Global warming alarmists got some bad news from both poles recently:
One: London’s Telegraph Christopher Booker reported yesterday that a research team jointly dispatched by the BBC and World Wild Life foundation to the North Pole expressly to measure how quickly the Arctic sheet is melting ran into just one problem: It found no evidence of melting. In fact, since last March, it seems that the ice sheet has thickened by at least half a meter.
A tip-off that things were not going to turn out as anticipated came when the team, whose express mission was to raise awareness about global climate change ahead of the December confab in Copenhagen, saw wandering around aimlessly one of those polar bears who are supposedly near extinction due to global warming.
Separately, Booker reported that a London employment tribunal ruled that a firm had wrongly dismissed from the position of “head of sustainability” someone who, in his fervent commitment to “climate change,” was trying to reduce the company’s “carbon footprint”. The tribunal chairman David Neath found the company guilty of discriminating against the employee under the 2006 Equality (Religion and Belief) Regulations, because his faith in global warming was a “philosophical belief”.
“Recalling how ‘eco-psychologists’ at the University of the West of England are pressing for “climate denial” to be classified as a form of ‘mental disorder,’ writes Booker, “one doubts whether the same legal protection would be given to those who fail to share (the fired employees ‘philosophical beliefs.'”
Two: A study in the journal Nature calculated that the time span for the Antarctic’s melting is not on the scale of a hundred years as alarmists have been hyperventilating, but thousands. The New York Times’ Andrew Revkin, no global warming skeptic, reports:
“Dr. Pollard and Dr. DeConto ran a five-million-year computer simulation of the ice sheet’s comings and goings, using data on past actual climate and ocean conditions gleaned from seabed samples (the subject of the other paper) to validate the resulting patterns.
The bottom line? In this simulation, the ice sheet does collapse when waters beneath fringing ice shelves warm 7 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit or so, but the process — at its fastest — takes thousands of years. Over all, the pace of sea-level rise from the resulting ice loss doesn’t go beyond about 1.5 feet per century, Dr. Pollard said in an interview, a far cry from what was thought possible a couple of decades ago.”
So will President Obama please take a deep breath and exhale before committing the U.S. to an energy diet through a cap-and-trade scheme?