To: Land Shark who wrote (999497 ) 2/8/2017 1:47:46 PM From: longnshort 3 RecommendationsRecommended By
Read Replies (1) | Respond to Iceberg Story, Slim New York Times' Global-Warming Meltdown Abe Greenwald / Feb. 7, 2017 commentarymagazine.com New York Times is surely both things depending on who’s reading it. story , “A Crack in an Antarctic Ice Shelf Grew 17 Miles in the Last Two Months,” written by Jugal K. Patel, gets the full bells-and-whistles treatment. It’s dead center on the site’s homepage and tricked out with multiple maps, graphs, satellite images, and time-lapse sequences. Here’s the gist of it: A crack is growing in the Larson C Ice Shelf, “in an area already vulnerable to warming temperatures” and may soon create a very large iceberg. This is literally a story about an iceberg that could form—and then do no appreciable damage. And lest you think there’s any new information here, the Times reports that scientists have been monitoring the thing since 2014. To be fair, Patel mentions that the not-yet-existing iceberg could herald new dangers if its creation exposes glaciers to warm temperatures “because the melting of those glaciers can cause much higher levels of ocean rise.” But, wouldn’t you know it, the article ends before any details are offered on that point. We’re simply told: “Scientists see the impending Larsen C collapse as a warning that much larger amounts of ice in West Antarctica could be vulnerable.” Some 40,000 icebergs are created each year. Out of that 40,000, the New York Times can’t find one—in our supposedly perilous age of rampant global warming—that actually constitutes a threat to our well being . The paper put together a scare-story on melting ice shelves and it couldn’t find a single genuinely scary example in a sample size of 40,000.
