Yesterday, EvMick@aol.com forwarded the following:
>
> Subject: North Pole not as wet as reported
> Date: 29 Aug 2000 15:08:05 -0000
> From: "Junkscience.com" <milloy@cais.com>
>
>
> North Pole not as wet as reported
>
> . . . Citing a report in The New York
> Times, The Associated Press erroneously reported Aug. 19 that open water
> had been spotted on the North Pole for the first time in 50 million years,
> a possible sign of global warming.
>
> In a correction Tuesday, the Times said it had misstated the normal
> conditions of sea ice at the pole. It said open water probably has
> occurred there before because the Arctic Ocean is about 10 percent
> ice-free during a typical summer.
>
Thanks, EvMick, for the info. I was wondering what was supposedly going
on with this, having heard a report on on local CBC radio here in
Saskatchewan, Canada. I'd note that if you follow up on the New York
Times website, with a free account and searching for things like "north
pole ice melt" you come up with a the seemingly very definite result
that the Arctic ice pack has been reduced by 6%, just since 1978. At the
same time, sea level is said to have been affected very little, owing to
the fact that the reduced volume of sea ice changes total water volume
very little, while land pack ice (Greenland, Antarctica) hasn't been
reduced.
All of which seems a little confusing to me -- or to put it another way,
I am not reassured that the "stop global warming" people really know
what they are talking about yet. I mean, open water in the Arctic summer
is not all that remarkable, it seems. At the same time, I have to worry
that a 6% reduction in the ice pack overall now looks like a smoking gun
for manmade global warming? Such a noticeable amount of melting on a
large scale, and in only 22 years; this is more impressive than past
computer projections of a couple of degrees warming in a century! Or, is
it just the El Nino/La Nina ocean current changes messing with the ice
in a way that has little to do with the overall world's temperature as
such?
I am strongly tempted to say that the world should just *wait* on this
problem *another* 22 years, to confirm if the actual overall world
temperature is going up or not and also to confirm (as much as it can be
confirmed) whether fossil fuel use is the most likely cause. At that
point, if the *global* quality of any warming is confirmed, put a high
priority on developing nano-engineered trucks, tractors, buses, etc.,
that don't burn fossil fuels. For nano to get to the point of being a
big help, this time frame seems about right -- or am I just
oversimplifying, stalling, the enviros have it right, so that we really
gotta *move* on this or *fry*, etc?
David Blenkinsop <blenl@sk.sympatico.ca>
"Dust bunnies an endangered species -- rare new variety isolated by
inability to mate with generic dust bunnies, details at eleven."
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