"Ice Memory" Has Amnesia

Elizabeth Kolbert is an appealing writer. She's industrious, clear, and fun to read. Her seminal New Yorker piece, "Ice Memory," was a dazzling bit of reportage. It's too bad she doesn't seem to understand some of the people she quotes. In 2003 she went to Greenland to visit an international research station which was drilling ice cores through 3000 meters of Greenland ice. In the process, the scientists there were able to determine Greenland's temperature for the last hundred thousand years. According to the station field director, they discovered to their surprise that the temperature of Greenland has undergone "dozens" of sudden reversals during this period, changing at times as much as 16° Fahrenheit in a mere 10 years. All of these occurred before the 20th century, which is to say before modern man had a chance to drive up atmospheric carbon dioxide by burning fossil fuels.

The stunning thing is that Kolbert, who fervently believes that man is the cause of the current global warming, offers not the slightest speculation as to what caused these "dozens" of temperature reversals in Greenland over the last 100,000 years. She apparently doesn't think it's important.

Call me simplistic, but I sure do.

If the Earth's temperature, or at least Greenland's temperature, changed dozens of times over the last 1,000 centuries without any help from man, I am at a loss to see why she blames man for the current warming. It seems far more statistically probable that whatever caused the warming dozens of times before is also causing the current warming too.

But that's just my opinion.