Consensus This

Remember all that hoopla about a consensus on Global Warming? Mother Nature has other ideas (H/T Instapundit):

Greenland isn’t melting as fast as we feared.

It was big news when the rate of melting suddenly doubled in 2004 as ice sheets began moving more quickly into the sea. That inspired predictions of the imminent demise of Greenland’s ice — and a catastrophic rise in sea level. But a paper published online this afternoon by Science reports that two of the largest glaciers have suddenly slowed, bringing the rate of melting last year down to near the previous rate. At one glacier, Kangerdlugssuaq, “average thinning over the glacier during the summer of 2006 declined to near zero, with some apparent thickening in areas on the main trunk.”

The whole crux of this is that Greenland was warmer sixty years ago than it is now. And back then, things turned out OK. I'm sure some will say that the New York Times is just a political arm of Big Oil for allowing such things to be printed.

Incidentally, you have to love the following from the profile on Tierney's blog.

With your help, he's using TierneyLab to check out new research and rethink conventional wisdom about science and society. The Lab's work is guided by two founding principles:

1. Just because an idea appeals to a lot of people doesn't mean it's wrong.
2. But that's a good working theory.