AGW Scaremongering Now More Thinly Veiled

Here's a new story just out today from the Vancouver Sun.

After thousands of years, Canada's 'majestic' ice shelves disintegrating

Note the heart tugging statements at the top of the story.

"disintegrating"

"Today the shelves are a tenth that size and could soon be erased completely from Canadian maps and relegated to a footnote in the history books."

"They're really unique, intriguing aspects of our Canadian landscape..."

"And they are disappearing."

"But once his expedition made it across the "long prairie-like swells" Peary marvelled in his journals at the size and uniqueness of shelves"

"Today only four small shelf remnants are left - covering less than 900 square kilometres. And the largest of the remaining ice shelves is cracking"

"It's looking really precarious..."

""The worst case scenario from the cracks that we can see is that we would lose the entire eastern part of the ice shelf."

"Scientists say the demise of the shelves is accelerating, but they have been shrinking for decades"

Then we start to see some inconvenient truths:

"In the 1940s and '60s, huge ice islands snapped off the Ellesmere's shelves - some hundreds of square kilometres in size. And an ice island that calved off in the early 1980s, dubbed "Hobson's Choice" was used as a floating research platform by scientists as it sailed around the Arctic."

"England and his colleagues say loss of Ward Hunt ice shelf would be 'without precedent in the last 5,500 years.'"

Hmmmm. What happened before 5,500 years ago? Would that be earlier in the inter-glacial era, as in closer to the time when almost all of North America was covered with ice? Nah, we don't need to go into that, do we?

"They dated driftwood on Ellesmere that come ashore before the western half of the Ward Hunt ice shelf formed, and found it's been there 5,500 years. Another team has pegged the age of other parts of the shelves at 3,000 years."

Well, I'll be darned. But don't let that stop you:

"All of which makes the shelves as old, if not older - and in England's mind, as much as a treasure - as the Egyptian pyramids."

Oh, the humanity.

"'They're old friends,' England says of the shelves.

And the demise of the shelves is yet more evidence that the Arctic and planet is warming. "And it behooves us to listen," he says."

Look, England, the pyramids are remarkable as a testament to human ingenuity. Five thousands years later, we still don't know for sure how they did it, but we do know that ancient Egypt was one of only a small handful of locations where human civilization developed independently of one another, marking the transition from our hunter-gatherer life to one of settlement and agriculture. But this is human time scales and humans have only been around a short time compared to the longevity of the earth.

If you want to talk ice sheets, and the waxing and waning thereof, human time scales won't do. Try talking in terms of billions of years. And as far as ice caps are concerned, remember that the Earth's poles have been covered with ice for only 20% of the time our planet has been whizzing around in space. This comparison to the Pyramids is just plain silly.