Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (74 page)

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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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Yet Dr. Pachauri refused to apologize for calling the Environment Ministry’s report “voodoo science.”
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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.”
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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.
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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
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and the collapse of agricultural production in Africa.
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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.
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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 these 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.
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Therefore the people will not likely starve if the glaciers melt completely. A warmer world with higher CO
₂
concentrations, 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.
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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.