Guest post by Matt Ridley
My article in Wired in August called “Apocalypse Not” (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/ff_apocalypsenot/) attracted a huge number of comments, many of which were constructive and interesting. It also led to critical responses at other sites. Here is my response to some of those responses. Wired asked me to respond, but then concluded that there was not space on their website to carry the response.
Philip Bump wrote an article in Grist attacking what he calls my “conceit” on climate change and calling my argument “bullshit”: http://grist.org/news/apocalypse-or-bust-how-wireds-climate-optimism-doesnt-add-up/. Leaving aside the insults, what was the substance of his criticism?
Mr Bump’s first point is that I am wrong that malaria will continue to decline because “comparing our relative recent success in combating malaria to the haphazard and poorly funded efforts from last century doesn’t provide much insight into how we’ll fare against more widespread malaria using existing tools”. He is entitled to this opinion but it flies in the face of published evidence on three counts. First, the retreat of malaria during the twentieth century was far from haphazard. As a chart published in Nature by Dr Peter Gething of Oxford University (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v465/n7296/images/nature09098-f1.2.jpg) shows, malaria vanished in the twentieth century from large parts of Asia, Europe and North America and became dramatically rarer in South America and South-east Asia. It also declined in Africa.
Second, the acceleration of this decline of malaria since 2000 (25% reduction in ten years) has indeed been aided by the work and funds of the Gates Foundation and others, but with new funds and new techniques it is not clear why Mr Bump thinks “it’s unlikely, though, that additional investment will continue to get the same rate of return” since he provides no evidence for this statement. Third, the “more widespread malaria” the he forecasts is largely a myth. In most of the world malaria is not limited by climate. In Africa there a few high-altitude areas – less than 3% of the continent – that might become more malaria friendly if global warming accelerates as the IPCC predicts. Surely it will continue to make sense to combat malaria itself rather than trying to fight it by combating climate change? Why should we focus on preventing that 3% increase rather than diminishing the existing 100% of malaria? As Dr Gething has written: “widespread claims that rising mean temperatures have already led to increases in worldwide malaria morbidity and mortality are largely at odds with observed decreasing global trends in both its endemicity and geographic extent” and “proposed future effects of rising temperatures on endemicity are at least one order of magnitude smaller than changes observed since about 1900 and up to two orders of magnitude smaller than those that can be achieved by the effective scale-up of key control measures.”[1]
Incidentally, the persistence of the myth that malaria would worsen in a warming world was quite unnecessary, because a world expert on the topic tried in vain to correct the myth at an early stage. Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute, made the case within the IPCC that malaria’s range was shrinking and was limited by factors other than temperature, but was ignored and (in his words) “After much effort and many fruitless discussions I…resigned from the IPCC project [but] found that my name was still listed. I requested its removal, but was told it would remain because ‘I had contributed.’ It was only after strong insistence that I succeeded in having it removed.”[2]
Mr Bump’s second charge is that if I am right that the threat of increased malaria as a result of global warming was greatly exaggerated, this does not prove that other aspects of climate change are exaggerated: “Even if the malaria argument held up, it would still only represent one ancillary concern stemming from global warming!” Given the prominence of the malaria-from-warming threat in the early IPCC reports and in the media, and the long battle Dr Reiter had to get the IPCC to see sense on the issue, the issue was hardly ancillary. None the less, let me take up Mr Bump’s challenge and consider some of the other threats promised in the name of climate change. For reasons of space I chose to focus on malaria but there is a long list of threats that have been downgraded as more knowledge of climate change accumulates. My first draft included two paragraphs of other examples that were left on the cutting room floor when my article was published. I reproduce them here:
“Likewise, the prediction that global warming could turn off the Gulf Stream, an idea that featured in the film The Day After Tomorrow. The fear was taken seriously in the 1990s, with the respected Nature magazine publishing a computer-model calculation that showed “a permanent shutdown” of the Atlantic “thermohaline circulation”, which drives the Gulf Stream, within a century if carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise[3]. This, commented a senior scientist, posed a risk “that no nation bordering the North Atlantic would willingly take.”[4] Such a threat has now been abandoned as highly unlikely, one scientist commenting: “I think the notion of telling the public to prepare for both global warming and an ice age at the same [time] creates a real public relations problem for us.”[5]
“In other words, some of the subplots of climate change have already proved exaggerated.
– The Himalayan glaciers are not melting in a hurry and even if they were, 96% of the water in the Ganges comes from rain, not melting ice[6].
– A gigantic methane belch when the Arctic ocean reaches some warm tipping point turns out to be implausible[7].
– The world’s coral reefs recover quickly and fully from bleaching episodes caused by sudden warming[8].
– Runaway warming is now widely agreed to be impossible[9].
– The United Nations was wrong in 2005 to predict (and map the whereabouts of) 50 million future environmental refugees by 2010[10]. And so on.
Maybe these sideshows were always mistakes. Or just maybe the main event is being exaggerated too.”
I look forward to Mr Bump’s response on each of these points, few of which are ancillary. I also draw his attention to the deceleration of sea level rise, in sharp contrast to predictions, a measure that is about as central to the climate change threat as you can get. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/13/sea-level-acceleration-not-so-fast-recently/
Another critique of my article appeared under Lloyd Alter’s byline here: http://www.treehugger.com/energy-policy/wired-magazine-tells-us-dont-worry-be-happy-about-climate-population-resources-pandemics.html. Mr Alter accuses me of being pie-in-the sky and head-in-the-sand and objects specifically to my conclusion about the ozone hole that “the predicted recovery of the ozone layer never happened: The hole stopped growing before the ban took effect, then failed to shrink afterward. The ozone hole still grows every Antarctic spring, to roughly the same extent each year. Nobody quite knows why. Some scientists think it is simply taking longer than expected for the chemicals to disintegrate; a few believe that the cause of the hole was misdiagnosed in the first place. Either way, the ozone hole cannot yet be claimed as a looming catastrophe, let alone one averted by political action.”
Mr Alter claims that the long residence time of chloroflurocarbons in the atmosphere explains the failure of the ozone hole to shrink. He may be right, in which case he falls in the category I cited – “Some scientists think it is simply taking longer than expected for the chemicals to disintegrate” – but that hardly disproves my last statement that the ozone hole cannot yet be called a crisis that was definitely averted. Here’s a graph, from NASA (http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/meteorology/annual_data.html) , showing the stubborn persistence of the ozone hole:
Among the emails received at Wired was one from David Gasper of Dayton, Ohio, arguing “many situations are avoided because we listened to the alarmists and PREVENTED the extremes from happening.” Sure, and I acknowledged this in my piece. However, Mr Gasper gives two poor examples to support his case. The first is the Y2k computer bug. A huge amount of expensive work was indeed done to avert the breakdown of computers on 31 December 2012, but that does not in itself prove that the threats were not exaggerated.
Indeed the absolute lack of any major problems the next day, even in countries whose efforts were threadbare and patchy (such as Italy and South Korea and much of Africa), rather argues that they were exaggerated. Remember my argument is not that there was no threat of problems, but that the threat was overblown. Can anybody really think, in retrospect, that Senator Christopher J. Dodd, (D-CT), speaking at the first hearings of the Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem on June 12, 1998 was not overegging the scare when he said: “I think we’re no longer at the point of asking whether or not there will be any power disruptions, but we are now forced to ask how severe the disruptions are going to be…. If the critical industries and government agencies don’t start to pick up the pace of dealing with this problem right now, Congress and the Clinton Administration are going to have to…deal with a true national emergency.”[11]
Mr Gasper’s other example is DDT, saying that I downplay the importance of DDT and bird populations and he points out that bald eagles and other predatory birds now thrive in his part of Ohio. He’s right and hawks and falcons now thrive where I live also. In both cases the removal of DDT was, I am convinced, crucial in the recovery of raptor populations, because DDT became concentrated as it moved up the food chain till it reached levels that did harm by thinning eggshells. However, my critique of the Rachel Carson/Paul Ehrlich scare was not about this phenomenon, but about the claim that DDT, together with other chemicals, caused cancer in human beings and would result in a severe shortening of human lifespan.
The website Carbon Commentary carried a piece by Chris Goodall (http://www.carboncommentary.com/2012/08/23/2449) arguing that skin cancer was getting worse because of ozone loss, that food and metal prices were rising and that he had read a similar article in the Economist in 1997.
Mr Goodall’s piece had many errors, starting with the repeated misspelling of “Ehrlich”.
He attempted to combat my assertion that melanoma is not increasing with the following remark: “increasing skin cancer incidence has been linked to rising UV-B radiation for several decades.” He gave no source. (My article has over 75 source links at my website: http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/apocalypse-not.aspx.) Is Mr Goodall unaware that most skin cancer is not melanoma? That the increase in other skin cancers is caused, most medical scientists think, by an increase in holidays in low latitudes, not a reduction in ozone in high latitudes?
There were plenty more in the way of egregious mistakes in the piece that would never have got past the fact-checkers at Wired. His price graphs took no account of inflation! Minerals and cancers were cherry picked. For the true picture on commodities prices and the Simon-Ehrlich bet, see this chart:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_otfwl2zc6Qc/S4AmqnxCqXI/AAAAAAAAM1A/eYRQcCkYlcc/s1600-h/commodities.jpg
and Mark Perry’s conclusion about it:
“If Simon’s position was that natural resources and commodities become generally more abundant over long periods time, reflected in falling real prices, I think he was more right than lucky, as the graph above demonstrates.
Stated differently, if Simon was really betting that inflation-adjusted prices of a basket of commodity prices have a significantly negative slope over long periods of time, and Ehrlich was betting that the slope of that line was significantly positive, I think Simon wins the bet.”
As for food prices, see http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/08/peak-oil-climate-change-and-the-threat-to-food-security/#more-48870
How anybody from the climate-alarm camp can argue that the recent spike in food prices might be evidence of running out of food, when we turned 40% (!!) of US grain into motor fuel last year to satisfy green campaigners, baffles me.
And the similarity of some parts of the Wired article to some parts of the Economist article in 1997 is because I wrote them both.
Finally, there was an anonymous article on a blog called Skeptical Science, which purported to correct my claims about the possibility of a “lukewarm” climate outcome that would be less damaging than some of the measures being taken to combat climate change such as biofuels. The article focused on two points, first that Greenland’s ice loss, while currently less than 1% per century as I claimed, is in fact accelerating. However, recent revisions to the data show that the true rate of ice loss is even lower, less than 0.5% per century (http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v3/n9/full/ngeo938.html) and even this comes from far too short a period to be called a trend. (It is interesting how quick some climate alarmists are to dismiss the standstill in global temperatures of the last 15 years as “too short” while accepting nine years of Greenland satellite data as a trend!)
In fact the latest work, by Kurt Kjaer of the University of Copenhagen (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6094/569.abstract?sid=822b555a-638b-4a49-a021-3dab84f17457), using aerial photographs to extend the history of Greenland’s ice cap backwards in time “challenges predictions about the future response of the Greenland Ice Sheet to increasing global temperatures” by concluding that the spurts of ice loss from Greenland in 1985-1993 and in 2005-2010 were short-lived events rather than indicative of a general trend.
Skeptical Science’s other criticism was that the evidence supports a strong positive water-vapour feedback amplification of carbon-dioxide induced warming. I am glad to have confirmation that this feedback is necessary to turn CO2-induced warming into a major danger, as I argued, but I disagree that the current evidence overwhelmingly supports this. There are studies that find evidence for net positive feedbacks and studies that do not. Here’s one very recent one (http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2011GL050226.shtml) that makes “relatively low projections of 21st-century warming”. And here is a recent critique of high-sensitivity studies (http://judithcurry.com/2012/06/25/questioning-the-forest-et-al-2006-sensitivity-study/). My point, remember, is not that climate change will definitely be benign, but that the possibility that it will be real but not a catastrophe is far from small and yet is usually ignored. It is surely premature to rule out the possibility of such a lukewarm future and Skeptical Science produces very threadbare evidence to support such a dogmatic conclusion.
For those who are interested in the sources I used for my original article, I have reprinted it with many live links at www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/apocalypse-not.aspx.
[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v465/n7296/full/nature09098.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Reiter
[3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/climate/stories/sci120197.htm
[4] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/climate/stories/sci120197.htm
[6] http://www.mtnforum.org/sites/default/files/pub/1294.pdf and http://www.theresilientearth.com/?q=content/himalayan-glaciers-not-melting
[7] http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/28/more-views-on-global-warmin-and-arctic-methane/?src=tp
[8] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090423100817.htm and http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2010/09/13/coral-bleaching/
[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_greenhouse_effect#cite_note-10
[10] http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,757713,00.html
[11] http://www.co-intelligence.org/y2k_quotes.html
Y2K overhype: I had a supplyer send me a letter appolagizing that they could not certify that their RF attenuator was Y2K compliant. An RF attenuator is esentialy a chunk of carbon (carfully calibrated carbon). Hello!
I enjoyed newyears 2000 in Time Square. I was not worried in the least about Y2K bugs. I was however worried about the very limited bathroom facilites. 16h is a long time to hold it….
Cost of stuff: Humans always manage to find a way. The UN predicts that the human population will platue at 10 billion. That is only about 40% growth. If we would stop using our food as fuel, and stop the low per acre productivity practice of organic growing, 40% increase in food production should be easy. Just with the developing world using modern farming, and GM crops, It would likley be done already. As for non-renewable resourses, as they become more scarce, alternatives are found.
Other Doomsday prediciton flops: The Amazon rainforest. When I was in grade school, we were told that we were going to run out of O2 because those evil farmers in Brazil kept burning the rainforest. Well they were just trying to feed their families. Same as early North American setlers. In the end, we still have losts of O2. False alarm…
Y2K Castaways By Tom Ervin
To the tune of Gilligan’s Island
Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale
Of the doom that is our fate.
That started when programmers used
Two digits for a date.
Two digits for a date.
Main memory was smaller then;
Hard disks were smaller, too.
“Four digits are extravagant,
“So let’s get by with two.
“So let’s get by with two.”
“This works through 1999,”
The programmers did say.
“Unless we rewrite before that
“It all will go away.
“It all will go away.”
But Management had not a clue:
“It works fine now, you bet!
“A rewrite is a straight expense;
“We won’t do it just yet.
“We won’t do it just yet.”
Now when 2000 rolls around
It all goes straight to hell,
For zero’s less than ninety-nine,
As anyone can tell.
As anyone can tell.
The mail won’t bring your pension check
It won’t be sent to you
When you’re no longer sixty-eight,
But minus thirty-two.
But minus thirty-two.
The problems we’re about to face
Are frightening, for sure.
And reading every line of code’s
The only certain cure.
The only certain cure.
(key change, big finish)
There’s not much time,
There’s too much code.
(And Cobol-coders, few)
When-the century is finished with,
We may be finished, too.
We may be finished, too.
Eight thousand years from now I hope
That things weren’t left too late,
And people aren’t lamenting then
Four digits for a date.
Four digits for a date.
O/T but following up on the Y2K thing (Cui Bono & UlfT) there are certainly some interesting parallels to the present AGW clamour.
Y2K “detection” software, some endorsed by governments, where the test was looking at the BIOS date, not testing the real-time clock.
I was contacted to ask if I had used 2 digit or 4 digit date format in some functions I wrote:
“you still using that stuff? It was only supposed to be up for about 6 months … … can’t remember … probably 2 digit … no point trying hypnosis, not ‘cos I strong-willed, just doesn’t work. Sorry. … you might find that a year = 365.25 days, but none of those Gregorian Calendar adjustments, couldn’t understand that stuff … it’s not exactly mission-critical, just let it fall over …
Around here I believe we may still have one or two sewage pump stations that send a message reporting daily volumes pumped on 1/1/1980 +
No aircraft falling out of the sky because their engines had not been serviced for 20 to 99 years.
The Soviet missile scare was a good one 🙂
At the time the systems were built, the west was not allowing state of art stuff to be supplied. But the “cutting edge” was video games. So the Russians got loads of video game machines, powerful Motorola processors etc, rejigged them for their missile systems. No RTC to fall over …
As has been observed, fixing stupid is difficult …
Good book for debunking the ‘science’ of DDT and thin eggshells in birds, http://www.amazon.com/Kicking-Sacred-Cow-James-Hogan/dp/0743488288
I was a subscriber from Day One, but let my sub lapse a year or two ago in the wake of their alarmist sneering. (Though I suspect it was imposed on them by their owner, Condé-Nast.)
21 Nov: Yale: UN Climate Chief: Talks Are Making Slow, Steady Progress
With a new round of climate negotiations about to get underway, Christiana Figueres, head of the United Nations climate organization, explains in a Yale Environment 360 interview why, despite the obstacles, she thinks the world community is slowly inching its way toward an agreement.
(Elizabeth Kolbert, who conducted this interview for Yale Environment 360, has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1999. Her 2005 New Yorker series on global warming, “The Climate of Man,” won a National Magazine Award and was extended into a book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, which was published in 2006. In previous articles for Yale Environment 360, she has written about a study that found the pace of global warming is outstripping projections and about a study tracking the effects of climate change in the Peruvian Andes.)
(Christiana Figueres) It is the most inspiring job in the world because what we are doing here is we are inspiring government, private sector, and civil society to [make] the biggest transformation that they have ever undertaken. The Industrial Revolution was also a transformation, but it wasn’t a guided transformation from a centralized policy perspective. This is a centralized transformation that is taking place because governments have decided that they need to listen to science. So it’s a very, very different transformation and one that is going to make the life of everyone on the planet very different.
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/un_climate_chief_christiana_figueres_talks_making_progress_on_eve_of_doha/2593/#.UK05kQ6CU1g.twitter
So I have a question about DDT. If we assume for a moment that it has the harmful effects it is accused of (I’m not saying it does, just assuming for purposes of this discussion) does that not leave plenty of room for using it anyway? I mean, it was in use for years, and the raptors survived. So….
Malaria still kills a lot of people every year. Wouldn’t it make sense to go nuts with DDT for a couple of years? Then after that any incidence of malaria, hit that spot and a big radius around it with DDT until we eradicate it? With the use being intermittent, I’d think any deleterious effects would be minimized if they exist at all?
Doug Proctor says:
November 21, 2012 at 11:33 am
Good article and arguments, well stated!
Ahh! but herein lies the problem: the warmists have CERTAINTY, while the skeptics have only un-certainty on their side.
************************
You remind me of a great quotation:
“The problem with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”
– Bertrand Russell
Somehow this got to Y2K. My advice at the time was…
Leave your PC on overnight so the century would roll over.
DaveE.
Perhaps a reference to utilize with respect to Ozone.
Haven’t seen much of a follow up in the science community on this item at all.
It doesn’t surprise me considering the Montreal Protocol was the test drive for Kyoto.
http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070924/full/449382a.html
Great post by Matt. Standing back and looking again at the argument, one sees again the persistant pattern used by the alarmists:
1. Take a known and agreed-upon phenomenon (greenhouse gases tend to warm the earth), and…
2. Leverage it into a suite of unsupportable imagined catastrophes (Gulf Stream will break down) designed to generate as much fear as possible.
3. When confronted with the absence of evidence or counter evidence, attack the messenger.
Not a bad formula, for as Matt well knows, fear of things that never happen has a long and dreary history. And the purveyors of fear are never brought to account for their failures.
I am constantly gobsmacked that the AGW crowd continue to believe that no ‘credible’ scientist would dare to have an opinion that ran counter to the AGW theory. It’s really disappointing that science is being subverted to the point where skepticism is no longer the default position. Faith seems to be the default for far too many people. Scientists should be encouraged to speak their mind if they have a different hypothesis, not denigrated for daring to oppose the status quo.
Skeptics see a glass half full of water.
Warmist see a glass half empty.
Alarmists see ice melting in the glass, water rising ,spilling over, and everyone slipping on it and the drowning.
correction .. “and then drowning.”
It doesn’t matter whether the sky is falling. If you don’t believe Chicken Little, you are a mean person. You don’t want to be a mean person, do you?
Also, if the Gulfstream breaks down, you’ll have to fly in a Cessna. How declasse.
Mr Alter claims that the long residence time of chloroflurocarbons in the atmosphere explains the failure of the ozone hole to shrink.”
======================================
The correct concept, wrong gasses, possibility cannot be discounted. Whatever caused the ozone holes, an 8% increase in UV over the subtropical oceans and a 20% increase over the Southern ocean is no small matter.
http://geosciencebigpicture.com/2012/11/08/global-uv-increase-from-1979-2008-correlated-witn-global-warming/
Most data these days comes in the form of a derivative anomaly. This can be useful, but there is this really great atmospheric map on this site I’m feeling too lazy to dig up that shows actual surface temperatures. What a concept. If you look at it you will find that for any given latitude the ocean temperature is higher than the land temperature.No small matter, and the derivative obscures this.
There are many ironies in nature, but that snow is an excellent “blackbody” and water is not surely rates near the top. While land (and snow and ice cover) are efficient at ridding their enthalpy, the oceans (and lakes) are not. The oceans are a passive/agressive monsters constantly absorbing frustration in the form UV and having no outlet except evaporation and radiation from a micron thick surface film.
Dan in Nevada says:
November 21, 2012 at 2:39 pm
This is not hard to understand; I think most 5 year olds could grasp this. Why is it that presumably intelligent adults continue to buy into the “Population Bomb” crap?
———————————————————————————————-
Simple. They equate people with bacteria, i.e. stupid life that invariably grows to consume all available resource and then crashes. Unfortunately for them, and fortunately for us, people have this odd ability to innovate and unlock new resources.
“My point, remember, is not that climate change will definitely be benign, but that the possibility that it will be real but not a catastrophe is far from small and yet is usually ignored. It is surely premature to rule out the possibility of such a lukewarm future and Skeptical Science produces very threadbare evidence to support such a dogmatic conclusion.”
I hate to say this, but after all they do call themselves “skeptical scientists.” How much harm is inflicted on the cause of skepticism by those who proclaim themselves to be the holders of the flame but have no true understanding of what “skepticism” even really consists?
MattS says:
November 21, 2012 at 1:35 pm
You miss my point. I was making the point that the flow in the headwaters of a river often is a very small part of the river’s total volume at points downstream. The Mississippi is a good example of a river that flows through continuous rich watersheds. Given the volume of water from these watersheds, ending permanently the flow from Minneapolis would not have a great effect on the Mississippi at St. Louis.
My overall point is that people who claim that we should worry about Himalayan glacier melt because it might greatly reduce the flow downstream in the Ganges are overlooking the powerful contributions from the watersheds that the Ganges travels through.
In regards to the comment about food price hikes due to corn being used to fuel cars.
Oxfam, at least in some European countries, is currently holding a campaign to educate people that food for fuel is the “dumbest thing on earth”.
Since a certain politician voted for this because is was good for his votes in Iowa, as explained to a foreign delegation some years later, what does that say about Al Gore Warming?
Tsk Tsk says:
November 21, 2012 at 6:51 pm
“Simple. They equate people with bacteria, i.e. stupid life that invariably grows to consume all available resource and then crashes.”
I think your characterization is appropriate. Of course, somebody has to keep an eye on the petri dishes and who better than themselves to keep the bugs in line?
Theo Goodwin says:
November 21, 2012 at 7:18 pm
If I missed your point it was because you didn’t make it very well. The amount of water flowing through the Mississippi at Minneapolis is larger than you think and Saint Louis is less than half way to the Gulf of Mexico along the path of the Mississippi.
Your original claim was that interrupting the flow at Minneapolis would not be detectable at Saint Louis. A partial interruption would be measurable and a complete cut off even if temporary would be noticeable without instruments to anyone familiar with the river at that point. The river level would likely change by a couple of feet.
Here is another reference
Yet Warmists used runaway warming for years to scare the children and naive adults. I wonder what Dr. James Hansen has to say about this given his love of Venus.
On Greenland warming, Skeptical Science probably missed this.
[my bold]
Great! Clear thinking based on real evidence. Thanks.