The Greenland Solution

Last Wednesday, in the midst of a rather lengthy ramble on the topic of food, I wrote about climate change. I laughed at the idea that there is someone who thinks it’s ok to cut down our rainforests. I know there are still global warming skeptics in the world, but that viewpoint is so far from my own that I have trouble wrapping my mind around it. People still don’t believe in global warming? Really?

Then I read an editorial in today’s Boston Globe with the title: Convincing the Climate Change Skeptics. Huh? Skeptics? The editorial was written by John Holden, who is described as, “a professor in the Kennedy School of Government and the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard and the director of the Woods Hole Research Center.” Mr. Holden doesn’t really try to convince the skeptics that they’re wrong as much as he ridicules their arguments with all the subtlety of a jackhammer. I can’t say I blame him either. As he says at the conclusion of his article, “the extent of unfounded skepticism about the disruption of global climate by human-produced greenhouse gases is not just regrettable, it is dangerous.”

I mentioned in my food post that is that it can be difficult to accept that the cause and effect of global warming is not something you can see happening in right in front of you. At this point, global warming can be clearly observed through scientific measurement, but Joe Citizen doesn’t see or feel its effects. Not yet, anyway.

Well, unless maybe you are talking about the Joe Citizen who lives in Greenland. There is a great article on Time.com about Climate Change in Action in Greenland. What’s interesting is how we can predict how global warming will affect us in the future, based on scientific models, but it’s a lot harder to see the tangible effects today. As this article points out, “we can't look at a hurricane today, or an iceberg melting, and say: ‘Yes, this is global warming, and we did this.’ Climate change is change, and change happens over time.”

Except apparently if you live in Greenland, you can see global warming all around you. Melting glaciers can be seen with the naked eye: “There's no doubt here, no room for skeptics — temperatures have warmed in Greenland, and as they have warmed, the ice has melted. It is as simple as that.” We don't have any glaciers here in the continental U.S., and sometimes people really just need to see with things with their own eyes.

Is there any doubt about what we should do with climate change skeptics after reading that article? I think it's obvious. We should send them to Greenland. Yup, pack ‘em all off for the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier in Greenland, and see which melts faster: the glacier or the skepticism.