Thursday, May 24, 2007
Whacky science
Al Gore on Larry King the other night began one of his dire pronouncements by saying, "If Greenland were to break up . . . ." He's not a good enough scientist (he's not a scientist at all, come to think of it) to be taken so seriously and, besides, he's on an odd kind of guilt-producing hellfire and brimstone kick that has some basis in agreed-upon science but more basis in not-agreed-upon prognostication. And some of what he says is just plain wrong. For example, Greenland's more than eight hundred thousand square miles are a land mass, officially called a non-continental island just like Australia. A glacier covers most of the island's interior surface, not the coasts, and none of it is an iceberg or anything else similarly formed and therefore it couldn't "break up" even if it wanted to or even if the temperatures rise to a billion degrees (although who really knows what would happen to anything if the temperature rose to a billion degrees, come to think of it). Lots of research has been done on Greenland's ice sheet and it turns out there have been huge climate changes off and on for thousands and thousands of years, including thickening at its center around ten years ago. At the moment, the ice sheet's edges are melting more quickly than previously, but it's entirely possible that similar fluctuations happened before ("before" meaning over the last several hundred thousand years). Skepticism, questioning, research and reading need to be our best friends. (h/t dadvocate)
Vikings settled in Greenland around a thousand years ago. Then the climate changed. It got too cold to grow crops, etc. and they had too leave.
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