A religious fervor for protecting nature has transformed Canada’s leading environmentalist into an emotional bully intolerant of scientists who don’t see things his way. Over the years I’ve heard and read statements by David Suzuki that are too often misleading or incorrect, especially about climate. He, and many like him, claim natural events are unnatural thus guaranteeing that they appear right. What he conveniently overlooks, and may have learned had he remained a scientist rather than becoming an activist, is that nature and climate frequently change dramatically and in very short time periods.

Read full story here.

The July 27-29 2007 U.S. Senate trip to Greenland to investigate fears of a glacier meltdown revealed an Arctic land where current climatic conditions are neither alarming nor linked to a rise in man-made carbon dioxide emissions, according to many of the latest peer-reviewed scientific findings.  Recent research has found that Greenland has been warming since the 1880’s, but since 1955, temperature averages at Greenland stations have been colder than the period between 1881-1955.

A recent study concluded Greenland was as warm or warmer in the 1930’s and 40’s and the rate of warming from 1920-1930 was about 50% higher than the warming from 1995-2005. One 2005 study found Greenland gaining ice in the interior higher elevations and thinning ice at the lower elevations. In addition, the often media promoted fears of Greenland’s ice completely melting and a subsequent catastrophic sea level rise are directly at odds with the latest scientific studies.  These studies suggest that the biggest perceived threat to Greenland’s glaciers may be contained in unproven computer models predicting a future catastrophic melt. 

As a representative of Environment & Public Works Committee Ranking Member, Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), I made the trek to the Arctic Circle with the Senate delegation (LINK) to the land the Vikings once farmed during the Medieval Warm Period.

Senators and their staff viewed majestic giant glaciers and icebergs in the Kangia Ice Fjord and in Disko Bay via helicopter, boat and on foot, during the three day 24 hours of daylight trip which began in the Arctic city of Kangerlussuaq, Greenland

See full blog here which includes links to recent studies refuting fears of rapid Greenland Melting.

Photo by Peter Knight

Note the important paper in Science by Belen Martrat, Joan O. Grimalt, Nicholas J. Shackleton, Lucia de Abreu, Manuel A. Hutterli, and Thomas F. Stocker that shows the importance in cyclical ocean circulation changes in historical climate change.

Centennial climate variability over the last ice age exhibits clear bipolar behavior. High-resolution analyses of marine sediment cores from the Iberian margin trace a number of associated changes simultaneously. Proxies of sea surface temperature and water mass distribution, as well as relative biomarker content, demonstrate that this typical north-south coupling was pervasive for the cold phases of climate during the past 420,000 years. Cold episodes after relatively warm and largely ice-free periods occurred when the predominance of deep water formation changed from northern to southern sources. These results reinforce the connection between rapid climate changes at Mediterranean latitudes and century-to-millennial variability in northern and southern polar regions.

Note the following courtesy of R. Behl CSU, Long Beach, CA

The major water masses in the deep ocean are differentiated by their temperature and salinity. These properties determine their relative densities, which in turn drive deep thermohaline circulation of the oceans. NADW = North Atlantic Deep Water. AABW = Antarctic Bottom Water. Modified from figure courtesy of Dr. Steve Hovan, Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

The atmospheric greenhouse effect, an idea that authors trace back to the traditional works of Fourier 1824, Tyndall 1861 and Arrhenius 1896 and is still supported in global climatology essentially describes a fictitious mechanism in which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting with but radiatively equilibrated to the atmospheric system. According to the second law of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist.

Nevertheless, in almost all texts of global climatology and in a widespread secondary literature it is taken for granted that such mechanism is real and stands on a firm scientific foundation. In this paper the popular conjecture is analyzed and the underlying physical principles are clarified. By showing that (a) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects, (b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, (c) the frequently mentioned difference of 33 C is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, (d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, (e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, (f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.

Let me give you just one fact. Al Gore says the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets will melt and cause sea level to rise 20 feet, putting the present-day populations of Manhattan, Shanghai, Bangladesh and other coastal regions at risk. The official scientific consensus, represented by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says that over the coming century the contribution of these two ice sheets to sea-level rise will be not 20 feet but 2 inches; that in each of the past four interglacial warm periods sea level rose to a height five metres above its present level, and did so without any influence from humankind; that sea level will do the same in the present interglacial period; but that it will not rise by 20 feet for several millennia. Indeed, the UN says the probability that our activities make any difference to sea level is little better than 50:50. So, on the scariest of all the “global warming” scares - sea-level rising and displacing hundreds of millions - Al Gore is exaggerating 120-fold, or almost 12,000 per cent. He does not represent the scientific mainstream consensus, but instead speaks for a small, fringe group of politically-motivated scientists.  - Lord Christopher Monckton.

After a much publicized rapid retreat during the period 2002 through 2005, Greenland’s Helheim glacier, has stabilized and begun advancing. The restabilization of the Helheim glacier alone could be responsible for a reduction in excess of 10 percent of the current mass loss from Greenland.

See full report and full size image here.