Climate Change Claims Melt Away
Posted 01/28/2011 07:01 PM ET
Environment: In 2007, the U.N. said the Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035 due to man-made global warming. Yet four years later, some are advancing. What's retreating is the global warming narrative.
Global warming alarmists felt a tingle in their legs when the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report claiming "Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of their disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the earth keeps warming at the current rate."
The announcement was enough to set off celebrations by greenshirts everywhere.
Turns out, though, that the claim was nonsense. It was not based on scientific research but on one scientist's guesswork, which was lifted from a telephone interview. It was carelessly — or intentionally? — included in the report.
Despite its mistakes and clear political bias, the IPCC survives.
But its credibility is, at best, shaky — and getting shakier. New research indicates that half of the glaciers in the Himalaya's Karakoram range are advancing. Scientists from the University of California Santa Barbara and the University of Potsdam, who cited "erroneous reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change," strongly suggest that the "settled" science is not so clear.
"Our study shows that there is no uniform response of Himalayan glaciers to climate change and highlights the importance of debris cover for understanding glacier retreat, an effect that has so far been neglected in predictions of future water availability or global sea level," write researchers Bodo Bookhagen, Dirk Scherler and Manfred Strecker.
The alarmists, who refuse to give up on their goal of controlling energy and wealth distribution, say that the study does not refute the man-made global warming claims. They argue the glaciers that are advancing are protected from warming by the debris cover.
But that's a stretch that ignores this from the report: "Some glaciers that were stable in length were covered by a thick layer of rocky debris."
Note the word "some." If the report said "all" stable glaciers were shielded by debris, the global warming dead-enders might have a point.
But then they would have to ignore the fact that the researchers found "there is no uniform response of Himalayan glaciers to climate change."
Environmental activists have long used glaciers as a measure for global warming — and as a scare tactic by claiming that melting glaciers will flood coastal cities.
But human understanding of glaciers isn't quite there yet. A team of United Kingdom scientists looking at glaciers in Greenland over five years has found that the six glaciers they monitored melted more during cool summers than in warm summers.
Be careful, though, in interpreting this fact, because Ed Josberger, a researcher for the U.S. Geological Survey, told a local reporter writing about glacier growth on Mount Shasta that glacial expansion is proof of global warming.
Science has advanced at a spectacular pace in the last 100 years. But it's almost staggering how much we don't know about glaciers.
There are by some counts 160,000 of them across the world, yet only a small portion has been monitored over the long term. A reading of the work of Roger J. Braithwaite of the School of Environment and Development at the University of Manchester makes it clear that the "sparse datasets" researchers have to work with are not enough to make sound judgments about global warming.
Facts and reasonable doubt, however, have slowed, though not stopped, the environmental left from carrying on its narrative. They keep ringing the alarms.
But as the prophecies of impending doom fail to materialize, the narrative loses traction among the public. Americans understand they've been deceived. That healthy skepticism will only grow as this realization spreads |
