Stingray: Global Warming Archives

And we can’t do a thing about it.

We’ve been subjected to horror stories for several years now about the melting of Greenland’s glaciers. Never mind that the glaciers melted from the 1920s to 1940s in the same way that they’re doing today. Never mind that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Client Change (IPCC) has been accused by a leading expert, Nils-Axel Mörner, of falsifying data, destroying data, and appointing unqualified people to come to a pre-ordained conclusion of rising sea levels.

Anybody named Axel has got to be good.

Oh, and never mind the fact that dinosaurs roamed Antarctica 190 million years ago. Yeah, I know about continental drift — Antarctica was probably further north back then, but it sure wasn’t at the equator.

I won’t even go into the Medieval Warming Period or the Little Ice Age except to note the two blaringly contradictory sentences on NOAA’s site where they do a little jig, wave a few hands, and discount the Medieval Warming Period altogether.

There are not enough records available to reconstruct global or even hemispheric mean temperature prior to about 600 years ago with a high degree of confidence.
…

In summary, it appears that the 20th century, and in particular the late 20th century, is likely the warmest the Earth has seen in at least 1200 years.

We can’t be certain about the earth’s climatology before 600 years ago but we sure as heck are absolutely positive that it’s warmer now than it’s been in 1,200 years. Sure, that makes great sense, oh great ones — I believe anything the ~~global warming~~ climate change priests say because they have my BEST INTERESTS at heart. It doesn’t matter whether they’re right; it only matters that they care.

I try to be open-minded about global climate change — I really do — but I’m not exactly impressed with the quality of the science behind it.

Now we learn that an influx of magma close to the earth’s surface may be contributing to or even causing most of the melting of Greenland’s glaciers:

“Stop the MAGMA!”

A Kansas University researcher in a presentation to the American Geophysical Union today will show evidence that global warming may not be the only — and perhaps not even be the largest — cause of declining ice sheets on Greenland.

In a presentation at the AGU meeting in San Francisco, researchers from KU’s Center for the Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets will show evidence that a weakness in the earth’s crust could be causing underground magma to melt the ice above. If that is in fact happening, the water could be melting and carrying away more ice as it flows away from the “hot spot.”

“We think it may be a part of greater geothermal activity beneath the entire ice sheet,” said Kees van der Veen, a KU researcher and professor in the department of geography.

The CReSIS researchers found the weakness in the crust using data gathered with the center’s airborne radar, which has been flying over Greenland, combined with Navy data on the gravitational pull over the ice sheet. Van der Veen and Tim Leftwich, of KU, worked with Ralph von Freese of Ohio State University to analyze the data.

“For the most part, up until recently, the glaciologists ignored the geophysical activity beneath the ice sheets,” van der Veen said.

The initial studies revealed the one known hot spot in an area of northeast Greenland that is home to a recently discovered ice flow. The researchers theorize that the ice flow could have been started by the magma — and not human activity. These streams have become more powerful and more prevalent in recent years. They can be responsible for taking ice from the center of the ice sheet more than 400 miles out to sea, where it eventually melts.

Yeah, that makes sense. So why have glaciologists been ignoring geophysical activity beneath the ice sheets? Could it be that ~~global warming~~ global climate change might be more complicated than blaming Bush?