We are sure you’ve heard that sea level is rising? We conducted a web search on “Global Warming and Sea Level” and nearly 3.5 million websites are immediately located. And before you conduct the search yourself, you already know what you will find. The earth is getting warmer due to the buildup of greenhouse gases, the warmer sea water expands causing sea level to rise, and most of all, you will read all about the ice melting throughout the world pouring fresh water into ocean basins causing sea level to rise far more. Alarmists insist that the worst is just around the corner, and the sea level rise will accelerate or even quickly jump to a new level given some catastrophic collapse of large sheets of ice near the fringes of the polar areas. Coastlines will be inundated, the human misery will be on a Biblical scale, ecosystems will be destroyed … this goes on for millions of websites!

But things aren’t really so simple.

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We have featured Antarctica many times in our essay series, and despite a million claims that “the icecaps are melting,” we continue to find no end of articles in major journals building a case for the opposite. Here we examine some recent research, and find evidence for decreased melting and, at least local, mass gains.

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No presentation on global warming is complete without images of some major wildfire – from day one, the global warming alarmists have insisted that a warmer world will generate more wildfires thereby devastating ecosystems from sea to shining sea. It is an easy sell – higher temperatures will increase potential evapotranspiration, forests dry out, and therefore become far more susceptible to fire. Recall that the entire global warming issue became front-page news back in 1988, and 1988 was the summer Yellowstone Park and much of the western United States suffered severe forest fires. Ever since, every major fire somehow gets linked to global warming. We searched the internet for “Fires and Global Warming” and found literally thousands of websites claiming that global warming will cause more fires, fires are causing global warming, and of course, global warming leaders should be fired!

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Imagine if the global annual average temperature were about 5°F colder than it is presently.

Not quite sure how to? OK, consider this: During the Little Ice Age—a period extending from about the 1500s to the mid-1800s and thought to be one of the coldest periods during the past 10,000 years or so—the earth’s average temperature may have been 2-3°F colder than present. Associated with the Little Ice Age are all sorts of human calamities—widespread crop failures, plagues, famines, population declines, glacial encroachments, etc. For a collection of descriptions of all the fun times that a colder climate brings, take a gander at the Wikipedia page on the Little Ice Age. After spending a few minutes there, you’ll see that these were not high times for humans.

Now, consider a temperature decline twice that much. That can’t be good.

Yet that’s apparently where we would be had human ingenuity not come along.

According to a new study just published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the global climate would be about 5°F colder than present were it not for human carbon dioxide and methane emissions.

Brrr.

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Congratulations to Boston College and Wisconsin for making it to the finals of the NCAA Men’s Hockey Tournament with Boston College dominating for the national title. College sports fans would generally agree that football is the #1 sport in terms of overall fan interest followed by men’s basketball. Picking the 3rd most popular sport is more difficult with fans in the Great Lakes and New England areas insisting hockey is #3 while fans throughout the Sun Belt insist that baseball is the clear #3. With the focus this week on the hockey finals played in Detroit by schools from the American hockey belt, we turned our attention specifically to the Great Lakes themselves.

Boston College Lovin’ the Ice!

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You’ve heard it a thousand times before – greenhouse gases are causing the Earth to warm, there is more warming in the Arctic than other parts of the planet, and the permafrost is melting away. Remind the world that permafrost holds carbon and methane that can be released into the atmosphere, throw in some pictures of a drunken forest (below), claim that the permafrost melting is some type of global warming time bomb, and you will be embraced by the global warming alarmists. Do a web search on the subject of global warming and permafrost melting for 1,000s of additional ideas.

Figure 1. “Drunken forest” undoubtedly caused by widespread melting of the permafrost?

We have covered the permafrost issue before, and over and over, this story seems to be far more complex than one might expect. A recent article in Global Change Biology is yet another addition to the complicated warming = melting of permafrost issue.

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Several errors have been recently uncovered in the 4th Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). These include problems with Himalayan glaciers, African agriculture, Amazon rainforests, Dutch geography, and attribution of damages from extreme weather events. More seem to turn up daily. Most of these errors stem from the IPCC’s reliance on non-peer reviewed sources.

The defenders of the IPCC have contended that most of these errors are minor in significance and are confined to the Working Group II Report (the one on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability) of the IPCC which was put together by representatives from various regional interests and that there was not as much hard science available to call upon as there was in the Working Group I report (“The Physical Science Basis”). The IPCC defenders argue that there have been no (or practically no) problems identified in the Working Group I (WGI) report on the science.

We humbly disagree.

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The Technical Summary of the most recent IPCC reports states that “Over the 1961 to 2003 period, the average rate of global mean sea level rise is estimated from tide gauge data to be 1.8 ± 0.5 mm yr–1.” “The average thermal expansion contribution to sea level rise for this period was 0.42 ± 0.12 mm yr–1, with significant decadal variations, while the contribution from glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets is estimated to have been 0.7 ± 0.5 mm yr–1. The sum of these estimated climate-related contributions for about the past four decades thus amounts to 1.1 ± 0.5 mm yr–1, which is less than the best estimate from the tide gauge observations. Therefore, the sea level budget for 1961 to 2003 has not been closed satisfactorily.”

That is indeed very interesting – the average rate of sea level is around 1.8 mm per year, and the IPCC can account for only 60% of the increase. This uncertainty is compound considering IPCC’s statements that “The global average rate of sea level rise measured by TOPEX/Poseidon satellite altimetry during 1993 to 2003 is 3.1 ± 0.7 mm yr–1. This observed rate for the recent period is close to the estimated total of 2.8 ± 0.7 mm yr–1 for the climate-related contributions due to thermal expansion (1.6 ± 0.5 mm yr–1) and changes in land ice (1.2 ± 0.4 mm yr–1). Hence, the understanding of the budget has improved significantly for this recent period, with the climate contributions constituting the main factors in the sea level budget (which is closed to within known errors). Whether the faster rate for 1993 to 2003 compared to 1961 to 2003 reflects decadal variability or an increase in the longer-term trend is unclear”.

As you might guess, there is much to be done to improve our understanding of sea level rise.

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We have all heard over and over that the icecaps are melting, glaciers are retreating, and sea level is rising as ice around the world turns to liquid water. We have covered this topic many times in our essay series, but we revisit the ice issue given two recent and important publications in the science literature.

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The wonderful Christmas season is upon us, and no Christmas story would be complete without snow. If you really like snow, Greenland is the place for you! The snow there lasts all year long and is 1,000s of feet deep in the interior – a white Christmas is guaranteed every year in this winter paradise.

Anyone following the global warming debate is aware that Greenland is a favorite topic of the apocalypse crowd – melt Greenland, sea level will rise, the ocean currents will be disrupted, and the climate of the world will be changed for thousands of years — all thanks to our inability to slow-down our greenhouse gas emissions. The rhetoric from Copenhagen recently was full of disasters involving rapid melting of Greenland. Within the past week alone, we found the headlines “Warming Hits Greenland’s Hunters” and “The Maldives and Greenland’s Ilulissat: Two Countries Experiencing Global Warming at an Alarming Rate”.

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