Ooh, More Fiction

Thank God it's all a conspiracy:

Icy Greenland turns green
By Richard Hollingham
BBC News, Greenland

...

The Earth's climate has warmed before, albeit naturally.

A ruined church on the banks of a fjord marks the remains of a Viking farming civilisation.

The sun casts shadows through the arched window to the site of the altar, last used in the 1400s before the area was abandoned when it became too cold to support habitation.

Today, the farmers are back.

Sheep once again graze the surrounding hillside and shiny new tractors work the fields near the southern coast.

Greenland is turning green, something the rest of us should be very worried about indeed.

I'd have to look it up to be sure, but I was under the impression that Greenland's glaciers also contain a lot of trapped Methane (hydrates), so the melting of Greenland's ice is possibly also releasing millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases.

Boy, the news keep getting more and more bleak. I've basically accepted the fact that we now face a catastrophe. It might have been different if we'd listened to the scientific consensus in the late 1980s - when 48 countries (including the US) concluded that climate change represented a threat to the world "whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war". They also set a voluntary 20% reduction in CO2 emissions target - by 2005. Oops.

We probably couldn't have avoided climate change entirely, but if the nations of the world had taken the threat seriously in 1988, we would already have solved these problems. We'd have gotten off oil and coal, and prepared our economies for the 21st century.

I hate missed opportunities.