Oscar and the Grouch

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Posted 2/26/2007

Environment: Al Gore's Academy Award should be for best actor in an unsupported role. Once Chicago was under a sheet of ice a mile thick. Just what melted those glaciers, Al?

If Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" had failed to win an Academy Award for — and we are not making this up — best documentary, no doubt the search for more hanging chads would have begun. It was a political statement by a political town, and we doubt artistic merit was the yardstick. We didn't notice if any of those who are smarter than the rest of us showed up at the Oscars in stretch hybrid vehicles.

Gore's opus is built around the premise that Greenland's 630,000 cubic miles of ice is melting rapidly and will soon put New York City, and perhaps all those expensive homes in Malibu, under about 20 feet of water by 2100. Problem is, the ice was probably melting faster in the cocktail glasses of Oscar celebrators at the post-show parties.

Satellite data published in the November 2005 issue of Science did show that Greenland was losing about 25 cubic miles of ice per year. By our math, Greenland was shedding ice at the rate of about 0.4% per century, hardly a cause for concern.

Earlier this month, Science published another paper showing that the recent acceleration of Greenland's ice loss had suddenly reversed.

According to a recent report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, at the 2005 rate, Greenland's ice loss would have contributed less than an inch to sea level rise during the 21st century.



Disko Bay, Greenland

An earlier study published in Science by Ola Johannessen of the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center in Bergen, Norway, found that ice was actually accumulating on Greenland's interior glaciers, far away from the news cameras.

British environmental analyst Lord Christopher Monckton tells us the Greenland ice sheet "grew an average extra thickness of 2 inches a year" from 1993 to 2003.

A study published last year by the National Center for Policy Analysis reported that not only had the Greenland ice mass grown but that "average summer temperatures at the summit of the Greenland ice sheet have decreased 4 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since the late 1980s."

Greenland is supposed to be melting, but it was warmer when Eric the Red brought settlers to the appropriately named place in 986. The climate there supported the Viking way of life based upon cattle, hay, grain and herring for about 300 years, predating the Industrial Revolution, the sport utility vehicle and the stretch limousine.

By 1100, a colony of 3,000 was thriving there. Then came the Little Ice Age, and by 1400, average temperatures had dropped by about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit and the advancing glaciers doomed the Viking colony in Greenland.

Petr Chylek of the department of physics and atmospheric science at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia notes that Gore in his movie "suggests the Greenland melt area increased considerably between 1992 and 2005."

But, Chylek points out, "1992 was exceptionally cold in Greenland" and that "if Gore had chosen for comparison the year 1991, one in which the melt area was 1% higher than in 2005, he would have to conclude that the ice sheet melt area is shrinking and that perhaps a new Ice Age is just around the corner."

Meanwhile, there's a planet where the southern ice cap has been shrinking for three consecutive summers — the red planet, Mars. Could be due to our Mars landers — they're electric and solar powered. Maybe, as NASA reported, it has something to due with the fact that solar radiation has increased in each of the past two decades.

Unless those little green men are driving Ford Expeditions.