Climate Corrections

In full-on apocalyptic mode this morning, Martyn Bradbury hyperventilates over melting ice in Greenland. Greenland ice melting should "terrify us," he tells us. The melting is "so extreme" that the ice sheet "lost 11 billion ton of ice -- in just one day"!

Imagine that! 11 billion tons!! In just one day!! In summer!!!

"How does that impact the rest of us?" asks Martyn, and answers: "In a terrifying manner I’m afraid."

Martyn is afraid.

Martyn is very afraid:

We are seeing the last canary die in the coal mine. Catastrophic climate change is here, we have run out of time. Our collective denial has made it impossible to stop climate change, our only hope now is radical adaptation.

But Martyn hasn't done his sums.

George Reisman has. After headlines such as “Greenland is on track to lose most ice on record this year and has already shed 250 billion tons,” Reisman put down his paper and picked up his calculator -- something Martyn should have done before letting loose:

It turns out that this amount of water is equal to slightly more than 60 cubic miles. (http://bit.ly/33tnVhf) The total volume of water in the world’s oceans is approximately 320 million cubic miles. (http://bit.ly/2N2yl1x)
    If we divide the 60 cubic miles of water added by the ice melt in Greenland by the 320 million cubic miles of water already in the oceans, the result is 0.0000001875. This is the relative increase in the volume of water in the oceans.
    The absolute increase is the relative increase times the pre-existing average depth of the oceans, which is approximately 12,100 feet (idem) [or 3,688m).... The results of these multiplications are .0023 feet [or 0.69mm] ... That’s 23 ten-thousandths of a foot, 27 one-thousandths of an inch [or less than one millimetre].
    To put these numbers in proper perspective, recall that a quarter of an inch is 250 one-thousandths of an inch. So what the fake media were trying to frighten us with is a rise in the sea level of little more than a tenth of a quarter of an inch (i.e., .027/.250).

Terrifying! A whole summer's worth of Greenland ice a-melting, as it does every summer, creating a seal-level rise of less than two-thirds of a millimetre. And as Reisman reminds us, "much or most of the 60 cubic miles of melted ice from Greenland will refreeze come Winter."

This is a canary in the coal mine only in the sense that it flushes out those prone too easily to panic.

There is no more need to panic because Greenland ice raises sea level less than the thickness of a cigarette paper than there is to panic about (to pick a place made topical by a costly Prime-Ministerial visit) the seas around Tuvalu. To remind readers:

The reported `plight' of the Tuvaluans is not about sea level rise at all - it's about over-population. With such a high population density, the fresh water table on the atolls is subject to rapid depletion, especially in dry years. In addition, the development which would follow from such a high density will bring the inevitable coastal erosion, a problem which the Tuvalu government falsely blames on climate change and sea level rise. Tide gauge data from all around the South Pacific shows the same pattern as the one at Funafuti - no sea level rise. It is, and always was, a bogus claim, with few in the outside world bothering to check the accuracy of the claim.”

Little has changed since those claims were first made, neither in any acceleration of sea-level rise around Tuvalu, nor the arrival of that flood of "climate refugees" from Tuvalu that Al Gore forecast would have begun arriving here at least a decade ago. (The Tuvaluan population increased by 660 between 2001 and 2006, largely through births. By 2006, there were 1654 Tuvalu-born folk living in NZ; in 2013 just 1848.)

We are right to be afraid. Not by the way the planet is behaving, but by those who purport to report upon it.

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