The Washington Post has released a story headlined "Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt."  Highlights of the article include seals finding waters too hot, there is a radical change in climatic conditions, temperatures are rising in the arctic, and glaciers are disappearing.  Same old story, and I do mean an old story — this particular item appeared in 1922.

The left has taken umbrage at the circulation of the story on social media because it was embellished with a warning that the sea level would rise and coastal cities would become uninhabitable.  It's true that the archived article says nothing about rising sea levels or the habitability of coastal cities.  It is also true that the mainstream media have been issuing strident warnings that melting polar ice will render coastal cities uninhabitable.  The World Economic Forum lists cities at risk.  CBS News informs us there will be zombie towns from rising sea levels.  The United Nations considers melting ice a direct threat to humanity.  I find myself wondering why anybody would have a problem with the extrapolation of the 1922 article that melting ice will endanger coastal cities, when that's what we've been told for years and years. 

This is why I prefer actual science, like the discovery that thousands of years ago, glaciers retreated at the rate of one quarter of a mile a day.  Apparently, the rate of glacial melt is affected, among other things, by the surface upon which the glacier rests.  Thwaites glacier is called the Doomsday Glacier because it contains enough ice to raise the sea level by two feet all by itself if it melts.  It was moving at the rate of about half a mile a year before it stabilized on a ridge in the bedrock.  No one knows when it might start moving again, but it's only a couple of miles away from smooth flat bedrock. 

Scientists have learned that smooth flat bedrock allows ice to practically float above the ground, which facilitates sliding into the sea.  The more the glacier slides into the sea, the more pieces break off, and the faster it melts.  It's simple physics, and it has nothing to do with so-called man-made global warming.  Humans are not responsible for the topography of the land upon which glaciers rest.  And if we're lucky, the scare-mongers will be as accurate today as they were a hundred years ago.

Pandra Selivanov is the author of Future Slave, a story about a 21st-century black teenager who goes back in time and becomes a slave in the old South. 

Image: Unsplash.