Just how green was Greenland?

Actually, this was one of the oldest PR ploys known.

The Vikings wanted to encourage settlers to go to Greenland, even though it was definitly colder than Iceland, so they named them the reverse of what they should have been.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Wiyosaya @ Apr 5 2007, 09:23 AM) [snapback]418148[/snapback]</div>

Greenland's was not devoid of ice in the last few thousand years but there was very significant thawing and freezing over the last few thousand years long before there was man-made industrialization.


According ot wikipedia:
History
Main article: History of Greenland
Greenland was home to a number of Paleo-Eskimo cultures in prehistory, the latest of which (the Early Dorset culture) disappeared around the year 200 AD. Hereafter, the island seems to have been uninhabited for some eight centuries.

Icelandic settlers led by Erik the Red found the land uninhabited when they arrived c. 982. Around 984 they established the Eastern and Western settlements in deep fjords near the very southwestern tip of the island, where they thrived for the next few centuries, and then disappeared after over 450 years of habitation.

The fjords of the southern part of the island were lush and had a warmer climate at that time, possibly due to what was called the Medieval Warm Period. These remote communities thrived and lived off farming, hunting and trading with the motherland, and when the Norwegian kings converted their domains to Christianity, a bishop was installed in Greenland as well, subordinate to the archdiocese of Nidaros. The settlements seem to have coexisted relatively peacefully with the Inuit, who had migrated southwards from the Arctic islands of North America around 1200. In 1261, Greenland became part of the Kingdom of Norway.

After almost five hundred years, the Scandinavian settlements simply vanished, possibly due to famine during the fifteenth century in the Little Ice Age, when climatic conditions deteriorated, and contact with Europe was lost. Bones from this late period were found to be in a condition consistent with malnutrition. Some believe the settlers were wiped out by bubonic plague or exterminated by the Inuit. Other historians have speculated that Spanish or English pirates or slave traders from the Barbary Coast contributed to the extinction of the Greenlandic communities.

 

28 Nov 2004
Medieval Warm Period ("MWP")
Filed under:
Glossary
— group @ 11:08 am
Period of relative warmth in some regions of the Northern Hemisphere in comparison with the subsequent several centuries. Also referred to as the Medieval Warm Epoch (MWE). As with the 'Little Ice Age'(LIA) no well-defined precise date range exists. The dates A.D. 900–1300 cover most ranges generally used in the literature. Origin is difficult to track down, but it is believed to have been first used in the 1960s (probably by Lamb in 1965). As with the LIA, the attribution of the term at regional scales is complicated by significant regional variations in temperature changes, and the utility of the term in describing regional climate changes in past centuries has been questioned in the literature. As with the LIA, numerous myths can still be found in the literature with regard to the details of this climate period. These include the citation of the cultivation of vines in Medieval England, and the settlement of Iceland and southwestern Greenland about 1000 years ago, as evidence of unusual warmth at this time. As noted by Jones and Mann (2004) [Jones, P.D., Mann, M.E., Climate Over Past Millennia, Reviews of Geophysics, 42, RG2002, doi: 10.1029/2003RG000143, 2004], arguments that such evidence supports anomalous global warmth during this time period is based on faulty logic and/or misinterpretations of the available evidence.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archi...arm-period-mwp/

10 Nov 2006
English vineyards again….
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archi...ineyards-again/

 

Both of Mirza's "real climate" citations have absolutely no usable information regarding the assertions that there was a MWE and a LIA. (well maybe that there are 2 vineyards in Britain)

Really only the first citation just states that any analysis of the MWE evidences anomalous global warming should be disregarded. The citation does not state why the analysis should be disregarded. Heck, the citation doesn't even say the analysis is wrong, just that it shouldn't be used.

Amazing, an argument or analysis that goes against the GW religion should be ignored!

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Devil's Advocate @ Apr 6 2007, 01:23 PM) [snapback]418927[/snapback]</div>

Well, you can read the article that shows why the analysis is wrong. GW's not a religion; that's your position which is faith-based.
http://holocene.meteo.psu.edu/shared/artic...esMannROG04.pdf

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(MegansPrius @ Apr 6 2007, 02:15 PM) [snapback]418953[/snapback]</div>

I have watched Al Gore's an Inconvenient Truth many times now and every time it seems to be less science and more hyperbole, distorted fact, fear mongering and politics. I know AIT is only one representation of AGW but it is a very poor one at best.

There is a definite guilt in the Environmental community about man living on the earth. It reminds me very much of Catholicism and the guilt of original sin, with the "carbon-offsets" being the modern day version of confession.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(malorn @ Apr 6 2007, 02:42 PM) [snapback]418972[/snapback]</div>

Wow, the antiglobal warming crowd sounds crazier every day. I have heard this whole gore worshipping, global warming church jibberish before though, from a rightist newspaper columnist who dresses up her hard republican line with 'family values' and 'common sense' -- She made the exact same comparison of original sin/carbon offsets and said the same crap about guilt of human existence. I would say that you copywrited her article, but she more than likely got it from someone else who got it from someone else, and her article itself has probably been repeated and echoed throughout cyperspace that no one could really claim ownership - much like all of the antiglobal warming pseudo-science gets thrown around and amplified despite ever being verified or published. Anyways, if you want to talk about hyperbole and fearmongering, listen to yourself and your crowd (they [environmentalists] worship their saint Gore, they have disciples, they are a religion, they hate america, they are hypocrites, they want to take away jobs, they believe humans are evil, they want to eliminate the middle class, they want to bring about socialism, etc. etc. etc.). STOP!! It isn't helping your case, it is making you look crazy, and at times paranoid.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(MarkMN @ Apr 6 2007, 03:04 PM) [snapback]418980[/snapback]</div>

does it?

 

Yes, and you just proved it. :lol:

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(MarkMN @ Apr 6 2007, 03:27 PM) [snapback]418996[/snapback]</div>

Do me a favor this weekend and watch AIT and tell me it is not full of inuendo and fear-mongering? Over and over again that the science is complete and it is inferred that anyone questioning the "movement" is connected to big-oil and/or the Bush administration. Do you really think that is true? Tell me there is no infering that Hurricane Katrina was a punishment for our wayward ways. Just watch it again and tell me.

 

If you want the truth about global warming just go to you tube.com and search for "The Grest Global Warming Swindel".

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(MarkMN @ Apr 6 2007, 12:04 PM) [snapback]418980[/snapback]</div>

and please ignore the man behind the curtain!

Whose crazy, the person pointing out the truth or the ones denying it?

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(malorn @ Apr 6 2007, 03:39 PM) [snapback]419003[/snapback]</div>

But in fact they mostly are connected to the big oil:
Scientists' Report Documents ExxonMobil’s Tobacco-like Disinformation Campaign on Global Warming Science
Oil Company Spent Nearly $16 Million to Fund Skeptic Groups, Create Confusion
http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/E...ng-tobacco.html

And interference from the government:
http://oversight.house.gov/investigations....sue=Environment

If Gore's guilty of pressing a Katrina Innuedo button, so be it. It is insignificant in its distortion of the issue when compared to the focused misinformation efforts of Big Oil and the Bush admin cited above.

The UN panel just today issued another warning on coming environmental consequences:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070406/ts_nm/...cB7x8tTkCWs0NUE

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(MegansPrius @ Apr 6 2007, 04:24 PM) [snapback]419027[/snapback]</div>

Exxon-Mobil spends 16 million dollars over 7 years and this means that all dissension within the scientific-media community is bought and paid for by exxon-mobil? How much grant and research money is spent in this year studying AGW and its possible effects? do you think it is more than $2.2 million a year? I would like to know, can someone tell me? How much is spent on this "crisis" every year in the US alone?
So distortion of the facts is ok as long as the intended policy end is met? So the ends justify the means no matter what? It is ok to talk about Ground Zero in Manhattan being under 20 feet of water even though it is an utter fabrication of any "science"? A very slippery slope for folks trying to present scientific fact with no announced political or social agenda other than stopping global warming.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(malorn @ Apr 6 2007, 03:39 PM) [snapback]419003[/snapback]</div>

I am a scientist. My speciality is in Environmental Engineering, which is centered on traditional pollutants (not climate). However, I have done a bit of research on global warming and look through the reports and read the scientific literature.

The science isn't technically complete. I will be upfront with you. What we (as scientists) do know with very good certainty, and I mean very good, is how many greenhouse gasses humans emit into the atmosphere (it is an easy measurement). We know with very good certainty how much is sinking into the oceans and how much the atmosphere is holding. There is something we don't know though, the CO2 doesn't balance out. We produce more CO2 than is accounted for in atmospheric increase and oceanic increase. AKA, there is an unknown carbon sink (consider us lucky). People like you probably want to make a big deal about the fact that carbon is dissappearing somewhere, but to scientists, it isn't much of an issue - a few estimates might be off or measurements on the sinks through the ocean are underestimated. The missing carbon sink isn't that big also so there is no way that we could rely on it to fix our CO2 mess. It doesn't matter though because CO2 is increasing in the atmosphere and human causes more than make up for that. What we also don't know with great certainty is how much the earth may cool because of aerosols. The impact on aerosols on cooling hasn't been nailed down to a good certianty, and there are many people that are working on that. The whole "scientists talked about ice ages in the 70s" was due to the belief by some at the time that the cooling impacts of aerosols are greater than the warming effects due to CO2 and methane. After a little bit of research into the matter and it was obviously the opposite case. And still today, even if we don't have very good estimates on aerosol cooling, it won't be enough on any estimate to slow down global warming at today's CO2 emission rates. So there you have it, the few areas where the science is incomplete. This information is present in the IPCC report if you care to read it with nice graphs and error bars.

HOWEVER, with the few incomplete scientific areas, there is no doubt that the CO2 is much, much higher than ever before because of humans. The ice core data is very reliable. There is no doubt that CO2 causes global warming (and yes, global warming will increase CO2 in a nasty positive feedback loop). There is no doubt that glaciers are melting, seas level are rising, drought/rain patterns will change, species extinction is accelerating, and hurricane activity will increase. The direct measurements of sea level rise are unknown and there is a wide range of predictions. There is new data coming out every month, which I will tell you makes the higher end of sea level rise prediction look more likely. There is no doubt that the science is COMPLETE enough that action is necessary and prudent. The science on global warming has been nearly 50 years in the making, and since the 90s before most people talked about it, scientists were calling for action. For the last 15 or so years scientists are still calling for action, and during those 15 years, the temperatures have been rising, CO2 levels increasing, and awareness is spreading.

I think AIT was a decent way to get people outside of the realm of science to make the connection between scientific fact and predictions to the personal impacts it has on us. Al Gore's use of Katrina isn't perfectly scientifically acceptable, but he was trying to tell the unscientific masses that this impacts them, it impacts their children's life, it impacts the planet. His movie was to tell people that it is time to act, and it is time to act. Scientists don't make great speakers, we dwell too much on the numbers and charts. Al Gore decided that he would bring the message to people, and I think it is great that he does. There is some mild hyperbole in the film that skeptics and hardheads like you dwell way too much on. Gore doesn't say sea levels will rise 20 feet next year, he says they will rise 20 feet if greenland melts (which may happen in 100 years); that is a mild form of hyperbole to show the audience the future that the earth awaits. Earth does not have a pretty history of being resilient to change. It's history is one of mass extinctions, widely varying climate patterns, positive feedbacks that only accelerate change. Gore's movie is one of a call to action, not a call to 'repent your sins'. It ends with optimism.

Do I think that those who question global warming are connected to energy? Not all of them. Most of the scientists that are in the light that question global warming are connected to oil money though. Some scientists just want attention, and some are just people who are skeptical (skepticism is a natural trait among scientists and it will always show no matter what the consensus is). The political motivation against environmentalism is the most frustrating aspect to me. It is full of hyperbole and speech to appeal to votes against the 'evil environmental nazis who hate america'. It is for votes. Sometimes it is for contributions. People are stupid enough to listen to them.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(oakdale61 @ Apr 6 2007, 04:01 PM) [snapback]419016[/snapback]</div>

Yes, youtube for all of your scientific information :lol:

By the way, I grew up in the town just to your west with the initials B.A.

 

hmm. Greenland may not have been green for multiple thousands of years, but it seems like it's going to be getting greener in the next hundreds of years....


<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(jgills240 @ Mar 26 2007, 12:14 PM) [snapback]412367[/snapback]</div>

 

I was thinking if I could get land for really cheap on the southern coast of greenland. It might be decent real estate by the time I retire (40 years).

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(MarkMN @ Apr 6 2007, 04:48 PM) [snapback]419046[/snapback]</div>