Al Goreâ??s movie An Inconvenient Truth says human-emitted CO2 will boost the earthâ??s temperatures enough to melt the Arctic ice capâ??and suddenly raise sea levels by 20 feet.
Phooey.
So says author Dennis T. Aver, senior policy analyst for the U.S. State Department, who won the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement. He is the co-author, with atmospheric physicist Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years, due in October from Rowman & Littlefield.
In the movie, a whole Antarctic ice sheet shatters on Goreâ??s computer screen. In the real world, that isnâ??t happening. It is only the Antarctic Peninsulaâ??2 percent of the continentâ??s land area that sticks up toward the far-off equatorâ??that is warming. It recently earned headlines by calving an ice floe as big as Rhode Island, not an unusual event.
But the East Antarctic ice sheet is more than 2,000 times bigger than Rhode Island, and the ice is two miles thick! John Stone of the University of Washington, reporting in Science on January 3, 2003 says the West Antarctic ice sheet has been retreating so slowly for the past 10,000 years that it still has not fully accommodated the end of the last Ice Age, and apparently still has about 7,000 years of ice to meltâ??and the East Antarctic ice sheet is melting even more slowly than that.
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