Judging from comments I get on the YouTube site, many deniers apparently believe that not too long ago, Greenland was green.
Like, really green.
In fact, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson gave voice toTea Party science when he told an interviewer, “There’s a reason Greenland was called Greenland,” he said. “It was actually green at one point in time. And it’s been, since, it’s a whole lot whiter now.”
But to find a greenland without glaciers and an ice sheet, you have to go back a little further in time.
65 million years ago, when reptiles swam and hunted there.
The more recent past was less idyllic.
Ice core data indicates the the greenland ice sheet is at least 400,000 years old.
While Greenland ice cores tell us much about the past, they are not the only ice cores available
For some 30 years, ice from tropical glaciers has also been examined by Scientists from the Byrd Polar research Center, at Ohio State university, who have packed heavy equipment up some of the highest mountains in the world to preserve a vanishing record.
Ellen Mosley Thompson, and her husband Lonnie Thompson, have been among theleading pioneers in this heroic scientific effort - organizing and leading the transport, often by pack animals, of cutting edge scientific teams to some of the world’s most remote regions.
In December 2010, Ellen Mosley Thompson explained some of their key findings to the American Geophysical Union. So, hard evidence from tropical ice cores and other records is showing us empirically that the medieval period that climate deniers like to talk about was indeed regionally warm, but not a global phenomenon, like today.
Climate deniers love to tell you that the science of global warming depends on abstractions and computer models, but the evidence for man caused warming in fact has been painstakingly built up by some of the hardest of of the hard sciences – the real, boots on the ground grunt work of courageous and dedicated professionals – the spiritual heirs of bold viking explorers of the past.
The tiny colonies that survived in greenland during a brief, regional mild period must indeed have been tough and resourceful people, but not the thriving high culture of climate denier imagination.
More About Medieval Warming:
Link: http://climatecrocks.com/2011/02/02/new-crock-video-what-the-ice-cores-tell-us/
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