In a rebuttal to the recent major environmental issues published by Vanity Fair and Time magazines, the Capital Research Center published this article; which focused on the scariest item in the Vanity Fair issue that the Greenland glaciers are melting, or decreasing in size, when, according to this rebuttal, they are actually increasing in size.
Here is an excerpt.
Enviroscam: A Vain Affair
April should be dubbed “Climate Change Alarm Month.” Both Vanity Fair and TIME magazine have published scare stories this month, hyping the supposed dangers of global warming. Both issues fill their pages with glossy photographs worthy of any fashion magazine. Vanity Fair goes the extra mile by dubbing “Green: the New Black,” and filling its pages with environmentally-sensitive celebrities such as George Clooney and Julia Roberts. Roberts combats global warming by using “environmentally friendly Seventh Generation diapers.”
You know that any Vanity Fair article will be “fair and balanced” when the author is Mark Hertsgaard, environmental correspondent for The Nation. From the get-go, it’s clear that Hertsgaard doesn’t know what he’s talking about. For example, he describes carbon dioxide as “the most prevalent” of the greenhouse gases. In fact, the most common greenhouse gas is water vapor, which accounts for between 36-70 percent of the greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide accounts for 9-26 percent, while the other greenhouse gases include ozone, methane, and nitrous oxide.
Hertsgaard’s piece is accompanied by altered photographs purporting to show how Washington D.C., New York City, and the Hamptons(!) will look underwater when the greenhouse effect causes the sea-level to rise. Vanity Fair certainly knows its audience. According to Hertsgaard, “The image of Washington, D.C., shows the effects of a 20-foot sea-level rise, which is what scientists expect if the entire Greenland ice sheet melts. The ice sheet has shrunk 50 cubic miles in the past year alone, and is now melting twice as fast as previously believed.” Then there’s New York City whose image “shows the effects of an 80-foot rise in sea levels. That's what would happen if not only the Greenland ice sheet but its counterpart in the Antarctic were to melt, says James Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.” The TIME article says much the same: “It’s at the North and South poles that…steambath conditions are felt particularly acutely, with glaciers and ice caps crumbling to slush.”
Listen up: Neither Greenland nor Antarctica is likely to melt. A 2005 article in Journal of Glaciology notes that while “the Greenland ice sheet is thinning at the margins,” it is “growing inland with a small overall mass gain.” Another 2005 article in Science finds an average gain of about 5.4 centimeters of ice per year over the entire Greenland ice sheet. The Antarctic also appears to be gaining ice. A January 2002 article in Science found the ice there grew by about 26.8 billion metric tons per year, while a 2005 Science article found ice in the Antarctic increasing by an average of about 45 billion metric tons annually (with a range of plus-or-minus 7 billion metric tons.)
