The Biggest Whopper of 2007

Among the candidates for the biggest cock-and-bull story in 2007 must be NASA’s James Hansen with his work of creative genius on Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice sheets and his wannabes, who subsequently copied his imaginative tour de force.

Even the facts are no match for James Hansen and his incredible modeling machine! Though Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice rests in deep bowls, Hansen declares them inclined planes. Then despite ice cores that show little to no movement for the past 400,000 years (including the warm periods), he shamelessly states that these gigantic ice sheets are slip, slidin’ away and the world will be flooded.

The idea of “meltwater lakes on the surface finding their way down through cracks in the ice and lubricating the bottom of the glacier is not compatible with accumulation of undisturbed snow layers. It might conceivably work on valley glaciers but it tells us nothing of the ‘collapse’ of ice sheets,” according to Cliff Ollier, School of Earth and Geographical Science at the University of Western Australia, “Indeed ‘collapse’ is impossible.”

Alarmists have to be thrilled with the successfulness of Hansen’s 2007 con—without this lie there is no catastrophic flooding, and all they are left with is the IPCC’s non-eventful one-foot-in-a-century sea level rise.

I wonder if Hansen’s modeler can also make Everlasting Gobstoppers!