IGM Pending Environmental Doom

Inter-Galactic-Memo
To: All Personnel
Fr: W. Leavitt, Crypto-Glaciologist
Re: Pending Environmental Doom

In an article last night I found an interesting claim. It was on some site called Yourstateline.com, which I’ve never heard of and probably didn’t want to, but the headline intrigued me. It says:

Rise in Sea Temp Could Melt W. Antartic Ice Sheet

The more astute among us will notice they misspelled ‘Antarctic’. We all misspell stuff all the time but one would think that a commercial website headline might have been spell-checked.
The first line of the article says the following: (Oslo) -- A nine degree rise in sea temperature could melt the West Antarctic ice sheet.
Naturally my curiosity was piqued since no one has been talking about multi-degree ocean-temp. rises since Al “Captain Planet” Gore and his spurious documentary debut. I thought, “do these people know how long a nine-degree spike in ocean temperature would take?” Then they told me—the process would take “thousands of years”. So . . . what’s the point of telling us that? This is a non story. Yes, if the Antarctic ice cap were to melt (thousands of years from now due to a completely hypothetical warming trend) it would change the landscape of the planet and rearrange the coastlines globally. So what? Geologically speaking, that happens all the time.
But then the entire debacle-of-a-story became clear in the last line of the brief “article.”

The nine degree trigger for collapse is based on a computer model.

They do love their computer models, don’t they? (Actually, I do too, I just can’t help making fun of them when they take this stuff so seriously.)
Anyway, take a breath and relax. There is no imminent danger of the Ross Ice Shelf disappearing. At least not for the next four years—it wouldn’t dare vanish on Obama’s watch.