George Will gets my vote for the Voice of Common Sense Award. His article Dark Green Doomsayers points out that only 30 years ago the same folks wringing their hands over global warming today were running in circles hysterically warning of the coming ice age. Then and today the message was the same: massive starvation, the end of life as we know it, etc. Will aims a hit at one of my favorite Chicken Littles, Paul Ehrlich, the bug scientist who wrote the attack on babies called The Population Bomb. Well, the bomb turned out to be a dud and if all the babies aborted since 1973 were alive today we'd have a lot more taxpayers contributing to our economic base.
Read the article and laugh. These guys don't care about the climate; they love hysteria. It does two things -- 1) Makes money to SOLVE THE PROBLEM (even if it doesn't exist) and 2) Provides an excuse to expand government control.
God calls us to be good stewards of our world. That doesn't mean we have to swallow the snake oil being peddled by the likes of Al Gore.
George Will has his melted his facts: In response the University of Illinois has responded.
ReplyDelete"“We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.”
It is disturbing that the Washington Post or anyone would publish such information without first checking the facts.
Of course a number in square km is an area measure and not a volumetric measure of the total quantity of ice.
ReplyDeleteThe variation is only meaningful if it is outside the range of normal variation which isn't published here. The figures Turfkiller cites are a decline of about 8%, but this may or may not indicate anything at all unless we know what the degree of variation is from year to year since ice advances and retreats all the time and also gets thicker and thinner.
The idea that one can just cite two points decades apart and get a rate of decline is too simple. The analysis needs a lot more data to put it into any kind of perspective.