GAS-L: Re: Mother Earth?? Then we practice matricide.

[Eric Bruce Johnston <ericbj@club-internet.fr>]

"The vanishing Arctic ice. In a front-page story in August, the New York
Times reported that scientists on board a ship cruising through Arctic
waters saw almost no floating ice, and that at the North Pole, "an ice-free
patch of ocean about a mile wide has opened at the very top of the world,
something that has presumably never before been seen by humans. . . . The
last time  scientists can be certain the pole was awash in water 
was more than 50 million years ago" (New York Times,  John Noble Wilford,
19 Aug 2000).

"Though this striking intro was retracted 10 days later  (there's no way to know how often the North Pole may  have been ice-free in previous years), the point of the article was substantially correct and penetrated the  popular imagination in a way that no climate story had  since the torrid summer of 1988 (New York Times,  John Noble Wilford, 29 Aug 2000).

"Several scientific studies had earlier noted the  vanishing ice cover phenomenon in a more systematic  but less dramatic way. Late in 1999, data collected by  submarines revealed that ice cover over a large part of  the Arctic had thinned during warmer months by about 40 percent over the last four decades (New York  Times, William K. Stevens, 17 Nov 1999). And in  another report, in July, Norwegian scientists predicted  that in 50 years, summer Arctic ice could entirely disappear (New York Times, Walter Gibbs, 11 July 1999).

"But to hear it predicted and to see it actually happen are two very different things, at least to most people, and this story moved the zeitgeist so much that it soon  became a recurring topic on the David Letterman show,  leading Letterman himself to grill presidential candidates Gore and Bush on global warming when they later appeared on his show.

"A near-doubling of the predicted increase in global temperatures. This story, which broke in late October, should have been front-page news everywhere but wasn't. The New York Times concentrated on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's increased certainty that the warming occurring over the last century was "likely" caused by human activities, in place of the panel's assessment five years ago that "the balance of evidence" suggested influence by humans (New York Times, Andrew C. Revkin, 26 Oct 1999). This is a subtle point, elusive to most people. The bigger development was that the IPCC nearly doubled its predicted range of increased global temperatures -- 2.7 to 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit, up from the 1.8 to 6.3 degrees it had earlier predicted. If the upper end of this prediction actually comes to pass, our planet will be transformed into something nearly unrecognizable -- it will be even warmer than when the dinosaurs still roamed the Earth."

( ... )

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