The original draft of this email was sent to Washington Post reporter Sarah Kaplan, copying several of her climate storytelling Post colleagues and University of Vermont geologist Andrew Christ who is quoted by Ms. Kaplan in the story at issue.
Dear Sarah,
Your A3 story in today’s edition, “ Soil analysis shows vulnerability of Greenland ice sheet,” reports that today’s still largely glacier-covered Greenland was last free of its icy entombment about one million years ago or, as you put it, “Just the blink of eye in geologic terms.”
Well, I’m surely not as smart as University of Vermont geologist Andrew Christ. But if I could, I’d ask him why he seems panicked by the fact that our planet’s temperature has risen only “1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880” when, a million years ago, long before humankind’s infernal fossil fuel-burning began, the earth was warm enough to make Greenland mostly green. And since Greenland’s not even close to being mostly green again, might he be overreacting just a bit?
Furthermore, I and other soberly objective readers would certainly like to know the source for your paragraph 5 assertion that “human-caused warming . . . is causing the Earth to warm faster now than at any other period in its history.”
How can we possibly know that? The Earth is more than four billion years old. Sure, we can sample Antarctic ice cores that may be up to a few million years old at most. For clues to more recent climate changes, we can look at ancient tree rings and such. But we can’t know with any degree of certainty how the current rate of warming stacks up against rates of warming — and cooling — hundreds of millions or even a few billion years ago. And making wildly hyperbolic assertions to the contrary only makes The Post look silly in grinding its ideological climate ax.
None of which is to argue that humans’ modern industrialization plays no role in the gigantic, barely comprehensible matrix of factors that interact to create our planet’s ever-changing climate. And all sensible people want our scientists, innovative engineers and manufacturers to continue moving us toward a cleaner energy future. But free markets will get us there soon enough without The Post’s hyperbolic cheerleading for evermore government control over energy and our lives.
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.
