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Criticism after Gore spoke at COP15
last update: Feb 04, 2010 03:18 PM
From various articles: Although it was previously announced that Al Gore had cancelled his appearance at COP15, he did attend and presented fresh figures of the ice cap. He warned that, in as little as five years, the Arctic polar ice cap could disappear entirely in the summer months.
The former American Vice-President was showing slides projecting the sea ice volume at the North Pole that he said he had just received from Wieslaw Maslowski of the US Naval Postgraduate School in California.
"These figures are fresh," Mr Gore said, pointing to the slide. "This is the volume metric measure of the ice and some of the models suggest to Dr Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar icea cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years."
His claim attracted a storm of criticism from scientists and sceptics alike. Wieslaw Maslowski said that Gore's claim that there is a 75 per cent chance that the North Pole will be completely ice-free within five to seven years, was a misrepresentation of the information he had provided to Mr Gore’s office.
At a presentation earlier by Dorthe Dahl-Jensen of the Centre for Ice and Climate at the University of Copenhagen, suggested that previous projections and predictions from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had proved too conservative. She had presented a report on the Greenland ice sheet, the vast body of ice that covers about 1.7 million sq km (656,000 sq miles), or 80 per cent of the territory of Greenland. With an average depth of more than 2,000 metres the sheet contains almost 3 million cubic kilometres of ice, about an eighth the size of the Antarctic but enough to raise global sea levels by 7.5m if it were to melt entirely.
According to her, although it was too early to predict a trend, in the past two years the melt had been calculated at 260 billion tonnes a year, which implied a contribution of almost 1mm a year to global sea levels. "We have woken giants," Dr Dahl-Jensen said. "The ice sheets are melting and the have the potential to change sea levels in the future."
Read more:
Times Online, 15th December 2009
COP15 Post, 15th December 2009
Times Online, 16th December 2009
The Australian, 16th December 2009
Associated Press, 15th December 2009
