Cold turkeys
By Melanie Phillips on Diary
The New York Times inevitably flags up the latest prognosis of our imminent environmental doom:
"The cap of floating sea ice on the Arctic Ocean, which retreats under summer's warmth, this year shrank more than one million square miles — or six Californias — below the average minimum area reached in recent decades, scientists reported Thursday."
And so, inevitably:
"Mark Serreze, a senior researcher at the snow and ice center, said it was increasingly clear that climate change from the buildup of greenhouse gases was playing a role in the Arctic warming, which is seen not only in the floating ice but also in melting terrestrial ice sheets, thawing tundra and warming seawater… 'You can't dismiss this as natural variability,' he said. 'We're starting to see the system respond to global warming.'"
But then, at the very end of this story, the NYT tells us off-handedly:
"Sea ice around Antarctica has seen unusual winter expansions recently, and this week is near a record high."
No explanation, of course, how this fascinating nugget of information, which makes complete nonsense of what 'senior researcher' Mark Serreze has just said, squares with his claim. Indeed, as this report makes clear, the University of Illinois has recorded the fact that Antarctic ice has expanded to a level not seen since 1979:
"While the Antarctic Peninsula area has warmed in recent years and ice near it diminished during the Southern Hemisphere summer, the interior of Antarctica has been colder and ice elsewhere has been more extensive and longer lasting, which explains the increase in total extent. This dichotomy was shown in this World Climate Report blog posted recently with a similar tale told in this paper by Ohio State Researcher David Bromwich, who agreed 'It's hard to see a global warming signal from the mainland of Antarctica right now'."
You can say that again. If the Antarctic is increasing, then how can the decrease of ice in the Arctic possibly be due to man-made global warming? Is global warming, perhaps, a selective phenomenon, operating in some parts of the world but not in others? As for the vanishing Arctic ice horror, I have been sent an intriguing bit of context from this account:
"A considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been, during the last two years, greatly abated… 2000 square leagues of ice with which the Greenland Seas between the latitudes of 74° and 80°N have been hitherto covered, has in the last two years, entirely disappeared… The floods, which have the whole summer inundated all those parts of Germany where rivers have their sources in snowy mountains, afford ample proof that new sources of warmth have been opened "…
These are extracts from a letter by the President of the Royal Society to the British Admiralty, recommending they send a ship to the Arctic to investigate the dramatic ice reduction – in 1817. (Ref; Royal Society, London. Nov. 20, 1817. Minutes of Council, Vol. 8. pp.149-153.)
The Royal Society is taking the very same view today. Clearly, history happens the first time as farce — and then repeats itself as farce.
Still, at least one world leader gets it. Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic and a noted sceptic who is also the an author of a book about the economics of climate change has been returning to the attack:
"As I said, the empirical evidence is not alarming. The arguments of global warming alarmists rely exclusively upon forecasts, not upon past experience. Their forecasts originate in experimental simulations of very complicated forecasting models that have not been found very reliable when explaining past developments.
3. It is, of course, not only about ideology. The problem has its important scientific aspect but it should be stressed that the scientific dispute about the causes of recent climate changes continues. The attempt to proclaim a scientific consensus on this issue is a tragic mistake, because there is none.
4. We are rational and responsible people and have to act when necessary. But we know that a rational response to any danger depends on the size and probability of the eventual risk and on the magnitude of the costs of its avoidance. As a responsible politician, as an academic economist, as an author of a book about the economics of climate change, I feel obliged to say that – based on our current knowledge – the risk is too small and the costs of eliminating it too high."
It is extraordinary that Klaus is so isolated and that such demonstrable facts and rationality are so widely denied. But there will come a time when the embarrassing absence of evidence that the dire prognoses by which we are now routinely regaled are actually occurring will become impossible to ignore. And then a large number of reputations will disappear beneath the rising seas of ridicule. melaniephillips.com |
