03-21-2017, 11:23 AM
http://newsletter.thaivisa.com/l/jzQgFpy...VOaHYkYR2w
Quote:The myth of melting ice and rising seas
By Sam Khoury
Special to The Nation
BANGKOK: -- This month The Nation along with every other news source in the world reported on a massive winter blizzard that struck the US northeast one week before the start of spring.
On that same day Agence France-Presse reported that global warming, caused by human activity, was causing arctic sea ice to melt. It seems not a week goes by without some article appearing in the mainstream media about some catastrophic ice melt or sea level rise, usually backed by some scientific research that may not be as definitive as suggested. Is there really a massive loss of global ice and surging rise in sea level? History and the most reliable scientific research say no.
Sea levels have been falling since the days of the Roman Empire – the world is dotted with former port cities that now lie kilometres inland. Visit the ancient Roman city of Ephesus in modern day Turkey and you can still see the road that led to the nearby harbour, only now there is no harbour. Ephesus used to overlook a bay, making it an ideal shipping port, but it has since become land. Along the Kent coast of England are more examples.
Romney was a port in the 700s. When the sea retreated and it could no longer be used for shipping, it died and was replaced by New Romney, which now lies 2 kilometres away from the sea. The Vikings prospered a thousand years ago at a time climatologists refer to as the Medieval Warm Period.
At that time the Belgian city of Bruges was a major port. A few hundred years later the sea had receded and Bruges lay near- abandoned for 400 years. About that time, in an increasingly swampy area up the coast, people started stacking mud in rows on which they built houses, giving them access to the sea in a Venice-like labyrinth. That settlement would become one of the gems of Western civilisation – Amsterdam.
To defend their theory, believers in global warming claim that these ports simply “silted up”, resulting in their downfall. But the historical evidence is overwhelming. In his book “The Mysterious Receding Seas”, structural engineer Richard Guy produces maps of Upper Egypt dating from the 1500s (some of the oldest maps on record).
They show there used to be an elaborate system of canals linking the Nile with the Red Sea that have since disappeared. In the intervening centuries attempts were made to dredge out these canals, but they failed as sea levels were just too low.
This brings us to the modern era. Has the global warming that has occurred since the post-medieval cool period ended or reversed this trend? The science is saying no. The articles read in the mainstream media are usually about arctic sea ice. This ice fluctuates between winter and summer and does not affect sea levels (use a glass of water, an ice cube and a marker to do the experiment). The articles also report melting glaciers, but there are many glaciers all over the world that are expanding, including some big ones.
And there are more than 150,000 glaciers on Earth. The two landmasses that really control sea levels are Greenland and Antarctica. A Nasa study of Antarctica using satellites concluded that the continent has been gaining approximately 100 billion tonnes of ice a year since the early 1990s while a group of 15 international scientists recently concluded that the Greenland ice sheet is now almost at its greatest extent for 7,500 years.
This suggests that the relationship between climate change and icing is complex: global warming doesn’t necessarily equate to melting ice and global cooling doesn’t automatically mean more ice, since the climate temperature has fluctuated since the Roman period whereas sea levels seem to have only gone down.
The answer to this riddle lies in the Earth’s recurring cycles of glacial periods – which last 90,000 years and see a steady accumulation of ice – and 10,000 year inter-glacial periods, which see rapid ice melt in the first part of those respective periods.
The last inter-glacial period started around 11,500 years ago. So current concern about modern-day cities going underwater are indeed realistic. But only about 90,000 years from now.
Source: http://www.nationmultimedia.com/news/opinion/30309683
