I&I Editorial
Even with a pandemic to exploit, the political left and its communications department, which most know as the mainstream media, still have time to sow fear about global warming. Now, they tell us, we have to worry about Greenland’s ice sheet because it’s reached the “point of no return.” Which makes a potent fear factor but fails to tell all of the story, which isn’t quite like the one the press wants to sell.
“The Greenland Ice Sheet is losing mass at accelerated rates in the 21st century,” says a new research paper published in Nature’s Research Communications Earth & Environment, “making it the largest single contributor to rising sea levels.”
In a separate statement, we’re told that “nearly 40 years of satellite data from Greenland shows that glaciers on the island have shrunk so much that even if global warming were to stop today, the ice sheet would continue shrinking.”
The report inspired such headlines as:
- “The Greenland ice sheet is melting to a point of no return: study” — The Hill
- “Greenland ice sheet lost a record 1m tonnes of ice per minute in 2019” — The Guardian
- “Going, Going … Gone: Greenland’s Melting Ice Sheet Passed a Point of No Return in the Early 2000s” — Inside Climate News
- “Loss of Greenland Ice Sheet Reached a Record Last Year” — New York Times
- “There’s no hope for Greenland’s melting ice sheet” — USA Today
So our carbon-crusted sky is falling due to global warming. Or is it?
Oceanographer Jochem Marotzke apparently doesn’t seem to think so. He’s reportedly said he’s not concerned about Greenland’s ice sheet thawing.
“It’s gonna take so long – a couple thousand years. I don’t see any risk with Greenland,” the director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany told a Frankfurt newspaper.
Seems he’s more worried about panic caused by sensational reports than climate “tipping points.”
Another salient point missed by the media is that Greenland was warmer in the 1930s than it is today. Why didn’t the ice sheet reach a “point of no return” then but has now when it’s cooler? It was also warmer, according to Climate Depot, 11,000 years ago than in the present.
In the interest of balance and equity, we feel compelled to list a few more headlines:
- “Greenland Is Getting Colder: New Study” — Global Warming Policy Forum, January 2018
- “Retreating Greenland Glacier Is Growing Again” — From a March 2019 NASA report
“At first we didn’t believe it. We had pretty much assumed that Jakobshavn would just keep going on as it had over the last 20 years.”
- “Jakobshavn Isbrae: Mighty Greenland glacier slams on brakes” — BBC, May 2019
“It’s a complete reversal in behaviour and it wasn’t predicted,” said one researcher.
So tell us again about this “point of no return.” About how once science has determined a course for an ice sheet, a glacier, a climate, that it can’t be reversed – because science says so.
Science doesn’t lock onto a single perspective or theory, claim the issue is settled, and never move from it. But zealotry does. That’s why the global warming religion and its religionists are so dangerous.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Thank you. Alarmism is everywhere. I remember reading the story about “the sky is falling” when I was a child. I believe it has been removed from the books for children today.
The story of Chicken Little and “The sky is falling!” actually just changed names–it’s now called “An inconvenient truth”
Noting that back in the 1970’sit was Global Cooling and New Ice Age was coming this is just the kind of stuff liberal rags like Time and Newsweek was spouting of to us