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COMMENTARY
July 7, 2007
Moths & butterflies
Surely, summertime is the best time to think about ice caps. And it is certainly summertime again, up here in the northern hemisphere. Down there in the southern, I have noticed from passing weather reports, that new cold records have been set in sundry locations in Patagonia, South Africa, Australia -- just as the “global warming” scare is peaking.My reader will of course realize that it is winter down there, and winter is when cold records tend to be set. Conversely, heat records tend to be set in the summer. (Think carefully about this, for there is a value in restating the obvious, at a time when climatological “experts” speak as if convinced the world’s weather is governed by carbon dioxide emissions, as opposed to, say, the sun.) Happily enough, I have also been glancing at polls that suggest that such “experts,” together with the government bureaucracies that have most to gain from encouraging them, and the media that want a good scare story, have done a poor job of ramming global warming down our throats. The great majority of North Americans, at least, simply do not believe them. As well they might not, for various reasons I have given in previous columns. The main point being, among the intelligent but uneducated: that weather forecasters with billion-dollar computer assemblies are so often wrong about the day after tomorrow. Why would they be right about the next hundred years? As George Orwell said -- and I’m sure, would have said specifically about the rage over CO2 levels -- there are some ideas so silly that only intellectuals can believe them. Alas, intellectuals hold power in any literate society out of all proportion to their numbers. Somewhere between the harmless nonsense believed by the masses, and the malicious nonsense believed by intellectuals, is something that might be characterized as objective fact. This is what is accessible to the clear-headed person, who subscribes to the distinctively Western, faith-based notion that the universe makes the kind of sense that will repay disinterested investigation. So back to those ice caps. There is a big one at the north end of the planet over Greenland (with substantial glaciation and sea-cover besides), and an even bigger one at the south end, over Antarctica. In the first flush of the global warming hysteria, we were treated to alarmist reports of unprecedented ice-cap melting, and warned that if it continued the seas would overflow (to say nothing of the effect on ocean currents, salinity, etc). That is the scenario that e.g. the incredibly irresponsible Al Gore is still running with, long after it was dismissed even in IPCC reports. More recent research indicates that while parts of each ice cap are getting warmer, other parts are getting colder. And the most recent -- published this week in the magazine, Science (see “Erske Willerslev, et al.”) -- begins to explain why the ice cap over Greenland has remained stable, over several hundred thousand years, while glaciers elsewhere have spread and retreated. I refer the learned reader to my source, for explanations that would take more space than I command. We already knew, from history, that the edges of Greenland were so warm a thousand years ago, as to be farmed by early Norse settlers; then became so cold in the “little ice age” a couple of centuries later, as to wipe that culture out; then fluctuated again. All before modern technology had managed to explode its first steam boiler. Yet the ice cap over even the southernmost interior of Greenland remained, more than two kilometres thick. And as we now know, from ice cores right through it, it has so remained, for nearly half a million years, come ice age, come thaw. More breaking news: for under that, there are frozen remains (and DNA samples) of lush forests of pine, yew, and alder; butterflies, moths, flies, beetles, and “all things like that.” What does that tell you? Something interesting, to be sure. But for what that is, we will have to wait, until we have a much broader picture. There is an old principle among sailors, from the days before GPS, and even before reliable charts. When you see land, after many weeks of sailing, you do not decide too quickly what land it is. You wait until you have had a good look, lest your first thought subvert all subsequent observations. For sailors who jump too quickly to conclusions, will drive their ships onto unsuspected shoals. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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