Environment

Virtually everyone in Washington now says that some type of global warming legislation is going to pass, either late this legislative season, or, more likely, in 2009. The latter is more probable because all the remaining candidates for President have expressed strong support for some type of legislation limiting carbon dioxide emissions.

With very little change in gasoline consumption as prices approach $4.00 per gallon, how expensive does energy have to become in order to reduce emissions enough to significantly alter the warming trajectory of the planet? Whatever the figure is, it is very high, and will certainly be associated with economic contraction.

Much of this is driven by the urban-legend science about world's largest island, Greenland.

The story is this. Current computer models, which take thousands of years to melt Greenland's ice, are wrong. Instead of slowly melting and discharging ice, much of the ice cap will rapidly slough off into the ocean, because the computer models don't consider that meltwater may work its way down to the bottom of the ice cap, lubricating it and encouraging rapid movement. Once the ice melts down to a certain level (currently it goes up to 10,000 feet) the remaining ice will be lower, and therefore in a warmer environment, hastening additional melting. One scientist (and only one, so far as I can tell), NASA's James Hansen, thinks this could happen by 2100.

A year ago, radio and television were ablaze a year ago with the discovery of "Warming Island", a piece of land thought to be part of Greenland. When the ice receded in the last few years, it turns out that there was open water, hence Warming Island. It was thought that the island hadn't been uncovered for thousands of years. Every major media outlet covered the story. CNN, ABC, and BBC made field trips to the ice.

Every climatologist knows that Greenland's last decade was no warmer than several decades in the early and mid 20th century. In fact, the period from 1970-1995 was the coldest one since the late 19th century.

Warming Island has a very distinctive shape, and it lies off of Carlsbad Fjord, in eastern Greenland. My Charlottesville colleague Chip Knappenberger found an inconvenient book, Arctic Riviera (!) published in 1957, by areal photographer Ernst Hofer. He did recon for expeditions and was surprised by how pleasant the summers had become. There's a map in his book. It shows Warming Island.

The rivers disappearing into the ice cap are called moulins. In Gore's book, An Inconvenient Truth, there's a wonderful picture of one on page 193, with the text stating "These photographs from Greenland illustrate some of the dramatic changes now happening on the ice there".
 
Really? Has anyone seen a photograph in the journal Arctic, published in 1953, captioned "River disappearing in 40-foot deep gorge", on Greenland's Adolf Hoels Glacier? It's all there in the open literature, but apparently that's too inconvenient for any scientist studying global warming to bring up. Greenland didn't shed its ice then. There was no acceleration of the rise in sea level.

Further, no one seems to have noticed that the Eurasian arctic was several degrees warmer in summer (when ice melts) for millennia after the end of the last ice age. We know this because trees are buried in what is now tundra that is too cold to support them. The forest extended all the way to the Arctic ocean, which is now completely surrounded by tundra. If it was warmer for such a long period, why did Greenland not shed its ice? And, again, where are the scientists who should be telling this to the world?

Then there's the perception that the rate of global warming is increasing. It isn't. The rate has been remarkably steady since the current warming trend began in the mid-1070s. What has changed are the data themselves!

I have examined the two major revisions of each record. They are the surface record from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Satellite-sensed temperatures originally published University of Alabama's John Christy, and weather balloon records originally published by James Angell of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

In each iteration there is a greater warming trend in the same data.

Most people would argue that there should be a fifty-fifty chance that any revision would produce either a warmer or a cooler record. So it's like flipping a coin 6 times and getting 6 heads or tails. The chance of that occurring is .016, or less than one in fifty. That doesn't mean that these revisions are all hooey, but rather that the chance that they would all go in one direction is pretty darned small.

Which prompts the ultimate question: why is the news on global warming always bad? Perhaps because there's little incentive to look the other way. First off, you're liable to be pilloried by your colleagues. If global warming isn't such a threat, who needs all that funding? Who needs the army of policy wonks crawling over every world capital with their plans to stop dreaded climate change?

There's nothing wrong with revising temperature trends, even if the revisions are all in the same direction; that's just improbable. But, as we head down the road towards massive energy taxes raised by the perception of Greenland sliding into the ocean and an increasing rate of warming, shouldn't someone be talking?

Patrick J. Michaels is Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies at the Cato Institute and Professor of Environmental Sciences at University of Virginia.