detailed records of advancing and retreating
glaciers going back to the 1800s. More than 90
percent of the world’s glaciers are now retreating at an accelerating rate, and most of the few
advancing ones are thinning faster than they
are advancing. The immediate flooding, as well
as the eventual loss of drinking and irrigation
water, will imperil billions of people in South
Asia and other regions of the world.
Getting back to Plimer’s book, I wasn’t
anxious to compile another 12 pages of notes,
so I searched the internet to see if anyone else
had already done the job for me. Sure enough,
George Monbiot, an environmental columnist for the United Kingdom’s Guardian and
author of Heat: How to Stop the Planet from
Burning addressed it on his blog (monbiot.
com). Monbiot has posted a series of letters
he exchanged with Plimer and a list of various sites where knowledgeable reviewers have
called out the numerous errors in Plimer’s
book. In one of the letters, Monbiot lists 11 of
the most egregious statements in the book and
asks Plimer to explain them. As of this writing,
Plimer has refused to respond to these, choosing instead to challenge Monbiot’s audacity in
asking such questions.
Many of the arguments I hear in the Denver group are old ones. Typical is that the
warming trend of the last three decades is
not unusual. Consider the “hockey stick” curve
developed by climatologist Michael Mann,
which shows a sudden rise in the Earth’s
temperature in recent decades. Mann’s work
was so viciously attacked by skeptics that
Congress directed the National Academy
of Sciences to review it. In their meticulous,
160-page final report, the Academy found
some room for improvement in Mann’s
analysis but agreed that, “This conclusion …
has subsequently been supported by an array
of evidence that includes both additional
large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of
local proxy indicators ... which in many cases
appear to be unprecedented during at least
the last 2,000 years.”
Another argument the skeptics have been
making is that the Earth has been cooling
for the past decade. To make this case, you
merely do the following. First, ignore the
temperature data from the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies
(GISS), both of which account for the rapidly
warming Arctic and show 2005 as the warmest
year on record. Then cite the British Hadley
Centre temperature data (which does not
cover most of the Arctic) and choose as your
starting year 1998, which was the year of the
largest El Niño event in recorded history and
the warmest year on record according to the
British data. Finally, compare 1998 to 2008, a
relatively cool year due mostly to an extended
La Niña (cool surface waters in the eastern
Pacific) and, to a lesser extent, the sun’s output
being at a minimum of its 11-year cycle. Ergo,
the Earth is cooling.
Of course, by cherry-picking a 10-year
period like that, you can make any case you
want. It is actually the long-term average temperature trend that matters. And that trend
— as indicated by the plotted trend lines on
the temperature graphs of NOAA, GISS, and,
yes, even Hadley — shows a clear warming.
For the record, we entered another El Niño
period in the spring of 2009, and this past
August was the second-warmest one ever
recorded. Sunspots reappeared in July after
an extended absence, meaning that the sun
(which alternately exerts a warming and
cooling effect that is only about one-fifth the
strength of manmade greenhouse warming)
is now probably increasing in output with the
next peak predicted for 2013.
As the misinformation on climate change
dominates the public airways, you may think
there is little hope that Americans will have
an opportunity to learn the scientific truth.
But in the nick of time, NASA’s James Hansen
has written a long-awaited book that explains
what is happening in clear and precise terms.
While Hansen unfortunately shows more
optimism for nuclear power than renewables
in his discussion of solutions, he speaks with
unmatched authority on the subject of climate
science. Read Storms of My Grandchildren and
learn the truth about climate change from a
scientist who has dedicated his long and distinguished career to this field. ST
www.solmetric.com
