Greenland’s Funeral, Shipping’s Feast: The Unmatched Stupidity of 2026
Look at a map of the Arctic in January 2026. To a shipping CEO, the vanishing white expanse is a "Golden Waterway"—a shortcut that shaves weeks off global transit. To a climate physicist, it is the Albedo Flip : the moment we traded a planetary mirror for a heat-absorbing maw. We are literally cheering for the funeral of an ice sheet because it makes our sneakers arrive faster. I. The 50% Error: Our Models are Based on a Fantasy For decades, climate policy was built on the CLIMAP (1981) data, which estimated that the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) was only 3°C to 4°C colder than today. This led to a "conservative" estimate of climate sensitivity. However, two groundbreaking studies have shattered this baseline: Tierney et al. (Nature, 2020): Used "data assimilation" to prove the ocean was much colder than previously thought. Seltzer et al. (Nature, 2021): Used noble gases in groundwater to confirm that land tem...