“If this were to go, sea levels worldwide would go up 20 feet,”
says former Vice-President Al Gore in his global warming
documentary slide show, An Inconvenient Truth (2006). Gore was
talking about what would happen if the West Antarctic ice sheet
or the Greenland ice sheet were to melt entirely away. As
recently as his April 27, 2009 testimony before the Senate
Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, Gore again noted,
“Were the Greenland ice sheet to melt, crack up and slip into
the North Atlantic, sea level would rise almost 20 feet.” In a
presentation made at the Copenhagen climate change conference
earlier this month, Gore claimed, “There is a 75 percent chance
that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer
months will be completely ice-free within the next five to seven
years.” How do these statements square with a report, Melting
Snow and Ice: A Call for Action, commissioned by Gore and by
Norway’s Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre and released at the
Copenhagen conference? Among othe