Pat Michaels writes:
One of the reigning myths in climate science is that interglacial temperatures in Greenland were about five degrees (C) above modern, causing a dramatic loss of ice and raising global sea levels about 6 meters (19 feet)…
Whew! Thus does one revolutionary paper shoot pretty much the entire global warming sea-level catastrophe—the one worth being concerned about—through the heart. Antarctica is so cold that it is projected to gain ice in the coming century, as slightly increased precipitation—which may have recently been detected—falls as more snow, which compacts into more ice.
This puts any sea-level crisis out in the hundreds-of-years realm, at least, and probably far beyond our current era of burning hydrocarbons for energy and heat. In other words, forever.
Robert – there is alot of conflicting data out there. See Dr. Morner’s latest paper on sea level change being very modest and not at all alarming.. The very fact that there is so much conflicting data should be a red flag to you that we don;t know what is going on exactly.
Pat Michaels,
You wasted a lot of The CATO Institute’s money by taking that trip to Greenland to see what’s going on with your own eyes Your big “Whew” is the latest lie to come out of the disbelievers. You quote a Nature article by Ms. Dahl-Jensen who said that Greenland’s ice sheet is not melting as fast as was previously thought, but that it was still melting and melting faster than it did 12,000 years ago. That melting 12,000 yes ago could only be responsible for less than half the ocean rise of that era, she figured the rest of the recorded rise came from Antarctica melting. And this is your most grievous oversight, Antarctica is melting faster than ever before. So if you want to mislead your readership, be my guest, but you do them a terrible disservice.
“Although ice loss is currently greatest in Greenland, that could change: some parts of Antarctica are warming almost twice as fast as previously believed, and glaciers in western Antarctica have retreated at a worrying rate in the past few decades5. Furthermore, Eemian sea-level rise seems to have proceeded in drastic jumps, rather than gradually, suggesting that the ongoing sea-level rise could accelerate.” Nature 493, 459–460 (24 January 2013) doi:10.1038/4934