Global Warming on the Rocks

The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.

Global Warming on the Rocks
We almost filed this Associated Press dispatch from Oslo under Bottom Stories of the Day:

Al Gore said Tuesday the world must act quickly to slow the melting of the world’s polar ice packs and glaciers before it reaches a critical rate for global warming.

But it turns out the world acted very quickly indeed, as Germany’s Radio Bremen reports (translation here):

The research aircraft “Polar 5” today concluded its Arctic expedition in Canada. During the flight, researchers measured the current ice thickness at the North Pole and in areas that have never before been surveyed. The result: The sea-ice in the surveyed areas is apparently thicker than scientists had suspected. 

Normally, newly formed ice measures some two meters in thickness after two years. “Here, we measured ice thickness up to four meters,” said a spokesperson for Bremerhaven’s Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research.

Is it possible that global warming is neither a catastrophe waiting to happen nor a fraud but merely the result of confusion induced by the metric system? 

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