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Antarctic Ice Cap Breaking Up?
vrmlguy writes "Here's another reason why I'm glad to live well away from any of the coasts, East, Left, or Gulf: The Antarctic icecap (and a large number of Northern Hemisphere glaciers) may be melting faster than previously suspected. New Orleans, which is already 8 feet below sea level, may be just a memory in less than a century." Interesting stuff.
It reminds me of a CNN story on global warming I watched about two years ago.
They interviewed Greenpeace and a dozen other American sources. All were predicting disaster in outrageous terms, and some professor even suggested the survival of the human race was in question, citing the demise of the dinosaurs.
There was this 20 second clip slipped into the middle of the thing, you could easily miss it, in which they interviewed a Dutch minister who was in charge of Dikes and port infrastructure, or something. He gently chuckled at the reporter and told her (in perfect English, of course) "I could raise our walls one meter in three years for a third of our annual budget. If the sea starts rising it won't be an issue for us at all; we'll appropriate a small increase, and spread out the funding so it will be unnoticeable." And then he went on to suggest that the interviewer talk to people from poor nations in the South Pacific, saying that the Western world had enough money to take care of itself.
No American agency head would ever say something like that. If you asked them about pink aliens, they would claim immediate danger and the need for double their budget and an "awareness campaign".
I think our government system is better than that parlimentary system, but the individuals staffing it are a collection of third prizes. It's our own fault of course; we reward hypesters and alarmists, and punish the calm and accurate.