Friday, July 11, 2008

GASP!: Ice “hanging by a thread!”

FearBefore I do the usual work of ripping this fear piece apart with fact, scientific reasoning, and cold logic, please notice the hysteria and hyperbole of the headline itself. We see these stories every few weeks in the environmentally-ignorant, agenda-driven media. Here was a similar piece where we saw that ice melts in the Arctic are "receding like mad." Then we always see antithetical stories where the ice isn’t as bad as once thought, and then we see counter-stories from the media believers that proclaim “newly-formed ice” isn’t as good as “old ice.” And on it goes...the usual media fear templates that are on the circular conveyor: ice is melting, hurricanes are strengthening, floods are growing, fire is raging, animals are going extinct, tornados are forming, diseases are expanding, and on it goes. FEAR, DOOM, DOOM, DOOOOOOMMM!!!! And it’s all a bunch of baloney. You can read the extensive list of silly “global warming results” on the warmlist; check that list out and ask yourself if the media’s campaign is ridiculous or not. The GASP! series illustrates the extent of the media’s propaganda campaign too—check it out.

And the common thread connecting ice stories is that these glaciers and ice fields are being monitored for changes by satellites year-to-year, and how long have satellites been circling (or stationary) up there, compared to the age of the Earth? Are we making inane proclamations based on statistically-flawed comparisons?

Our “measurements” of ice obtained from satellites compared to records of the same ice over a statistically-acceptable length of time are truly impossible to verify as incontrovertible; the baseline of time is too small compared to the Earth’s total age. In other words, WE’RE INCORRECTLY MAKING ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT THE EARTH BASED ON A RIDICULOUSLY TINY SPAN OF TIME. Satellites have been used for 40 or so years, and satellites that are good enough to “measure” ice have been up there for how long? I’d wager far less than 40 years.

A good analogy to what they’re doing would be to observe a single nanosecond of one year, noticing that at that exact nanosecond the wind changed from 5 mph to 10 mph, and then concluding that our world will obviously be destroyed by this scary doubling in wind speed, if the “trend in acceleration” continues unabated!!! For you alarmist psychos who aren’t savvy enough to follow the allegory, I’m saying that a nanosecond taken out of a year as a period of observation is STATISTICALLY TOO DAMN SMALL to draw silly, far reaching conclusions; a nanosecond is one-billionth of a second, and there are a hell of a lot of nanoseconds in a day, much less a year (5.256 x 10^14 nanoseconds in one year to be exact). Well, taking 30 years of observations (even if they can be shown to be absolutely accurate and unassailable) out of the 4.5 billion years that the Earth has existed (meaning that you’re missing 150 million similar periods of observation), and making bold climate proclamations of doom based on that very small span (30 years out of 4.5 billion years) is similarly retarded. I can’t understand for the life of me how someone in the media hasn’t caught on to this silliness yet, though some have in a few places.

Notice how they make the claim that the ice has been stable “most of the last century.” Really? We see it breaking up now with satellites, but we know with certainty the same ice NOT OBSERVED BY SATELLITES was stable for the last century? Are you laughing yet? You should be...

My guess is that they know about the statistical and scientific problems with their claims, but the myth and boondoggle must be propped up at all costs. Too many reputations are at stake now after all the prophecies of doom, as is the money and power to be acquired from dealing with this new “crisis.” Government and political hacks need crises to remain relevant; they want us to believe that we can’t get by without them and their intercession in our lives.

Antarctic ice shelf 'hanging by thread': European scientists

New evidence has emerged that a large plate of floating ice shelf attached to Antarctica is breaking up, in a troubling sign of global warming, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Thursday.

Images taken by its Envisat remote-sensing satellite show that Wilkins Ice Shelf is "hanging by its last thread" to Charcot Island, one of the plate's key anchors to the Antarctic peninsula, ESA said in a press release.

"Since the connection to the island... helps stabilise the ice shelf, it is likely the breakup of the bridge will put the remainder of the ice shelf at risk," it said.

Wilkins Ice Shelf had been stable for most of the last century, covering around 16,000 square kilometres (6,000 square miles), or about the size of Northern Ireland, before it began to retreat in the 1990s.

Since then several large areas have broken away, and two big breakoffs this year left only a narrow ice bridge about 2.7 kilometres (1.7 miles) wide to connect the shelf to Charcot and nearby Latady Island.

No comments: