Meltdown: With Arctic sea ice disappearing at a record rate scientists are sounding the alarm.
This is the headline and subhead of Tuesday's Chronicle editorial on global warming.
Sea levels are not cooperating as evidence for global warming (they recently dropped slightly), nor have hurricanes (not so many, not so strong), nor even the only evidence that truly matters: global temperatures (flat or down for a decade, and still dropping).
But Artic sea ice did in fact shrink sharply in 2007. The event is called the Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice Anomaly, and it has its own Web site, here.
The great hope among environmentalists was that 2008 would be even worse.
So far, however, no such luck. UPDATE: Scratch "so far, however." The arctic melt season is over. Ice extent this year was up -- not down, up -- by 9%.
Undeterred by facts, the Chronicle used this nonevent as the peg for another dreary sermon about original sin: carbon.
Is sea ice in fact "disappearing at a record rate," as the subhead said? Nope. And, to its credit, I suppose, the body of the editorial never exactly said it was.
(The first lesson in reading any Chronicle editorial is not to assume that the person who wrote the headline and subhead also read the editorial.)
After melting of the polar ice cap turned the fabled northwest passage [read Northwest Passge] into reality last year . . .
The first man known to have "turned the fabled [N]orthwest [P]assage into reality" was Roald Amundsen, in 1906. Many others have since done the same. Navigating through the NP has became something of a sport for extreme adventerers and government-sponsored expeditions. In places, however, the fabled passage is less than ten feet deep, so don't book a cruise.
. . . climatologists were eager to see whether the record low of about 1.6 million square miles would be duplicated again this summer. After a colder than normal winter, that seemed unlikely.
"Colder than normal winter?" There's your first clue that things have not gone as badly as the Chronicle hoped.
"That seemed unlikely" is a setup -- a tease -- for something that never follows: a statement that, unlikely though it seemed, the record ice melt was, in fact, duplicated or exceeded this year.
"Record low" also needs explaining: It's a record for the period covered by detailed modern records, about thirty years.
The cold facts: the heavy ice melt of 2007 has not been duplicated (so far) in 2008 and the evidence (so far) suggests it won't be. Keep that in mind as you read.
After a slow start . . .
"Slow start" is another tease. It nods toward reality (last winter was much colder than expected) but hints that something scary is just around the corner. And here it comes:
. . . the seasonal ice retreat has now reached 2 million square miles . . .
Okay, it's early September. The melting season is almost over. We're down to 2 million square miles of sea ice. That is considerably more than the Chronicle's hoped-for target of 1.6 million.
Check the Web and you'll discover (from a pro-environmentalist site, no less) that on August 24 the retreat was 220,000 square miles behind the rate of melt in 2007.
The editorialists, were they bound by mere evidence, might well have celebrated the likelihood that the ice melt in 2008 will not be as severe as in 2007. But celebrate they did not.
. . . and could break the record before the Arctic begins winter cooling in mid-September.
"Could" is a weasel word. Yes, hyper-fast melting "could" happen. It probably won't. But it "could." This whole editorial hangs on "could."
Already, some areas bordering North America and Siberia have less ice than at the same time last year. In other areas, the ice is thinning.
In a large, complex phenomenon such as ice retreat, data fly in many directions. The challenge is to find the patterns. The Chronicle cherry-picked vague details to support its fear-mongering thesis. And why not? The larger pattern of facts casts doubt on the thesis.
Once under way, the melting is a self-perpetuating phenomenon. White ice cover reflects sunlight back into space, [read space;] darker open water absorbs heat and gets warmer, melting yet more ice.
Melting may be a "self-perpetuating phenomenon," but that is irrelevant here because the reflect/absorb mechanism has been in place for decades, centuries, millennia. The real issue is what has changed in 2007 and 2008, not what has always been the same.
The sentence serves no logical purpose, but it does serve an important emotional one: to suggest that we may have reached a tipping point after which nothing can be done. If melting is "self-perpetuating," how can we stop it?
Thank goodness, we don't have to. There's another regular phenomenon that will stop it for us this year, just as it did last year and the year before. It's called "winter."
The vanishing ice is considered one of the smoking guns indicating that global warming caused by industrial emissions of carbon dioxide is proceeding at a faster pace than predicted by a United Nations commission.
Remember, the Chronicle has so far offered no evidence -- none -- that the ice is vanishing faster in 2008 than in 2007. All we have is a naked assertion in the subhead, teases in the body of the editorial, and a declaration against the weight of the evidence that things "could" be worse this year.
So what exactly is the smoking gun?
"Vanishing ice" is deliberately nonspecific. It could mean summer melt; it could refer to 2007; it could refer to 2008; it could refer to both; it could mean anything.
The editorialists also need to take a continuing education class on how to use figures of speech. A smoking gun is one piece of evidence -- one -- that proves everything that needs to be proved.
So how can Arctic ice be "one of the smoking guns?" How many are there? Do smoking guns run in packs at the Chronicle?
And if smoking guns prove things, why does this one merely indicate something?
That something, of course, is a whopper: nothing less than the faith statement of radical environmentalism:
global warming caused by industrial emissions of carbon dioxide is proceeding at a faster pace than predicted by a United Nations commission.
To say that Arctic ice melt in the Year of Our Lord 2008 is a smoking gun for "global warming" and "caused" and "industrial emissions" and "carbon dioxide" and "at a faster pace than predicted" . . . well, words can hardly do justice to the audacity of this hype.
The globe is not getting warmer; it is cooling. This cooling may not continue. (I suspect it will, but we'll see.) But to say global warming may be proceeding "faster than predicted" when, in fact, temperatures have gone down, for the moment at least, is absurd, even by the standards of Chronicle editorials.
While its [meaning the UN commission's] projections would have the Arctic free of ice by 2030, scientists are now predicting that could happen within four or five years.
Saying something "could happen" is not a prediction; saying something "will happen" is a prediction. The Chronicle should have said these unnamed scientists had "suggested" a quicker disappearance.
To check the Chronicle and its hysterical scientists, I just posted ticklers to my calendar for September 2, 2012 and 2013. Lord willing, I'll see then to see how the sea ice is faring. If I were a wagering man and could find a solvent counterparty at the Chronicle, I'd put big money on, "Just fine, thank you very much."
After a detour to pet the polar bears, the editorial concludes with standard-issue Chronicle tongue-clucking:
The continuing loss of Arctic sea ice . . .
To say "continuing loss" presupposes that the editorial has proved that the acceleration of the ice retreat is "continuing" in any sense other than seasonal. The editorial has not come within a mile of doing any such thing.
. . . and its implications for climate change closer to home . . .
If the world is getting cooler, so far at least, and the record-setting ice retreat of 2007 is not repeating, so far at least, what implications?
. . . is a profoundly disturbing development [read are profoundly disturbing developments], with consequences that cannot be predicted.
This multi-syllabic finale --- "profoundly" and "disturbing" and "development[s]" and "consequences" -- is bluster to add weight to an editorial that might otherwise drift into the sky like an untethered hot-air balloon.
After years of obstruction of international efforts to combat global warming, U.S. leaders must reverse course and work toward a global solution.
Obstructing a "global solution" for the hot weather is perhaps the finest thing our government has done recently. May the obstruction continue until climate-change mania subsides and even the Chronicle comes to its senses, if senses it has.
Why did the Chronicle load this frail beast -- the 2008 ice retreat -- with such a heavy burden?
Because within a few days, we will know for sure whether this year matched or exceeded last year. The evidence so far is that we're not in for a new record.
Faced with so gloomy a prospect, the Chronicle decided, apparently, to do its ice-sheet carping while the carping was still good. As of today, a record ice-melt still could happen. Why wait to find out? Coulda is goodanuff.
By next September, if cooling continues, the Chronicle's concern for the ocean ice sheet will probably have been relegated to the memory hole.
But true believers never lose their faith. So it's not too soon to take odds on which climate anomaly will be the Chronicle's next smoking gun.
Maybe Farmer's Almanac will report finding a caterpillar on a Michigan Catalpa tree that has shed its wool in anticipation of an extra hot July 2009.
UPDATE: Thanks for the link from Lose an Eye.
UPDATE: "Arctic sees massive gain in ice coverage."
Comments