I’m not saying I buy into the entire Gaia Hypothesis hook, line, and sinker. I find some aspects of it very compelling, but it might be a bit of a stretch to believe all life is acting in harmony, like on the planet Pandora in the movie Avatar. But that’s not my point. What bothers me is the tendency to see all human behavior as negative. Lovelock and his followers seem to need a narrative that supports the idea of original sin, that we have been thrown out of the Garden of Eden, or is it the Garden of Gaia?
The Hockey Stick
No discussion of climate change would be complete without mention of the infamous hockey stick graph of global temperature. The graph, said to depict Northern Hemisphere temperatures over the past 1,000 years, was created by Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University and his colleagues. It shows a very even temperature until the modern age when there is a steep rise.[62] The surprise for many scientists was that the graph implied the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age did not exist and that the only significant change in temperature during the past 1000 years was a precipitous rise during the past century. The graph was very controversial in climate science circles. Despite the sharp debate, it was showcased in the 2001 and 2004 reports of the IPCC. [63]
Two Canadians, Steve McIntyre, a retired mining engineer, and Ross McKitrick, an economist, became concerned that the data used to create the hockey stick graph were not objective and the statistical analysis used was not legitimate. They asked Mann and others to provide them with the original data and the statistical methods used to arrive at the hockey stick graph. Mann and his colleagues at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia refused repeated requests to supply the data. The effort to obtain the data went on for 10 years as the researchers even refused requests under Freedom of Information Act rules. It was not until the release of thousands of emails from the CRU that it became clear information was being withheld illegally and there was a conspiracy of sorts to manipulate the data and discredit opposing opinions.
In 2003 McIntyre and McKitrick published a critique of the hockey stick graph in Energy & Environment in which they contended that Mann’s paper contained, “collation errors, unjustifiable truncation or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculation of principal components and other quality control defects.”[64] As a result of this and other critiques the IPCC did not use the hockey stick graph again in its 2007 report. The continuing debate over this graph highlights the absence of a consensus on the temperature record, never mind whether or not humans are responsible for climate change.
What’s So Good About Glaciers, Anyway?
Much has been made of the fact that many glaciers around the world have been retreating in recent years. By many accounts we should be viewing this with alarm. The potential loss of glaciers is portrayed as an ecological catastrophe, as if it were equivalent to a species becoming extinct. In its June 2007 issue the National Geographic magazine reported that a certain Peruvian glacier was in a “death spiral,” as if it were a living thing.[65] What should we make of this hysterical reaction to melting ice?
It is important to recognize that glaciers have been retreating for about 18,000 years, since the height of the last glaciation. It has not been a steady retreat as there have been times, such as during the Little Ice Age, when the glaciers advanced. But there is no doubt that in balance there has been a major retreat and it appears to be continuing today.
The retreat of the glaciers is largely a result of the climate becoming warmer. It brings us back to the question of whether humans are responsible for the warming or if it is just a continuation of the trend that began 18,000 years ago. Either way, we then must ask whether, in balance, this is a good thing or a bad thing. We know the climate was warmer than it is today during most of the past 500 million years, and that life flourished during these times. We also know there is very little life on, in, or under a glacier. Glaciers are essentially dead zones, proof that ice is the enemy of life.
When a glacier retreats up the valley it carved, the bedrock and gravels are exposed to light and air. Seeds find their way there, on the wind and in bird droppings, and can germinate and grow. Before long the lifeless barrens become a newly developing ecosystem full of lichens, mosses, ferns, flowering plants, and eventually, trees. Isn’t it fairly obvious that this is a better environmental condition than a huge blob of frozen water that kills everything beneath it? Glaciers certainly are photogenic, but as we discussed in the chapter on forests, you can’t judge the health of an ecosystem by the fact that it looks pretty. Sand dunes make for nice scenery too, but they aren’t very welcome when they bury a town and kill all the crops.
Much attention has been focused on the Greenland ice cap, virtually one big glacier with many arms to the sea. During the warming that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s it was reported that the Greenland ice cap was melting rapidly. Al Gore predicted the sea might rise by 20 feet in the next century, apparently assuming the entire ice cap might melt in 100 years.[66] This is a physical impossibility. The high elevation and extreme low temperatures dictate that it would take at least thousands of years for the glaciers of Greenland to disappear.
Figure 5. The Michael Mann Hockey Stick Graph as it appeared in the 2001 Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. [67]
More recently the focus has been on the Himalayan glaciers, the largest ice cap outside the Polar Regions. The story of what has become “Glaciergate” helps to illustrate the present very confused state of climate science and of how important glaciers are, or are not. The 2007 report of the IPCC, its fourth report, stated Himalayan glaciers may be completely gone by 2035, less than 25 years from now.[68] [69] The report warned, “if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.” It was not until the lead-up to the 2009 Kyoto Protocol meeting in Copenhagen that scientists began to question this assertion. The Ministry of the Environment in India published a paper rejecting the 2035 prediction, stating that it would be hundreds of years before the glaciers melted, even if the present warming trend continued.[70] This caused the chairman of the IPCC, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, who happens to be Indian, to denounce the Environment Ministry’s report as “voodoo science.”[71]
It was not until after the Copenhagen conference that the IPCC published an admission of error. They stated, “In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly.”[72] Yet Dr. Pachauri refused to apologize for calling the Environment Ministry’s report “voodoo science.”[73] It was revealed that the 2035 date was based on an interview by New Scientist magazine of a single Indian scientist, who subsequently admitted his statement was “speculative.”[74] The New Scientist article was then referred to in a 2005 WWF report on glaciers, which was cited as the only reference in support of the 2035 date.[75] This has caused something of a crisis of credibility for the IPCC, which had insisted all its predictions were based on peer-reviewed science. As it turns out, the most credible scientists who specialize in the subject of Himalayan glaciers believe it would take at least 300 years for them to melt completely, even if it continues to get warmer. Other indefensible statements in the IPCC report then emerged regarding the disappearance of the Amazon rain forest[76] and the collapse of agricultural production in Africa.[77]
Perhaps the most bizarre case of logical disconnect in the climate change hysteria involves the predictions of disaster if the Himalayan glaciers continue to melt. Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, predicts that if this happens there will be mass starvation in Asia.[78] The theory goes like this: the meltwater from the glaciers is essential for irrigation of food crops throughout much of Asia. The Ganges, Indus, Mekong, Yellow, Yangtze, and many other rivers flow from the Himalayas, providing water for over one-third of the human population. If t
hese glaciers were to melt completely, there would be no more meltwater for irrigation, and so food production would plummet, resulting in mass starvation. This seems plausible to many people and has been repeated countless times in the media as another “catastrophic” aspect of climate change.
After hearing Lester Brown speak at length about this doomsday scenario, it dawned on me that his thesis was illogical. On the one hand he is saying the meltwater (from the melting glaciers) is essential for food production, and on the other hand he insists that we must try to stop the glaciers from melting so they will not disappear. Obviously if the glaciers stop melting, there will be no more meltwater from them. So my questions for Lester Brown, and the IPCC, are, Are you saying you want the glaciers to stop melting? Then where would the irrigation water come from? I might add, How about if the glaciers started growing again, reducing water flows even further, perhaps advancing on the towns where the food is grown?
It has since been revealed that only 3 to 4 percent of the water flowing into the Ganges River is glacial meltwater. Ninety-six percent of the river flow is from snow that fell in the previous winter and melted in the summer, and from rainfall during monsoons.[79] Therefore the people will not likely starve if the glaciers melt completely. A warmer world with higher CO2concentrations, and likely more precipitation, will allow expansion of agricultural land and will result in faster-growing, more productive crops. Forests and crops will grow where now there is only a sheet of ice. I say let the glaciers melt.
Arctic and Antarctic Sea Ice
The Arctic and Antarctic regions are polar opposites in more ways than one. Whereas the Arctic is mainly an ocean surrounded by continents, the Antarctic is a large continent, almost centered on the South Pole, surrounded by seas. The Antarctic is colder than the Arctic largely due to its high elevation.[80] The Antarctic ice sheet began to form 20 million years ago and has been a permanent fixture since then, advancing and retreating with the pulses of glaciation over the past 2.5 million years during the Pleistocene Ice Age. The Arctic was largely ice-free until the onset of the Pleistocene and since then has had varying degrees of ice cover as glacial periods have waxed and waned.
Much has been made recently of the fact that the extent of summer sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk substantially. In September of 2007, typically the low month after summer melting, there was about three million square kilometers of ice cover, about two million less than the average since records were first made. Many pundits immediately predicted that the Arctic would be ice-free in the summer within 20 to 30 years, and that this would be our fault entirely. The fact that the area of ice recovered by about one million square kilometers in 2008 and again in 2009 didn’t dampen the shrillness of their predictions.
Figure 6. Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice Anomaly (1979–2008 mean).The extent of sea ice in the Arctic showed a clear downward trend from 1995 to 2007. Since 2007 it has recovered by about one-third over the lowest area. Only time will tell what the trend will be in the coming decades.
Figure 7. Southern Hemisphere Sea Ice Anomaly (1979–2008 mean). Graph showing the deviance from the 1979 to 2008 average extent of sea ice in the Antarctic. The winter of 2007 saw the greatest extent of Antarctic sea ice since measurements were first taken, coincident with the least extent in the Arctic. Whereas the extent of Arctic sea ice has shown a recent downward trend, the extent of Antarctic sea ice has shown an upward trend.
Our knowledge of the extent of sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic began in 1979, the first year satellites were used to photograph the Polar Regions on a continual basis. Before 1979 it is not possible to reconstruct the comings and goings of sea ice, as unlike glaciers, sea ice leaves no trace when it melts. There is an implicit assumption among the true believers that the reduction in sea ice observed in 2007 is unique in the historical record and that we are now on a one-way trip to an ice-free Arctic Sea (see Figure 6). Putting aside the fact that mariners consider an ice-free sea a good thing, it is not possible to conclude a long-term trend in the extent of Arctic sea ice from 30 years of satellite observation.
Between 1903 and 1905 the Norwegian Raold Amundsen became the first person to navigate the Northwest Passage in a 47-ton sailing ship equipped with a small gasoline motor.[81] We do not know the extent of ice over the entire Arctic at that time but the fact that a small boat could sail through the passage indicates 2007 was not the only time the area of ice was reduced.
Between 1940 and 1944, years before we had any idea of the extent of sea ice during the summers and winters, a small Canadian trawler name the St. Roch navigated the Northwest Passage twice, from west to east and from east to west.[82] [83] It was not an icebreaker and it had only a 150-horsepower diesel engine and sails. From 1910 to 1940 there was a well-documented rise in the average global temperature of nearly half a degree Celsius. There is every possibility that Arctic ice was as reduced when the St. Roch sailed through the passage as it has been in recent years. We will never know.
While all the media’s and activist’s attention has been on Arctic sea ice, the Antarctic has been playing out its own history in a very different way. The winter sea ice around Antarctica has grown above the average from 1979 to 2008 (See Figure 7). This has proven problematic for believers as it indicates Antarctica is cooling, contrary to what they have been led to believe by predictions based on computer models. In December 2008 Nature published an article claiming the Antarctic was warming.[84] Many climate activists, including Al Gore, seized on this article to bolster their belief in human-caused warming.[85] It turned out that the Nature article had been largely based on a computer model rather than real measurements of temperature. This represented another turning point in the questioning of the science used to claim humans were definitely causing the earth to warm up.[86]
Figure 8. Global sea ice level, 1979 to present. The lower line shows the anomaly (difference from the mean) for 31 years. As you can easily see, there is no significant trend when Arctic and Antarctic sea ice areas are added together.
In 2009 the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) published a paper in which it reported sea ice had retreated in one part of the Antarctic Peninsula.[87] The paper made it clear that ice was growing in other parts of Antarctica and it was not clear whether the total amount of ice on and around the continent was shrinking or growing. In Greenpeace-like fashion the USGS then issued a media release claiming the sea ice was “disappearing” in Antarctica and that sea level rise was imminent.[88] News services picked up this story, which gave the impression Antarctica was melting away. Perhaps the USGS scientists feel the need to sensationalize their otherwise good research in order to get more funding. I don’t know, but it certainly misleads the public about what is really happening down there.
The University of Illinois’ website, The Cryosphere Today, contains the entire record of sea ice since 1979.[89] (The Cryosphere is the area of the earth covered with ice.) Figure 8 shows the global sea ice cover, adding together the Arctic and the Antarctic, from 1979 until the present.[90] This is our total knowledge of the history of sea ice cover on planet Earth. There is no obvious trend up or down because increased ice cover in the Antarctic offsets most of the reduced ice cover in the Arctic. So even the very short record we do have for global sea ice cover provides no evidence of a warming trend, either natural or human-caused.
Coral Reefs, Shellfish, and “Ocean Acidification”
It has been widely reported in the media, based on a few scientific papers, that the increasing levels of CO2in the atmosphere will result in “ocean acidification,” threatening coral reefs and all marine shellfish with extinction within 20 years.[91] The story goes like this: The oceans absorb about 25 percent of the CO2we emit into the atmosphere each year. The higher the CO2content of the atmosphere, the more CO2will be absorbed by the oceans. When CO2is dissolved in water, some of it is converted into carbonic acid that has a weak acidic effect. If the sea becomes more acidic, it will dissolve the calcium carbonate that is the main consti
tuent of coral and the shells of clams, shrimp, crabs, etc. It is one more doomsday scenario, predicting the seas will “degrade into a useless tidal desert,”[92]
In his latest book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, Bill McKibben claims, “Already the ocean is more acid than anytime in the last 800,000 years, and at current rates by 2050 it will be more corrosive than anytime in the past 20 million years.” In typical hyperbolic fashion, McKibben, the author of the well-know essay, “The End of Nature,” uses the words acid and corrosive as if the ocean will burn off your skin and flesh to the bone if you dare swim in it in 2050. This is just plain fear-mongering.
Results of research published in the journal Science by M.R. Palmer et al., indicate that over the past 15 million years, “All five samples record surface seawater pH values that are within the range observed in the oceans today, and they all show a decrease in the calculated pH with depth that is similar to that observed in the present-day equatorial Pacific.” The five samples recorded pH values for 85,000 years ago and for 2.5, 6.4, 12.1, and 15.7 million years ago.[93]
Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist Page 50