The Old Gray Lady, over a year ago now, proved again that she possesses a never-ending litany of scary stories to tell Earth’s naughty little children about the dangers of combustion engines and the shepherding of gaseous sheep.
If only we could continue to believe her just-so stories. If only we could just not let the facts get in the way of a good story.
The story is about the emergence, due to global warming of Uunartoq Qeqertoq, Inuit for "Warming Island". That’s the name given to a three-fingers-like “new” island created by melting in Greenland. The ice bridge that had once connected Warming Island to the mainland had fissured and collapsed as temperatures warmed.
Uunartoq Qegertop was not named by native Inuit. It was named by white Berkely, California resident Dennis Schmitt, who made the discovery of the “new” island in September, 2005, and who is fluent in the Inuit tongue.
Uunartoq Qegertop lies on the east coast of Greenland, at the northern end of Liverpool Land, which lies at the mouth of Carlsberg Fjord.
Dennis Schmitt was very excited by the find and, as he told the Old Gray Lady in January of 2007, he had always wanted it to become a symbol for the dramatic effects of global warming, which Schmitt and the Lady both assume is man-made and is, correspondingly, a bad thing.
However, there is a problem with the tale of Uunartoq Qegertop.
The problem is that it’s not a new island…and the ice bridge that once connected it to the mainland of Greenland seems to come and go with what is in historical and geological terms the blink of an eye.
In the 1950s, aerial photographer Ernst Hoffer spent a good deal of time in the proximity of Warming Island, taking many photographs as he accompanied a Danish exploration team. He also drew some maps, based on his photography.
Found in his book Arctic Riviera, published in 1957, Hoffer’s map shows Warming Island, before it was so named. Yes, his map shows the “new” island as…well, an island that was always there and could be plainly seen in the 1950s just as it could in the early 21st century.
This was not a big deal to Hoffer. Indeed, he found northeast Greenland “beautiful.” This was because scientists like John Von Neumann and H.W. Ahlmann said that a warming planet would be a good thing. When the 1970s emerged and the media messiahs began shouting about the new, killing Ice Age that had come down upon us those scientists, I would hazard a guess, looked very right.
Suddenly, what those and other like-minded scientists were celebrating, and even in some cases wanting to intervene to accelerate, is demonized, death-dealing, and must be dealt with—through economic harm, personal sacrificial penance, and big brother’s iron-fisted control.
As I wrote back in the beginning of October of 2007:
Recently, ice and snow accumulation specialist Dr. Martin Jeffries and half-Inupiat whaleboat co-captain Richard Glenn have said that while the 2007 melting rate of Arctic ice is "shocking" to many people, and while it is indeed unprecedented "since before 1900 at least", there is absolutely nothing to panic about.
The whaling captain out of the town of Barrow, Alaska, who is a trained geologist as well, does not blame climate change, at least not such made by any human activity, on the events in the Arctic. He says the Inupiat philosophy is that the world is forever changing, and this is not the first time cycles of melting have come to the Arctic. He said what is called for is not panic but simply more vigilance in monitoring the ice and the waters, even down to an hour by hour basis.
It’s high time for the Old Gray Lady to tell her never-ending horror story walking.
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