the opinionist

Associated Press story published in the Washington Post, November 2, 1922. [page 2]

Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt.

The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.

Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.

Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.

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This is posted not to prove an opinion either to prove or disprove the notion of climate change - but to simply say this topic is complex and needs a moderate, careful and open debate by the scientific community and the governments of the world.
The downside is way too large to simply shuffle evidence one way or another without an agreed / non-partisan consensus.

Posted on August 15th, 2007 under climate change, global warming •  Email This Post • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback