Warning! Warming?

Russell Wangersky’s column of Aug. 5 was titled “The big melt.”

The subject of the piece was the recent reporting of a massive melt of Arctic ice in Greenland – 10 billion tons (not tonnes, sir?) on the last day of July and 22 billion tons on the first day of August.

The Greenland Ice Sheet (the Danish name is Indlandsis) has a volume of about 700,000 cubic miles of ice, most of it harder than the concrete under your feet and first formed when there were no ancestors of humans at Sterkfontein, Kromdraai, and Swartkrans in South Africa.

A cubic mile is a measure of volume 5,280 feet in length times 5,280 feet in width times 5,280 feet in depth or height.

Basic arithmetic (you can call it mathematics, if you wish) makes that 147,197,952,000 cubic feet.

May I round off to 147 billion cubic feet? Thank you.

A cubic foot of water weighs 62.4 pounds, a cubic foot of ice weighs about 57 pounds.

So, may I use, say, 60 pounds of water in a cubic foot?

Multiply 147 billion cubic feet by 60 pounds per cubic foot and you get a cubic mile of water equals very nearly 8,820,000,000,000 pounds, that is, eight trillion, 820 billion pounds of water.

Divide that huge number by 2,000 pounds (pardon the pedantics, there are 2,000 pounds in a ton) and you have 4,410,000,000 tons which is four billion, 410 million tons of water.

The estimated total melt in Greenland for July 31 and Aug. 1 is 32 billion tons.

Divide that 32 billion by 4 billion, 410 million tons and the answer is approximately seven cubic miles of melting ice.

That seven cubic miles is one in one hundred thousand or 0.001% of the size of Greenland’s ice sheet.

By the time Wangersky sits down to his Thanksgiving dinner and savours the bounty of the good earth, there will be no melting of surface ice in Greenland. Snow, sleet and frigid temperatures will rule the giant island.

When U.S. President Donald Trump tucks in to his Thanksgiving turkey (fratricide?) a month or so later, winter storms occurring on Greenland would terrify prattling Tvweather forecasters.

And when the third meal of turkey is eaten during the December holidays, Greenland will be much as it has ever been — a weather factory and the last remnant of the Pleistocene glaciations in the Northern Hemisphere.

I trust what I have written will not get me branded a climate change denier by the descendants, in mind at least, of Tomas de Torquemada.

Belief in climate change has become religion and the name of the Goddess to be feared and worshipped is Gaia.