Ice is the white flag being waved by our planet, under fire from the atmospheric attack being mounted by humanity. From the frosted plains of the Arctic ice pack to the cool blue caverns of the mountain glaciers, the dripping away of frozen water is the most crystal clear of all the Earth’s warning signals.
It’s also sheer BS, and it belongs to Damian Carrington of the Guardian/Observer newspapers. He continues…
Last week saw the annual summer minimum of the Arctic ice cap, which has now shrunk to the lowest level satellites have ever recorded.
Now, is this true? Anthony Watts, who needs no introduction here, has a very useful page linking to sea ice data at his site. Carrington’s claim is true, if we look at the record of ice extent produced by scientists at the University of Bremen:
But it doesn’t seem to be the story produced by International Arctic Research Center/Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (IARC-JAXA):
And it doesn’t seem to be the story produced by The National Snow and Ice Data Centre in the US:
The Danish Meteorological Institute, also, have produced different data:
And so too have the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center:
And if that’s not enough, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration story doesn’t match Carrington’s claims either:
Carrington wanted to give significance to a new record being set. But it seems to have been set only according to one out of six measurements of sea ice extent. He could have checked. He could have looked at Anthony Watt’s site. But if he had, he would be left without a muse, where would his poetry be then?
Carrington, the poet, wants to paint a picture of the world, in which its white parts drain away. He wants to convey a feeling, not unlike the disappointment children experience when they see crisp white snow turn into muddy slush. The real picture of the world’s ice, however, requires grown up eyes.
There may well be a trend towards an ice free world. But there is a great deal of sea ice remaining. The 30-year record, which Carrington believes is waving at us, begging for a ceasefire, hardly depicts this drama.
But it gets worse. (It always does.)
The lower glaciers are doomed. Kilimanjaro may be bare within a decade, with the Pyrenees set to be ice-free by mid-century and three-quarters of the glaciers in the Alps gone by the same date. As you climb higher, and temperatures drop, global warming will take longer to erode the ice into extinction. But at the “third pole”, in the Himalayas, the ice is melting as evidenced by dozens of swelling milky blue lakes that threaten to burst down on to villages when their ice dams melt.
As has been widely discussed in recent years, if the ice on the top of Kilimanjaro does disappear, it will not be the consequence of warming. The glaciers there have been in retreat for longer than can be accounted for by climate change, and the temperatures there are not sufficient to explain the recession as the consequence of melting. And the Himalayas….
The threat posed is far greater than even this terrifying prospect: a quarter of the world’s people rely on Himalayan meltwater, which helps feed the great rivers that plunge down into Asia. The Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Brahmaputra, Ganges and Indus nourish billions and will eventually lose their spring surges.
Even if we take at face value the claim that a quarter of the world’s population rely on Himalayan meltwater — which doesn’t seem plausible to me — why should we imagine that they will always rely on the meltwater in the future, whatever the fate of those glaciers? Even if the glaciers melted — which we now know is a prospect that has been deferred by some three centuries — rain and snow would still fall on the mountains, and make their way to the sea. It should not be beyond the minds and means of a billion or more Asians to find ways of halting the water’s progress, and containing it.
So what is Carrington up to, with all this revision of some of the most absurd global warming alarmism that has materialised over the last few years?
Perhaps it is because ice is at the cold heart of all our deepest global warming fears that climate change sceptics wield their picks so heavily on it. The error by the publicists and cartographers of the Times Atlas, who stated that Greenland’s ice cover had shrunk by 15% since 1999, prompted a renewed sounding of sirens by climate sceptics who saw another example of rampant alarmism by warming fanatics. In fact, it was climate scientists themselves who sounded the alarm, prompting the Atlas publishers to promise a new map would be inserted.
Aha! Carrington senses that the ‘climate change sceptics’ have stolen a march. And rather than letting them steal the show, Carrington rushes to make the claim that it was the scientists who saved the day, after all, spotting the error.
But if it is important to state which side’s champions were instrumental in identifying the truth, it ought then to be important to state who precisely was responsible for propagating the misinformation. As Bishop Hill pointed out, it was the Guardian’s Environmental Editor, John Vidal, who had said,
The world’s biggest physical changes in the past few years are mostly seen nearest the poles where climate change has been most extreme. Greenland appears considerably browner round the edges, having lost around 15%, or 300,000 sq km, of its permanent ice cover. Antarctica is smaller following the break-up of the Larsen B and Wilkins ice shelves.
This was ‘churnalism’. Vidal had merely copied the claim made by the press release announcing the Times Atlas,
For the first time, the new edition of The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, published on 15 September, has had to erase 15% of Greenland’s once permanent ice cover – turning an area the size of the United Kingdom and Ireland ‘green’ and ice free… Cartographers of the atlas have sourced the latest evidence and referred to detailed maps and records to confirm that in the last 12 years, 15% of the permanent ice cover (around 300,000 sq km) of Greenland, the world’s largest island, has melted away.
Rather than quiet reflection on their own errors, Guardian environment staff make noisy statements, hoping to recover their credibility. Does this not speak loudly to the fact that these writers are engaged in a very political debate: they sense that the embarrassment caused by the Times Atlas affair undermines the wholly alarmist argument they have been advancing; they have lost ground to ‘the sceptics’, which must be recovered. Thus, Carrington waxes poetic on what the melting ice portends, before reaching for… grasping for… facts that will give this lyricism some substance. And he grasps for facts that do not bear the weight of the political argument. There doesn’t seem to have been any record set on the Arctic Sea this summer. There is still a great deal of ice left on the world. Kilimanjaro’s glaciers are not victims of climate change. People living beneath glaciers are not so dependent on them. Clinging on to these long-debunked claims is an attempt to keep up appearances: to sustain the view of the debate they have been maintaining for far too long.
It was scientists, not some imagined group of ‘sceptics’, who corrected the Times Atlas. But in the same way, it isn’t ‘the sceptics’ who embarrassed the alarmist fools at the Times Atlas and at the Guardian; they embarrass themselves.
Hi Ben – Damian and you have both missed something….
Kilamanjaro is now REGAINING its snowcap — maybe you could pass the good news on to the Guardian……
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/21/kilimanjaro-regaining-its-snow-cap/
The Guarudiane recently raised its cover-price so perhaps they’ll use the extra income to hire some real researchers. Then again, they’ll probably just buy Carrington a larger set of blinkers.
I think the credit for revealing Atlasgate belongs to Dr Jeffrey Kargel who said here:
http://lists.cryolist.org/pipermail/cryolist-cryolist.org/2011-September/000919.html
“media be warned: play on this story at your own serious risk of losing credibility. I am certain that the scientists mentioned above, and many others, will respond with actual data, throughly peer-reviewed publications, and lots of data to show what is happening”.
This on the 15th, the very day that the Guardian published the article.
WUWT had a story on the 16th, BishopHill publicised Kargel’s comment on the 17th, and Richard Betts of the Met Office complained to the Guardian the same day. (Betts has been very active at Bishop Hill recently, engaging with sceptics, and promising to dissociate himself and his colleagues from alarmism).
Richard Black at the BBC reported the reaction of scientists from the Scott Polar Research Institute on the 19th, and the Guardian published a correction on the 20th.
Steve McIntyre on the 22nd turned up a fascinating plug for the Atlas on ITN by Sir Brian Hoskins of the Grantham Institute, who described it as a “useful tool against climate change skeptics.”
transcribed by Alex Cull at
https://sites.google.com/site/mytranscriptbox/home/20110915_it
while Maurizio Morabito claims to have found the source of the error – on Wikipaedia.
All of which shows that Carrington’s claim that “it was climate scientists themselves who sounded the alarm” is as false as the original claims about the greening of Greenland. Though the scientist Dr Kargel was, it is true, the first to blog on the subject, nothing would have happened without the involvement of sceptic blogs.
Pops
The Graun has already spent the extra cash sending Suzanne Goldenberg from Washington to Nepal, which was also visited a few years back by Guardian environment editor, John Vidal, who has also done the Andes and Mexico. See the Goldenberg report on Everest’s disappearing ice at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/24/climate-change-mount-everest-melting
Carrington is no doubt angling for a round-the-Arctic cruise before he takes the Monbiot vow of abstinence (“Oh Gaia, reduce my air miles, but not yet”).
There is a parallel with the IPCC 2035 melt date for the Himalayan glaciers. Again spotted very early by scientists, nothing happened to correct it — until the sceptics started having a laugh. Then it was corrected because “scientists had noticed”.
I’m sorry, I must have missed when the climate sceptic camp decided to let slagging off the Guardian and its journalists stand in for a sensible argument. Carrington’s self-serving and unnecessary lyricism aside – as well as the poetic license often taken by the likes of Vidal and Monbiot – this year’s sea-ice minimum represents the second lowest on record. This is certainly not irrefutable evidence of an impending catastrophe, nor is it proof that the ice melt isn’t a big problem. It is, however, a worrying sign. The fact that the ice isn’t necessarily lower year on year does not mean it isn’t in an overall melting trend. All of the graphs show fluctuation year on year. However, compared with the averages for the last decades of the last century, the levels are significantly lower. None of this excuses Carrington’s distortion, but we shouldn’t let that cause us to miss the point and ignore the information that the graphs do show us: The Arctic sea-ice is melting at an increased rate and there is less of it now than 10 or 15 years ago. We as a society need to figure what the consequences of this will be and how to deal with it.
Hi Ben, You’ve certainly got a way with words. This intrigued me ” if the ice on the top of Kilimanjaro does disappear, it will not be the consequence of warming.” You don’t explain what else it could possibly be the result of though and neither does the BBC article you link to, indeed I don’t agree that’s an accurate precis of what the BBC article says (interesting nonetheless).
Also you seem to be right that there are other studies that suggest the new arctic ice minimum has not been broken by 2011. But you fail to mention that they all point to 2007 as the year with minimum ice extent, consistent with a warming trend and only four years back.
Fair point about Vidal.
Josh – ‘It is, however, a worrying sign‘.
It is? I’m not in the slightest bit worried about the melting of floating sea ice. It doesn’t signify anything other than melting ice. It is only significant to those of a tendency to become alarmed, because melting ice is one of the central prophecies of environmentalism. As Damien puts it,
I’m not worried about it, and I’m not worried about it because I don’t believe the stories about X meter sea level rises by 20XX. And I’m not worried about it because, even if the ice is melting, it will be many, many years before it has any consequence. And I’m not worried about that because I believe that in the meanwhile, we have that time to develop less carbon intensive forms of energy production, to walk away from the rising sea levels, and to build further inland, develop sea defences, etc, etc. Alarmism robs the discussion of those facts, and possibilities — debate.
Hengist McStone – You don’t explain what else it could possibly be the result of though and neither does the BBC article you link to…
Yes it does…
…and…
…and…
So, Kilimanjaro’s glacial recession can be explained as the consequence of spontaneous climate change (i.e. can’t be explained by AGW). There are also discussions elsewhere about local land-use changes causing a reduction in precipitation.
Ben – good summary and analysis.
Josh – I do not dispute that there has been a decline in Arctic ice in the last 20 odd years, but the second lowest on [satellite] record is only since 1979. There are historical accounts of significant sea ice retreat in the 18th, 19th and 20th century, e.g http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/historic-variation-in-arctic-ice-tony-b/ – the Royal Society’s 1817 report is well worth reading for a start. The Norwegians also noted very little ice around Svalbard in the early 1920’s so who is to say that this recent decline isn’t just part of a longer 80-100 year cycle, probably led by changes to ocean currents (which would explain why the Arctic has warmed, unlike the Antarctic continent).
Hengist – iirc the average temp at the summit of Kilimanjaro is -4C. The snows and ice have not retreated due to warming temperatures, but increased sublimation. The latest research suggests this is due to decreased humidity (sorry don’t have time to find the link), as a result of deforestation on the plains below, nothing to do with CO2. Increased insolation (as a result of possibly less cloud cover in recent years, locally or globally) could also be a factor. Ice is a poor proxy for temperatures at high altitudes and in dry climates.
Yes the dea ice has fallen to a relative low [in comparison with figures only compiled since 1979] in the north this year – how can we surmise whether this is normal or not?
What we do know, is that, overall the sea ice balance remains in er…..balance because of the Antarctic sea ice, therefore no need imo to panic – what is the problem?
In order to properly understand, what is going on in the Arctic ocean, we first must understand the oceanic oscillation and the currents in this vast ocean, it is interesting to note, Sweden is recalling its ice breaker from the USA Antarctic survey, and there is concern in the sea of Okhotsk – where, for the last couple of years breaking the winter sea ice has been a major problem, colder here, relatively ‘warmer’ there etc.
We must study the Northern Oceans and seas, of course they affect our weather systems, whether mankind has any effect……well that must make the Gods laugh.
Bravo! Great piece.
The assumption of Carrington & others is that, if ice is melting, it must be the result of our nasty, sinful ways.
So how do these people explain the fact that, 20,000 years ago, Canada – the country in which I reside – was 97% covered with ice?
The Egyptian pharaohs only came into the picture 5,000 years ago, the Romans 2,000 years ago. Which means the ice that used to make my enormous nation uninhabitable has been melting and receding steadily for far longer a period of time than can possibly be blamed on humans burning fossil fuels.
So where does Carrington get his certainty that the reason it is doing so NOW is because of humanity?
The notion that I should be worried that there’s a little less ice than there used to be, when this appears to be entirely consistent with a long-term trend that has nothing whatever to do with me is bizarre.
We humans are not the center of the universe. Not everything that goes on is about us.
Some good Johan Hari quotes (liar, plagiarist, etc)
“You know, the Arctic in my lifetime has lost 40% of its summer ice. By 2012 the North Pole will be a point in the open ocean”
Ben Pile:
“I’m not worried about it, and I’m not worried about it because I don’t believe the stories about X meter sea level rises by 20XX.”
Ben, are you are aware that – since sea ice sits in the sea – changes in sea ice are not related to changes in sea level?
Also:
even if the ice is melting, it will be many, many years before it has any consequence
Are you aware that – because the loss of sea ice means that more moisture is available from cold Arctic latitudes – it may well be responsible for the extreme winter cold some Northern Hemisphere countries (including the UK) have been experiencing for the last two years?
Paul – Ben, are you are aware that – since sea ice sits in the sea – changes in sea ice are not related to changes in sea level?
Yes, though my point was about what the ‘signs’ of melting ice are meant to signify: one needs to believe that melting ice signifies something for it to provoke alarm.
Are you aware that – because the loss of sea ice means that more moisture is available from cold Arctic latitudes – it may well be responsible for the extreme winter cold some Northern Hemisphere countries (including the UK) have been experiencing for the last two years?
No, I wasn’t. My understanding was that colder air is less capable of bearing water than warmer air. Even if we take the point, however, that colder temperatures are the result of sea ice loss, it’s not as if the conditions we have experienced in recent winters are unusual. The best we could say then, is ‘climate same as it was 50 years ago, due to climate change’. We can cope with it. We just need to do things like make sure there are things like snow ploughs and rock salt.
Geoff, Sir Brian Hoskins probably didn’t say that the new Times atlas is a useful tool against sceptics. That was how the ITN voiceover introduced Hoskins’ very brief piece in the edited broadcast but in the rushes for that interview (probably still available at news.itnsource.com) he said nothing of the kind. This doesn’t, of course, mean that he’s off the hook for having promoted the atlas as further *scientific* (‘We scientists …’ etc.) evidence of climageddon without bothering to wonder whether the claims in the atlas’s press release were even remotely credible. The ice experts at CRYOLIST say that the bogosity of the claims should have been immediately obvious to anyone with an ounce of scientific sense. But let’s not exaggerate his sins. There’s no need. Hoskins showed himself to be a credulous and unthinking propagandist of climate alarmism.
And Maurizio Morabito is wrong about the source of the error. The Wikipedia map resembles the new Times map only superficially. (It’s a map of Greenland.) What the Times cartographers did was take partial and outdated NSIDC ice-thickness data for Greenland, assume it was complete and up-to-date and arbitrarily choose to exclude all ice less than 500 m thick. Someone then calculated the percentage difference between the ice cover shown on the resultant (very wrong) map and the Times 1999 map. The cartographers might also have assumed that ice thicknesses are the same as ice-surface elevations. All in all, a story of astonishing cartographic ineptitude.
And you’re wrong that ‘nothing would have happened without the involvement of sceptic blogs’. Cogley, Torson, Kargel and the folks at the SPRI got this thing (or are getting this thing – HarperCollins still seems not have realized the true extent of its cock-up) sorted out. Blogs like Bishop Hill and WUWT could have had no impact whatsoever – and, I reckon, had no impact whatsoever – on the process of getting the errors corrected. If you think otherwise, you spend too much time reading climate blogs. (As do I.)
As for a quarter of the world’s population relying on Himalayan meltwater … Have these morons no sense at all? (Even Skeptical Science eventually got around to correcting that one.)
Geoff, I didn’t mean to diminish the bloggers by pointing out that it was the scientists who corrected the error in the Atlas. Real Climate, like Carrington also tried to spin the discovery of the error as scientists correcting the mistakes, all part of the scientific enterprise.
What I wanted to suggest is that ‘the sceptics’ are still some kind of bogeyman in Carrington’s poem. He imagines them as some singular entity, or driven by a single purpose, and who cannot possibly have treated the issue rationally, because they are anti-science. He, of course, perfectly represents what science says, because he is faithful to it. He isn’t motivated by ‘ideology’, or politics, like the deniers. It’s this absurd idea that he ‘owns’ the science that I was getting at… but I had been at the pub all evening.
Vinnie hasn’t looked at the maps in detail. Anyway…has anybody else noticed that we risk ending up with the Arctic sea ice behaving like global temperature anomalies, with a dramatic extreme followed by a series of years during which nothing really happens?
love the empirical evidence: thank you. This is what is patently lacking from most emotively charged, climate change mafiaesque, political discourse.
For example, the idea of Everest being ice free means nothing in itself . Other than an idea that the world as we now conceive it, should be maintained in an image we are attached to. Yet, ironically, in the effort to try to preserve or conserve, the world as we now see it, we irrevocably change what we think we had.
In the name of conservation, we kill animals and chop down trees, to sustain very recent measurements of both population and geographical distribution of species . Even with the knowledge that, even over recent human history, these are not stable variables,
I personally don’t want to live in theme park Earth al le 2011 for the rest of my life, and I don’t care if the ice one the summit of Everest melts
“Josh says:
September 25, 2011 at 12:13 pm”
The absolute first thing to do when confronted with data saying that arctic ice cover (or any other natural phenomenon) is at a 30 year low (I mean besides sarcastically retorting “Really? A whole 30 years? That is certainly cause for concern all right.”) is to ask “How does this compare with historical norms?”
The phenomenon has no significance whatsoever until that question is answered.
Once a baseline of natural variability has been established, we can start asking more nuanced questions, such as:
What, if anything, does extent(area) tell us about the volume, or mass (which is the only metric that really matters), of the ice cover? Can factors other than heat, such as winds or ocean surface conditions, affect ice cover?
If we can establish the change in actual volume, what does that represent in joules? Can changes in air temperature or cloud cover account for that much heat, or do we need to consider ocean currents? If so, could human activities have that much affect on them?
Not really fair to ask a Poet who can’t even compare graphs to think analytically, which is why I’m posting here & not at the Guardian.
Is what you are talking about is the difference between statistical cycles and trends,. If so the question would be about the quantity of data we have and also its historical accuracy.
Surely life has effected the climate before. Just intuitively this seems true. Thus the idea of an unbroken cycle is flawed. Just because we can measure change in the climate now doesn’t make it novel.
What’s more, a crude application of econometrics to biological diversity or climate change is naive in the extreme. There are methodological similarities, but they are mostly analogous, as they use some of the same statistical tools. Insightful maybe; but not proof of anything. I would caution against taking natural phenomenon. and then using social scientific tools to describe them.
Watch Top Gear on Dave when Clarkson and James May go to The North Pole in a converted 4×4 and Richard Hammond goes there on a dog sled
Well that was a few years ago and the North Pole seemed to look okay to me
So is the Guardian still carrying advertising for Cars and Iggy Pop car insurance
Vinny Burgoo
Thanks for the correction over Hoskins.
You’re right. He didn’t say the atlas is a useful tool to counter sceptics; he merely provided a daft quote about Greenland going green which enabled the journalist to say it.
Whether Maurizio is right or wrong about the source of the error, the essential point is that he raised the possibility on a sceptic blog, and it was discussed at length by sceptics. No such discussion can happen in the mainstream media, where the unfailing reaction to an error by “their side” is to note the danger of sceptics gaining credibility, and plead for an official correction. (see Monbiot’s famous declaration that once Muir Russell had spoken, he would stop treating the Climategate story).
However loudly the scientists had protested at Cryolist, I doubt if the affair would have made the media if it hadn’t been for Carrington’s fear of another Himalayagate. As Ben makes admirably clear, the role of Carrington and the Guardian’ environment team is not to find out and report what is happening to the environment, but to stop the sceptics from “winning” a point. In this they are simply mirroring (or imitating?) the activity of scientists, as revealed in the CRU e-mails.
The amount of ice on the polar caps doesn’t depend on the temperature, but availability of raw material, to renew itself every season. On Greenland and Antarctic, ice is meted from below; by the thermal heat, day and night, summer and winter. That heat is insulated by the ice from the coldness above. Therefore, must be replenished, by dry-freezing the moisture from the air (if there is any moisture available) On the latitude, where Greenland has 1km thick ice – in Finland potatoes are growing – east on same latitude is permafrost in Siberia = no ice. Verdict: when is warmer = more ice. Warmist are not just wrong, but back to front on everything.
Warmist mistake for believing that: ice disappears on arctic waters will be proof of warming, will be their big disappointment. B] they hope: no white ice to reflect the sunlight = small warming, to get them out of trouble. Truth: for 6months is no sunlight to reflect. White ice is full of air = best insulator. Minus ice, water absorbs much more coldness; that extra coldness radiates south – intercepts the moisture = more blizzards in Europe / USA = no moisture left to replenish the ice on Arctic’s water = chain reaction. Russian nuclear ice crusher ship is taking tourist / spectators direct to the north poll every 2 weeks. Because ice moves clockwise, cannot use same corridor – must slice another = big chunks float south and melt in warmer waters = less ice = will be even colder northern winter. Four different reasons are damaging the arctic’s ice, this is one of those – unnecessary. The others are on: http://globalwarmingdenier.wordpress.com and much more.
Geoff: ‘Whether Maurizio is right or wrong about the source of the error …’
He’s wrong. He needs to look at the larger version of the new Times map of Greenland provided by one of the articles in the Guardian.
‘… the essential point is that [Maurizio] raised the possibility on a sceptic blog, and it was discussed at length by sceptics.’
Alas, I have no scepticism about that at all.
‘… However loudly the scientists had protested at Cryolist, I doubt if the affair would have made the media if it hadn’t been for Carrington’s fear of another Himalayagate.’
No, a cartographic cockup of this magnitude by the publishers of ‘the world’s most prestigious and authoritative atlas’ would always have been newsworthy, especially as they chose to make the erroneous part of their efforts the lead item in the publicity campaign launching their new product. Add to that the Climate Wars dimension and the cockup would always, blogs or not, have been irresistible to the Mail, Express, Telegraph and, eventually (and for the reasons you and Ben Pile give), the Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/damian-carrington-blog/2011/sep/29/ecocide-oil-criminal-court
ECOCIDE
look at what these f–cking idiots have come up with now
Ben better get on this one quick
Jamspid, I have a ticket for tomorrow’s event, so will be writing about it, if I can keep myself awake.
I’ve also written about it previously. https://www.climate-resistance.org/2011/01/one-law-for-tree-another-for-ewe.html
Ask celebrity lleft wing lawyer Micheal Mansfield about the time he took both his wife his kids and his mistress on holiday separetley together (seperate hotels not swingers)
Nothing wrong with that hes one dirty lucky sod
But for some one whose such a champion for freespeech why did he go to the high court to get a gagging order on it .Hes the original Ryan Giggs
Enough bitchy gossip
Ecsocide equeals Genocide isnt that a bit of an insult to the real victims of real Genocide Rwanda ,Yugoslavia pre gulf war Iraq Auchwitzs etc ect
Ben this mock court case about Ecocide
If we could get our own Perry Mason or Johnney Cockren in there
We could really do the Eco Fascist in the arse
Turn this show trial on its head
Accoring to Bloomburgs a barrel of Brent Crude is 140 dollors at the moment i thought it was about 32
There must be published data available that collates the price of oil with the price of food and medicines and building materials and distribution in the developing world
You can also show the increase in poulation and mortality rates against increased oil and gas production
So you can argue in this kangeroo court that cutting oil production would cause a rise in mortallity in the developing world
Which would far exceed the mortality rate due to the damage done to the enviroment
After oil is the reason we went into Iraq
No oil the human race only cave men
This ridiculous claim that so many millions, nay, billions of people rely on the Himalaya glaciers for their water has been put to rest long time ago: they depend on monsoon rains (as stated but not stressed by Ben).
Whether the ice caps are melting and whether this is due to global warming or not is not the issue. The issue is whether it is something we can prevent – and simply it is not. I have yet to be convinced that CO2 warming effect is significant enough to be responsible for the temperature rises alarmist automatically attribute, without any scientific proof, to CO2, and particularly anthropogenic CO2 emissions. If it is any other reasons to the alarmists presumptions of CO2, then the solution to the global warming problem changes from one of prevention to remedial action. However, thanks to the alarmist everyone is now looking at the wrong solution to the problem.
2 points.
1. All the graphs show that the 2011 ice data is within the bounds of natural variability. There is NO ‘unprecedented’ melt shown in any of the graphs.
2. All the statements by Carrington et al., always look at what they guess may happen in the future, whereas scientists report data that has already happened in reality. Given (1), the question is, is there any recorded data in these graphs that even suggest there is an excessive ice loss, whether man-made or natural, and the answer must be a resounding “NO”!