``The massive Greenland Ice Sheet--which contains nearly 10 percent of all the frozen water on Earth--is melting at a rate of about 12 cubic miles per year, accounting for 7 percent of sea-level rise worldwide.''
This news is important because
1. It is the first report that in addition to Antarctica, the northern polar regions are losing ice. (TMY - to my understanding).
2. The teletext brief on this which first caught my eye, quoted the figure of 7% rise is worldwide sea level but gave a much more startling figure. That the rise in global sea level in the last 100 years is 9 inches.
I cannot see that confirmed in the more detailed web reports, which sound as if even the Greenland data needs a lot of interpretation.
Does anyone know how hard the evidence is for a rise in global sea levels in the last 100 years, and what order of magnitude that is estimated to be?
Chris Burford
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(It's Saturday night and I am watching, When Nature Goes Totally Out Of Control)
Evidence, I fear, will prove entirely unhelpful. It is much more urgent that we find a cause. In this regard, I expect the US will lead many high level scientific symposiums over how to stop the third world from creating these terrible natural disasters.
This idea follows the same logic that discovered the blight and decay of US cities is the natural result of too many poor.
Which reminds me, Jerry Brown evidently arrived in Cuba today to discover how to deal with public education in Oakland. Hey, makes sense to me, and it sure beats taxing the shit out of the new downtown office economy that produces absolute nothing, while it consumes almost everything.
Meanwhile, tonight's local news was all agog over a possible slow down in the housing market where the median is 375,000 and nobody who lives around here can afford that. Oh, what to do? Well, the SF School board thinks the answer is to sell off public school yards to develop housing for school teachers. What an obvious solution. Why didn't I think of that?
I suspect the reason I didn't is because I am mired in old-think. In the new economy it's all about new-think.
Chuck Grimes, substituting for Caroline Yu, ABC News at Eleven.