Dennis T. Avery
December 05, 2007
http://www.cfact.org/site/view_article.asp?idCategory=4&idarticle=1354
The global warming alarmists are at it again, shrieking about "ice melt
at the Poles."
"The relentless grip of the Arctic Ocean that defied man for centuries
is melting away," warned Doug Struck in the Washington Post. "The sea
ice reaches only half as far as it did 50 years ago. In the summer of
2006, it shrank to a record low. This summer, the ice pulled back even
more, by an area nearly the size of Alaska."
NASA's James Hansen keeps claiming that CO2 is "pushing the climate past
its tipping point."
British banks are sending "volunteers" to the Arctic to see for
themselves the loss of sea ice, and to view the "endangered" polar
bears-whose numbers have tripled in recent years.
Ho hum. Just another day at the scare factory.
Point one: We've known for 20 years about the earth's moderate, natural
1,500-year climate cycle, which we discovered in the Greenland and
Antarctic ice cores. The ice shows seven previous global warmings in the
past 12,000 years. Two of these-8,000 years ago and 5,000 years
ago-were, for many centuries, substantially warmer than today. The
Greenland and Antarctic ice caps didn't melt.
Point two: This can't be global warming. 1) The Arctic was also warm in
the 1920s; the Russians say it happens every 70 years or so. 2) The
Antarctic Ice is now at a modern high. The Antarctic has been cooling
since the 1960s, according to Peter Doran's 2002 paper in Nature. Thanks
to warming's additional snowfall, the East Antarctic ice cap is
currently gaining about 45 billion tons of ice per year.
Neels Reeh of the University of Denmark says that another 1 degree C of
warming would melt enough Greenland ice to raise sea levels perhaps half
an inch per year-but added ice in the Antarctic would lower sea level
almost that much. The net increase has been six inches per century, and
it isn't expected to change.
Why not? Cliff Ollier, well-known geoscientist from the University of
Western Australia, writes to say that Hansen is just a climate modeler
who doesn't understand either ice caps or their melting. He thinks the
whole ice cap melting thing is a figment of the climate modelers'
computerized imaginations, conjured up to ensure that we're properly
frightened of global warming. Otherwise, the grant money might dry up.
If the media only reported facts, who would be frightened about sea
levels rising at the current rate of six inches per century? Who'd be
frightened by the earth warming just two-tenths of a degree C over the
past 70- years?
Ice caps don't melt from the surface down, they melt only at the edges.
Once the edges are melted, further ice loss depends on the uphill weight
of the ice built up over previous centuries. The ice flows-reluctantly
because it's so cold-on the warmer ice at its base, with the upper,
brittle ice carried downhill by its own weight. When a chunk of ice
reaches the edge of the cap it falls off-and the AP writes a news story.
That's neither melting nor collapse.
The Greenland ice cap is 2-3 kilometers deep and much of its ice lies
inside a basin that won't slide off. Its undisturbed ice dates back at
least 105,000 years. The temperatures over the ice are well below
freezing, at about -30 degrees C in the north, and -20 degrees C in the
south.
The Antarctic ice cores date back more than 760,000 years, in the
coldest place on earth. The lowest recorded temperature was -89 C at
Vostok in 1983. The highest Vostok temperature taken was -19 C in
1992-still far below freezing.
By the way, even the southernmost polar bear population is doing fine in
the Davis Strait, with higher numbers and some of the largest bears yet
seen.
DENNIS T. AVERY was a senior policy analyst for the U.S. State
Department, where he won the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement.
He is the co-author, with atmospheric physicist Fred Singer, of the
book, Unstoppable Global Warming-Every 1500 Years, available from Rowman
& Littlefield. Readers may write him at the Center for Global Food
Issues (www.cgfi.org) Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421.
--
Warmest Regards
Bonzo
"It's very appropriate that it [An Inconvenient Truth] got an Oscar from
the land of make-believe." Dr. Timothy Ball, Chairman of the Natural
Resources Stewardship Project (NRSP.com), Former Professor Of
Climatology, University of Winnipeg
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