The following is fodder for a debate between Edmund and I on climate change, from the publication "Science." Sometimes Edmund denies the earth is warming at all. When he can bring himself to admit it, he insists that warmer temperatures are good, not bad, and that loss of species, crop land, and so on are just little clouds with huge silver linings.
A Greener Greenland
Melting of the Greenland ice sheet is expected to cause much of the rise in sea level that will occur as global climate continues to warm, although it still is not clear how much of the ice sheet will disappear as air temperatures rise. One way to infer how vulnerable the ice sheet is to temperature variations is to determine how it was affected by climate change in the past. De Vernal and Hillaire-Marcel (p. 1622; see the Perspective by Steig and Wolfe) constructed a pollen record for southern Greenland for the past million years, from a marine sediment core just off the coast. Large changes in ice extent and vegetation accompanied changes in temperature, illustrating the susceptibility of the ice sheet to climate change, and providing a guide as to what to expect with future warming.
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