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 to Tea 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 the leading 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 of 2010, Ellen Mosley Thompson explained some of their key findings to 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:
I was guilty of using the ‘why do they call Greenland Greenland canard in my…. ‘youthful’ days. After a little objective study post-right wing deprogramming that canard was thoroughly debunked.
This was before bracing bucket of cold water that is Climate Crocks.
It seems the Medieval Warm period was a real phenomenon but localized to Europe and maybe Greenland’s southern oceanic regions, leading to a relatively ‘greener’ Greenland than the frozen interior. Still a hard scrabble life.
Regards,
Embarrassed Ex-Conservative in Exile
Sounds like you came out of it ok.
Glad to be of help.
Plenty more cold water coming.
Has anyone contacted Senator Johnson to ask him to confirm his insanity?
http://ronjohnson.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/home
Bravo. Well done. Another enjoyable one with some very telling research out of OSU.
Go Bucks!
Mr. Sinclair,
I’ve been impressed with the videos I’ve seen on this site and the time and care you usually put into them. I was expecting to hear in this one that you had done your usual ‘trick’ of checking the primary sources, but not this time. So, here they are:
From Erik the Red’s Saga, Chapter 2:
“Eirik said to his people that he purposed to seek for the land which Gunnbjorn, the son of Ulf the Crow, saw when he was driven westwards over the ocean, and discovered Gunnbjarnarsker (Gunnbjorn’s rock or skerry). […] Then he sailed oceanwards under Snæfellsjokull (snow mountain glacier), and arrived at the glacier called Blaserkr (Blue-shirt); thence he journeyed south to see if there were any inhabitants of the country.”
and later:
“In the summer Eirik went to live in the land which he had discovered, and which he called Greenland, “Because,” said he, “men will desire much the more to go there if the land has a good name.””
*Taken from
http://www.sagadb.org/eiriks_saga_rauda.en
and cross-checked in my copy of “The Sagas of the Icelanders” (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, copyright 1997 Leifur Erickson Publishing).
Also from “The Sagas of the Icelanders” in “The Saga of the Greenlanders” Chapter 1 p. 637: (The online texts I found of this saga are all in old norse)
“They asked Bjarni whether he now thought this to be Greenland.”
“He said he thought this no more likely to be Greenland than the previous land – ‘since there are said to be very large glaciers in Greenland’.”
So clearly Greenland was named as a marketing ploy by Erik the Red, and other vikings verify the glaciers on it at the time. Once again the pseudo-skeptics cannot be bothered with facts.
proving that Eric the Red could sell beachfront property in Greenland to climate deniers.
I learn a lot from my readers and commenters — thanks!!
Haha, I can only imagine rowing all the way to “Greenland” only to find out that most all of it was covered in ice sheets. Life must have been tough back then.
Thanks for the video. It is another great one. Now I will have to find some time to watch the Ellen Mosley lecture.
I also would like to thank you for helping me get a handle on the facts. When the “Global Warming Swindle” movie came out I was somewhat convinced by their arguments, though guardedly. I was basically ignorant of climate science and so thought there really was some major debate in the field. Less than a year ago I came across “The Temp Leads Carbon Crock” video where you went over the Ciallon et al. 2003 paper. You also explained the milankovitch cycles and their relationship with CO2 forcing. The Swindle movie never made any mention of these things, and so it became clear to me that the movie was BS. Since then I have steeped myself in a little peer-reviewed literature, a lot of Skeptical Science, and I have viewed all of your videos. Thanks again. Keep it up.
Clearly the scientists are trying to get funding so they can have tropical vacations in Greenland. 🙂
I hear from people like yourself and kronocide (above), every week, and it’s part of what keeps me going.
We don’t have to convince everyone, but we do need to convince a critical mass of the opinion leaders and decision makers in the world. And those of us who understand the science need to step up and be those leaders.
I wish I was smarter, better, and more powerful than I am, but I’m here, I’m alive, I have kids, and I’m going to do what I can for as long as I can.
Although Greenland was a little more habitable 1000 years ago than it is today (during the “European” medieval warm period – not a world-wide phenomena), I was always under the impression that the Vikings named places “Greenland” and “Iceland” so other peoples would go to Greenland while avoiding Iceland which they wanted to keep for themselves (making them the world’s first real estate salespeople :-).
Now we all know that there were Viking colonies in both places (fewer people in Greenland than Iceland), and Leaf Erickson was banished to Greenland after committing the crime of murder in Iceland (believe it or not, the Vikings did not believe in capital punishment). Although the written historical record is sketchy because the majority of it came from oral sources, Leaf Erickson found Greenland life a little too harsh and so decided to explore west (where he discovered North America). He couldn’t go east due to political changes in Norway and Denmark. The neat thing about archeology is that it allows us to fill in the spotty history with uncovered facts (L’Anse aux Meadows). It appears that the Vikings lost interest in North America around the time that Leaf’s father, Eric the Red, died in 1003. Perhaps Leaf inherited his father’s property, or maybe there was a time-limit on his banishment.
As for Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson’s comments, I am reminded of the old adage: “Fundamentalism = Over Simplification” which I believe is an enabler of the anti-intellectualism flourishing in North America since Y2K.
I heard a radio interview with Simon Winchester a week or so ago. Anyone who’s really interested in this Viking exploration topic should get a copy when they can. One interesting aside from him was about Vikings and Greenland. He was talking about how much easier it is to get around the north Atlantic than around, say, the south pacific.
Whatever you might have heard about vineyards from those Viking explorers probably relates to their settlements in ….. Canada. Apparently they had quite a well-established community in (?) Newfoundland I think. Super stuff. Shame I was driving at the time.
http://simonwinchester.com/2010/01/atlantic/
I had the pleasure of hearing Lonnie Thompson speak a few weeks ago. Yes, they often transported the cores on yaks (12 metres of ice per yak), but they also used ice cream trucks from neighboring towns, hot air balloons, and (when he was a grad student with a shoestring budget for the project) they just let the ice melt and carried it back in bottles. Remarkably, when they went back to the same site years later and took back frozen cores, their analysis gave almost identical results!
He is a great speaker, I definitely recommend attending presentations by him if you get the chance.