Some scientists now believe that the released weight of millions of tonnes of melting ice may trigger geologic catastrophes such as earthquakes and tsunamis.
A conference in London last September outlined the threat: As humanity continues to produce global warming pollution, the rapidly heating atmosphere melts glaciers and ice fields, creating large displacements of weight as the solid ice masses melt and flow away into lakes and oceans.
The result: changing stress points on the Earth’s crust, which may affect lava and volcanic activity in very unpredictable ways.
(Image: Eruption of Eyjafjallajökull Volcano, Iceland; from NASA)
David Frum, formerly a key advisor to George W. Bush, writes in the National Post about the scandal plaguing climate scientists from the University of East Anglia, where emails obtained by outsiders seem to suggest that scientists fudged their climate numbers.
Frum’s point: just because some scientists did bad does not make the entire science of climate change bogus.
He uses the example of James Watson and Francis Crick, who gained in enormous insight from the work of Rosalind Franklin in their discovery of the structure of DNA and subsequently denigrated her with a attitudes of misogyny and sexism. Nobody would use Watson and Crick’s bad behaviour to discredit the structure of DNA.
Yet, here we are, our media using the behaviour of a small number of scientists to discredit the work on climate change done by thousands upon thousands of scientific minds.
In this one-minute video, atmospheric chemist Rachel Pike gives viewers an idea of the gargantuan scale of the science being done that leads to today’s newspaper headlines.
David Frum, formerly a