent doom as the result of the melting Greenland ice sheets.

Today, Marco Tedesco, assistant professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at The City College of New York, reported that melting over the Greenland ice sheet shattered the seasonal record in the modern era, a full four weeks before the close of the melting season. The melting season in Greenland usually lasts from June – when the first puddles of meltwater appear – to early September, when temperatures cool. This year, cumulative melting by 8 August had already exceeded the record of 2010 (chart above, year 2012 in red). "With more yet to come in August, this year's overall melting will fall way above the old records.

Wanting to be sure we understood how big a deal this is, they even broke into the biblical references

That's a goliath year

A Goliath year, wow that is big. How "Goliath" was it?

-- the greatest melt since satellite recording began in 1979," said Professor Tedesco.

Since 1979! Since 1979? I mean we are talking about dramatic changes not recorded since the end of the Disco epoch!

BUT, a new study puts the absurdity of this alarmist claim in perspective. As the Houston Chronicle...chronicles  (emphasis mine)

The study used ice cores to study conditions during a period of natural global warming that occurred between 115,000 and 130,000 years ago, when temperatures were about 14.5 Fahrenheit degrees higher than they are today. This was known as the Eemian period.

So what happened to the Greenland ice sheet when temperatures were 14.5 degrees warmer than today? During a period of natural global warming?

During this inter-glacial time about 75 percent of Greenland’s ice sheet remained intact.

Nowhere in any literature that I have ever read are any of the alarmist scientist predicting that temperatures as the result of man made CO2, going to come close to a 14.5 degree Fahrenheit increase.

In fact since the end of the Disco epoch (1979) the illustrious IPCC says that global temperatures have increased .72 degrees Fahrenheit or less than 5% of the increase experienced in the Eemian period. The absolute worst case scenarios projected by the IPCC for temperature increases as the result of a doubling of CO2 is 11.4 degrees Fahrenheit a full three degrees lower than previously experienced according to this study.

In the abstract to the new study we are told: (emphasis mine)

The response of the Greenland ice sheet to the warmer-than-present climate of the Eemian has thus remained unclear. Here we present the new North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (‘NEEM’) ice core and show only a modest ice-sheet response to the strong warming in the early Eemian.

Or as the Chronicle writer observed in the opening to his article:

New research suggests that Greenland’s vast ice sheet isn’t as fragile as some climate scientists feared.

The work, published in Nature this week (see abstract), indicates the majority of ice on Greenland could remain intact for hundreds of years even if the planet warms considerably.

Why is this important? It is important because the fear of the Greenland ice sheet melting is among the sited as one of the largest contributors to sea level rise that the alarmist use to scare the populace and drive public policy.

Greenland An Inconvenient Truth — MOVIECLIPS.com

This narrative is embedded into our culture and has been taught in our schools for a generation, and continues to be.

What will happen in the future?

If people keep adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, the average sea level around the world by the end of this century (the year 2099) could be anywhere from 7 to 23 inches higher than it was in 1990. Sea level could rise even more if the big ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica melt faster.

But the big ice sheets in Greenland will not melt faster, nor will the one in Antarctica, which is for another day.

The truth is that scientist have now shown that even if temperatures were to increase beyond the alarmist wildest claims, my home here near the Florida coast will be bulldozed under by future developers long before it is covered over by the rising Atlantic as depicted in Al Gore's fairy tale movie.

Yet people still believe in the fairy tale and that is a "Goliath" of an Inconvenient Truth.