National Review Visits Shrinking Alaska Glaciers (While Sipping Martinis)
| Thu Mar. 29, 2007 11:17 AM PDT
I love it: The conservative National Review is planning a cruise to Alaska. Of course, plenty of magazines do fundraising cruises -- but not a lot of them take a boatload of global warming deniers to Alaska, where glaciers are becoming puddles due to climate change.
Speakers on the cruise include William Rusher, who calls global warming the "Big Daddy of all...scare stories," Jonah Goldberg, who says the campaign against climate change a is "half-baked environmental jihad that could waste possibly trillions of dollars," and Robert Bork, who sided with the Bush administration in last year's Supreme Court showdown on global warming.
The cruise's first destination? Glacier Bay -- where glaciers are very visibly on the retreat (check out the photo above, and this NASA video.) I'd love to be a fly on the wall during that stop.
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Here's what the fly would hear: Look at this beautiful bay! It used to be clogged with nasty ice. And look! There's plenty of glacier up ahead! Those leftie pinkos would like nothing more than to see the whole earth covered with useless, dirty ice! [cheers, applause, farting]
Submitted by JT Barrie (not verified) on Sat Mar. 31, 2007 6:34 AM PDT.
To be fair: we've had episodes of global warming many times and the widespread use of fossil fuels is very recent. In fact many of these episodes lasted for more than twice the time period of current fossil fuel abuse.
Earth, like the human body, compensates for abuse and reaches equilibrium. Maybe that's what will happen with fossil fuel abuse. Of course, the human body doesn't do well with long-term deliberate abuse manifesting the symptoms as sickness and disease or maladies such as heart failure and strokes. And the human body - unlike Earth - has a more limited lifespan. We won't likely kill Earth with our foolishness - but we will make it less hospitable to life as we know it.
We should limit or end our fossil fuel abuse for the right reasons. It is toxic to life on this planet and the ecosystem's ability to handle the amounts we put up daily is overloaded. Whether we get massive global warming and flooding is up to question; we will have a more toxic and less hospitable place for humans to live if we continue. Or we will have a new bread of toxin resistant humans and animals emerge.
JT Barrie,
> Earth, like the human body, compensates for abuse and reaches equilibrium.
Actually, this is untrue, we have had periods where the entire earth was a tropical planet. And, there is some really good evidence of Iceball Earth some time ago. The global temperature fluctuates quite wildly, and includes fluctuations that humans would likely not survive. However, within the last 1,000,000 years, 5 times as long as our species has been around, CO2 levels have not been anywhere near where they are today. And, a very strong correlation has been shown between CO2 and global average temperature. I would strongly suggest that in matters of science, you look to scholar.google.com for your sources. When you read the popular press, you are getting what is known as balanced information. This means that in order to balance the real scientific information in peer-reviewed journals, they go to crackpots whose writings are refused by reputable peer-reviewed scientific journals to find contradictory information. Sure, the journalists will prefer good data, but they'll take whatever there is and present it as equal.
> Maybe that's what will happen with fossil fuel abuse.
Are you willing to bet our species survival on that?
> We won't likely kill Earth with our foolishness - but we will make
> it less hospitable to life as we know it.
An inanimate object cannot be killed. True. The planet will be fine for another 4.5 billion years. Unfortunately, we do have the ability to render it uninhabitable by humans and by many species more beautiful than our own.
> We should limit or end our fossil fuel abuse for the right reasons.
> It is toxic to life on this planet and the ecosystem's ability to
> handle the amounts we put up daily is overloaded.
True enough.
> Whether we get massive global warming and flooding is up to
> question;
Not really. Check the peer-reviewed scientific data. All else should be assumed to be crap. I can state whatever I want on this blog, as can you. But neither of us will get it published in Nature or Science.
> we will have a more toxic and less hospitable place for humans to
> live if we continue. Or we will have a new bread of toxin resistant
> humans and animals emerge.
The rate at which we are changing things will be too fast for larger species that take longer to go through generations to keep up. Many will be lost. No one can say which ones. I only hope ours is one of the lost to prevent the catastrophe that is humanity from making this type of mistake again.
I have been there. Looking at the glaciers teaches nothing. Anyone can look at a glacier and say 'Look, a mile wide river of ice. Everything must be OK.
You must put what you are seeing in prospective.
When John Muir was there there Glacier Bay was an ice field, not open water. We are talking about a massive change in a lifetime.
Can the human race afford to experiment with the world to see if we are "Really making these changes?"
This is like "Does tobacco cause health problems? Has it been proven beyond doubt? No. Nothing is absolute but would you lie in front of an oncoming train because 100.0000000% of all people that have done so have not died?
John,
I've been there too. Given the list of speakers, you're probably right that they'll learn nothing. I, on the other hand, found it quite obvious what was going on from just a few before and after photos and the maps they give out of where the glacier lines were and when. These are excellent visuals that can be quite instructive, even to illiterates. I think the idea of his cruise will be to avoid such instructive visual aids at all costs.
We should never rest all our laurels on all that peer-reviewed scientific data and assume all else is crap. Many of the peers reviewing all this crap will lie in a NY second just to keep their paychecks. Peer-reviewed does not equal the whole truth. Anybody that can read ought to know this.
Jim,
Just a minor correction. We've been causing mass extinctions everywhere we've gone since we left Africa. Hawaii and New Zealand are recent examples. North and South America lost 83% and 87% of their large mammal species when they were first colonized by humans.
carlos,
The problem with the non-peer-reviewed material is that anyone can say anything. Peer review isn't perfect. It's just the best we have to protect against total garbage. Nearly everything that attempts to contradict human caused global warming is funded by Exxon either directly or indirectly.
The only reliable bit I've heard otherwise is that between 5 and 15% of global climate change may be caused by cosmic rays. Even if it's as high as one paper says, 5-30%, which no one else corroborates, it still leaves humans responsible for at least 70% and possibly 95%.
So, keep your skepticism, but save it for topics where there is actually some fundamental controversy. On this issue, the only controversies are over how much, how soon, and what will the local effects be?
I love to see the rationalizations of the deniers, especially in the face of all the science, and considering the FACT that the only scientists to voice their "denier" status are paid off by the white house or other right-wing/uber-religious organizations.
And for those Christians (I am not one) who feel those pangs of guilt creep up when they wonder "gosh, can global warming really be our fault? But what about pastor bob and how he says global warming is false because it somehow contradicts the scriptures?", consider Revelations 11:18 - "Those who destroy the earth will be destroyed." This implies that the earth CAN be destroyed, does it not?
The bible also says that humans have "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing." Some interpret this to mean that we have license to destroy the earth. I interpret this to mean instead that "we are responsible for the well being of the earth and its inhabitants because we are bestowed with intelligence, observational skills beyond other animals, and probably just as important, compassion. We have compassion and intelligence. The logical course is to share the same compassion for the earth by taking care of the earth.
