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Jewish World Review May 2, 2005 / 23 Nisan , 5765 New Yorker doesn't let facts get in the way By Bill Steigerwald
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
This global warming problem is much scarier than we thought.
Not only is the Arctic ice cap dangerously thinning, says The New Yorker in Part 1 of "The Climate of Man," its epically biased trilogy on "the realities of global warming."
But the mile-high glaciers that cover most of Greenland are melting so fast that one of them, the mighty river of ice called Jakobshavn Isbrae, has nearly doubled its speed since 1993.
According to writer Elizabeth Kolbert, who schlepped to Alaska, the Arctic and Greenland to personally observe the thawing permafrost and melting sea ice, by 2003 the velocity of this speedy glacier "had increased to 7.8 miles per hour" from its 1993 flow-rate of "three and a half miles per hour."
And you always thought glacial meant slow.
At that Boston Marathon-competitive speed — nearly 8 miles per hour, 192 miles a day, 6,000 miles a month — the Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier will be knocking on the door of Rio De Janeiro by Memorial Day.
What Kolbert obviously meant to write in the April 25 issue — and what The New Yorker's famed fact-checkers wish they had caught — was that the glacier's speed had jumped to 7.8 miles per year. If you prefer more precise scientific numbers, that's .00089 miles per hour, or a still-impressive 4.7 feet per hour.
Being off by a factor of 8,760 should in no way detract from the magazine's five National Magazine Awards.
Nor should it by itself discredit the politically loaded premise Kolbert set out to prove: that global warming is not a liberal hoax; that all serious scientists who are not Bush administration stooges believe it's a problem worth exchanging our SUVs for bicycles for; and that modern man is the culprit.
Though embarrassing, the speed of the glaciers is a minor mistake in an otherwise perfectly spelled 12,881-word article that deeply detailed permafrost but had no room for an honest paragraph of skepticism about the often-uncertain science behind global warming.
"The Climate of Man II," this week's offering, while mercifully shorter, is just as politically unbalanced and more of a stretch: It seeks to show that the discovery that rapid climate change apparently wiped out "large and sophisticated cultures" such as the Mayans and the Old Kingdom of Egypt presents us with "an uncomfortable precedent."
Who knows how the New Yorker's exciting serial will end next week? Will Earth melt? And how does Kolbert's liberal tilt compare with Mother Jones' current cover-expose of Exxon-Mobil's generous funding of global warming skeptics?
Stay tuned — and don't get run down by a glacier.
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JWR contributor Bill Steigerwald is an associate editor and columnist at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Comment by clicking here. © 2005, Bill Steigerwald |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
