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COMMENTARY
October 31, 2009
Disalarming
Paradoxically, I have never come closer to thinking there might, after all, be something in "global warming" -- that it might not be a complete and utter fraud -- than this week, reading statements by prominent British scientists decrying the widespread publicity given to false or wildly exaggerated claims of melting Arctic ice, severe weather events, "potential" temperature trends, and the like. They argue, with the ring of sincerity, that there really are man-made "warming" influences with which we ought to be concerned, and that the scare-mongering has sabotaged this message.(In the full universe, there may be no such thing as a paradox, as we shall see in the fullness of time; but in the short distances that we now see, it would appear to be crawling with paradoxes.) Details may be read, passim, through the Times, BBC, and more serious British websites. It is one of those happy moments, when their various unspoken and unconscious agendas on news selection and angle all cancel out, and we get to read something that is more or less "objective." I have lost count of the number of columns I've written, attacking the whole "climate change" industry -- but whatever the number, more are required. My focus has tended to be, quite naturally for argumentative purposes, on the sort of things from which the British scientists are now trying to distance themselves; but it seems to me from my understanding of the issue that they are still ignoring more fundamental (if less sensational) challenges to the very thesis that increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere (past a certain level) can have any effect upon overall temperatures. It is obvious that very complex questions of empirical science -- whether in climate or in any other subject (evolutionary biology also comes to mind) -- will not be settled in newspaper columns. A journalist, however well or poorly informed, can only deal with general issues of attitude and approach, or call attention as I have done to the biggest howlers. Let me give an example of this, from a recent reading of a big feature article that appeared a couple of months ago in the Guardian Weekly. It was a plausible-looking piece (first warning!) -- provided the reader knew nothing whatever about the topic. It reported, correctly, that the Nile Delta is being gradually inundated by the destructive salt waters of the Mediterranean Sea, at terrible cost to the agriculture on which tens of millions of Egyptians depend for their basic foods. But the writer attributes the whole thing to rising sea levels, and thus global warming. And this is nonsense. The Mediterranean has been rising but only on an incremental scale undetectable except over centuries -- as all the world's sea level since the last Ice Age (and at that, not consistently, and apparently not at the moment). The explanation is instead the High Aswan Dam. For millennia that delta had been accreting from the accumulation of silt washed down the Nile from mountains in Ethiopia and other sources far, far away -- rising in the annual inundation which was once the basis for all Egyptian agriculture. Against this, at the mouth of the Nile, the inroads of the sea; but the deposit of silt was greater. Most of this silt is now impounded behind that huge dam, hundreds of miles inland, and has been for decades now. The dam itself is gradually silting over, but the delta lands are no longer being replenished. Hence, the unmitigated inroads of the sea. There is also geological subsidence: the soil compresses and the lands sink, even when the seas do not rise -- as we see from underwater archaeological remains of ancient ports around the eastern Mediterranean, sunken to quite various depths below the current waterline. I have given this example so my reader may see that "global warming" is not the problem in the Nile Delta; nor is it in several other of the world's most densely populated delta regions (such as Bangladesh). But it does not follow that there is no man-made environmental problem. Instead, there is a problem much larger than we could have imagined when we built the dams. Yet that problem is not all dams (for the most ancient and intelligent irrigation systems depend on dams), but some dams, with all that follows from the human infrastructure built around them. The writers of such stories as the one mentioned above (and I don't want to pick on one particular victim of an epidemic of ignorance) have done untold, if indirect, environmental damage simply by getting the story wrong; and yet may smugly congratulate themselves for "raising environmental awareness." In the end there are no alternatives to humility and patience, in the study of environmental as all other issues, and we are right to respond to alarmism with an equal and opposite alarm. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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