ESKIMOS ON MARS

The news story headlined Canadian Military Reinforces Arctic Claim had a dramatic lede:

"Battling high winds, 25-foot ice walls, mechanical breakdowns and whiteout conditions, a Canadian military team, including Eskimo reservists, last week completed a 17-day trek [across Ellesmere Island] designed to sustain Canada's claim to sovereignty over the high Arctic."

Of course, the reporter then had to include a ridiculous global warming spin in a story on Canadian national security:

"[Expedition leader Maj. Chris Bergeron] said old-timers among the Eskimos, who call themselves Inuit, told him they had never seen open water and bare rocks so close to the North Pole.  Two summers ago, said Martin Sharp, a glaciologist at the University of Alberta, temperatures hovered in the low 70s for 10 days at Canada's Axel Heiberg Island, about halfway between the Arctic Circle and the North Pole."

Being quite familiar with Ellesmere, Canada's northernmost island, I can assure you the reporter, Barry Brown has never been there and is laughingly ignorant – like most glowarmers.

Just as ignorant as the Eskimos – who live over 400 miles away from Ellesmere's northern shore on the Arctic Ocean (which is itself 550 miles "close" to the North Pole).  The only Inuit or Eskimo community on all of Ellesmere's 76,000 square miles is Grise Fiord on the far away south shore.  They have no knowledge at all of the Arctic Ocean.

The comment on Axel Heiberg is also a scam.  That region has such an anomalous microclimate of warmer temperatures it's jokingly called by researchers "the garden spot of the Arctic."  The nearby weather station of Eureka sells bright yellow t-shirts with that slogan.  I have one myself.

Which brings me to Mars – for scientists are reporting this month that global warming on Mars is happening at least four times as much as on Earth. 

No wonder Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) saw that Algore was "nervous, puffy, and sweating" when he testified before him at a recent Senate hearing.  It's hard to blame Martian global warming on us evil humans.

You heard about Martian warming back in September 2005 in Solar Warming – and how the sun's magnetic activity is the mechanism for global warming here on Earth. 

Briefly, the higher the activity (a sign of which is sunspots, so the more the sunspots), the more the shower of cosmic rays from space is deflected away from Earth.  The charged particles of these rays condense water vapor into high altitude/high albedo (reflecting sunlight) clouds.  Fewer cosmic rays means less cloud formation resulting in a warmer planet.

So the mechanism is:  more sunspots, warmer Earth.  And now that Sunspots reaching 1,000-year high, you'd think that the glowarmers would figure this out. 

But no, it's easier to wallow in ignorance and intellectual dishonesty, especially when that's the path to controlling national economies and political power.  That's why it's easy to be an Eskimo on Mars.