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Scare of the Century
JASON LEE STEORTS But what, oh what, would the earth do without Time magazine? Suddenly and unexpectedly, Time announced in a recent issue, the crisis is upon us. Havent noticed the crisis? You must not be looking very hard. The climate is crashing, and global warming [what else?] is to blame. Time accordingly devoted a special report to saving Mother Gaia. The report is half anti-Republican polemic, half catalogue of global warmings supposed ills and none receives greater emphasis than the melting of polar ice. We see a photograph of a polar bear, standing all by his lonesome at the waters edge, and are told that the poor fellow might drown because polar ice caps are melting faster than ever. Later, we learn that the journal Science published a study suggesting that by the end of the century, the world could be locked in to an eventual rise in sea levels of as much as 20 ft. Science magazine has itself been prone to hysteria. The issue that Time mentions contains no fewer than eight studies and articles about the ice caps, and begins with a news story warning that startling amounts of ice slipping into the sea have taken glaciologists by surprise; now they fear that this centurys greenhouse emissions could be committing the world to a catastrophic sea-level rise. The policy implications of such reportage are clear, but in case you missed them, Time connects the dots: Curbing global warming may be an order of magnitude harder than, say, eradicating smallpox or putting a man on the moon. But is it moral not to try? The answer is, yes, it may indeed be moral not to try. What is not moral is to distort the truth for political ends which is precisely what has been done with the ice-caps story. Heres what you havent read. The world has two major ice sheets, one covering most of Greenland and the other covering most of Antarctica. While melting sea ice has captured its share of attention, its the land sheets that matter. Sea ice is already in the water, so its melting doesnt raise ocean levels. But if land ice melts, the sea gets higher. Time wants you to be very worried about this: By some estimates, the entire Greenland ice sheet would be enough to raise global sea levels 23 ft., swallowing up large parts of coastal Florida and most of Bangladesh. The Antarctic holds enough ice to raise sea levels more than 215 ft. Farewell, Dhaka, we shall miss thee. Or not. Those numbers sound impressive, but the chances of the ice caps fully melting are about as high as the chances of Times giving you an honest story on global warming. The truth is that theres no solid evidence supporting the conclusion that weve locked the ice caps in to a melting trend. Lets look at Antarctica and Greenland in turn. About Antarctica, University of Virginia climate scientist Patrick J. Michaels is direct: What has happened is that Antarctica has been gaining ice. He explains that there has been a cooling trend over most of Antarctica for decades. At the same time, one tiny portion of the continent the Antarctic Peninsula has been warming, and its ice has been melting. The peninsula constitutes only about 2 percent of Antarcticas total area, but almost every study of melting Antarctic ice youve heard of focuses on it. So what about the rest of the continent? In 2002, Nature published a study by Peter Doran that looked at Antarctic temperature trends from 1966 to 2000. What it found was that about two-thirds of Antarctica got colder over that period. At the same time, Antarctica has gotten snowier, and as the snow has accumulated the ice sheet has grown. Snowfall is probably rising because water temperatures around Antarctica have gotten slightly repeat, slightly warmer. As a result, there is more surface evaporation, making for higher humidity and more precipitation. Higher humidity also means more clouds, which might explain the cooler weather. How much ice has Antarctica gained? In a 2005 study published in Science, Curt Davis used satellite measurements to calculate changes in the ice sheets elevation, and found that it gained 45 billion tons of ice per year between 1992 and 2003. Far from flooding the coasts, thats enough to lower sea levels by roughly 0.12 millimeters annually. Posted by: mcsegeek1 2006-05-22 |
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