Viking weather, the Mercator Projection, and other Icelandic considerations

This bit from the New York Times triggered the following reflections: "Warming Revives Flora and Fauna in Greenland".

Observation 1: Global warming isn't necessarily the "everyone loses" predicament it's often cast to be:

... now that the climate is warming, it is not just old trees that are growing. A Greenlandic supermarket is stocking locally grown cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage this year for the first time. Eight sheep farmers are growing potatoes commercially. Five more are experimenting with vegetables. And Kenneth Hoeg, the region’s chief agriculture adviser, says he does not see why southern Greenland cannot eventually be full of vegetable farms and viable forests.

“If it gets warmer, a large part of southern Greenland could be like this,” Mr. Hoeg said..."

... Cod, which prefer warmer waters, have started appearing off the coast again. Ewes are having fatter lambs, and more of them every season... “Now spring is coming earlier, and you can have earlier lambings and longer grazing periods,” said Eenoraq Frederiksen, 68, a sheep farmer whose farm, near Qassiarsuk, is accessible by a harrowing drive across a rudimentary road plowed in the hillside. “Young people now have a lot of possibilities for the future.”

Observation 2: Dire predictions of global warming doom appear to be made without taking long-term history into account, namely that temperatures in the not-to-distant historic past were as warm or warmer than current temperatures:

Greenland, a self-governing province of Denmark, was settled by the pugilistic Viking Erik the Red in the 10th century, after his murderous ways got him ejected from Iceland...

It was relatively green then, with forests and fertile soil, and the Vikings grew crops and raised sheep for hundreds of years. But temperatures dropped precipitously in the so-called Little Ice Age, which began in the 16th century, the Norse settlers died out and agriculture was no longer possible.

Observation 3: Journalists need a primer in basic cartography. The author of this article, for example, appears to be unaware that map projections distort either the scale or shape of landmasses, usually both:

When using the words “growing” in connection with Greenland in the same sentence, it is important to remember that although Greenland is the size of Europe, it has only nine conifer forests like Mr. Bjerge’s, all of them cultivated.

Correction: October 30, 2007: An article on Sunday about the effect of climate change in Greenland misstated its geographic size relative to Europe. It is about one-quarter as big, not the same size.

This probably resulted from consulting maps with a Mercator or similar projection, which is famous for misrepresenting the size of Greenland. This is one of the most common map projections -- Google Maps uses a Mercator projection, I believe -- since it produces a generally acceptable compromise between scale and shape of landmasses, while preserving the relative global positions. Many improvements on the Mercator have been proposed. One of these is the Dymaxion map (i.e. the Fuller Projection), which more accurately represents size and shape, but at the cost of conventional representations of global position.

Finis.