Summer Forecast: Snow Job

Via RealClear Politics is an editorial by Jay Lehr, editor of a book I very highly recommend: Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns. In the editorial, Lehr warns us of a snow job in our summer forecast:

In early May, newspapers across the country reported that a team of "adventurers" from Minnesota was setting off to "document climate change" at the North Pole.

According to newspaper reports, they aim to "draw [attention to] the gradual warming of Earth's climate" and "hope to convince skeptics, especially in the Bush administration, that global warming is real...."

In other words, this summer will bring a barrage of misinformation about the Earth's ice structures provided by non-scientists who make casual observations and then claim they know what caused the situations they are observing.

As is done in his book repeatedly and in great detail, Lehr contrasts what these dilettantes are going to do with what actual scientists who study phenomena like climate change do. Consider one exhaustive analysis of the melting of glaciers.

A few years ago, R.J. Braithwaite's peer-reviewed article in Progress in Physical Geography described a "mass balance analysis" he conducted of 246 glaciers sampled all around the world between 1946 and 1995. That's 50 years of data. Braithwaite found some glaciers were melting, while a nearly equal number were growing in size, and still others remained stable. He concluded, "There is no obvious common or global trend of increasing glacier melt in recent years."

By contrast, the global warming mongers pick out data points that seem to support their contention, and even then they sometimes blow it.

[A] favorite melting glacier of the global warming activists sits atop Mt. Kilimanjaro in northern Tanzania, near the equator. Satellites have been measuring temperatures near its summit for more than 25 years, finding no warming at all, yet the global warmers trot out Kilimanjaro as a poster child for their cause.

A scientific study published in Nature in November 2003 explained that deforestation of the mountain slopes -- not warming temperatures -- explains the melting. But the scaremongers don't particularly care why Kilimanjaro is melting, only that it is. Any other facts get in the way of their lobbying and fund-raising efforts.

Read the whole thing. It's short, sweet, and devastating. What's more, with dogged champions of reason like Lehr on the case, the intellectual tide is turning, no thanks to certain major scientific publications.

I applaud the tireless efforts of Lehr and others like him. It would have been be easier for them to laugh off global warming as a silly fad and do nothing than to keep on debunking it to the public. Instead, these men understood science enough to realize that its adherence to fact and logic must be inviolate; and they valued science enough to expend enormous time and energy protecting it.

Thanks to men like Lehr, the only thing in imminent danger of melting away due to human activity appears to be global warming hysteria, under the glare of facts and reason.

-- CAV

Crossposted to The Egosphere

P.S. The General posts on a related matter at Benjo Blog: Scientists in Kansas are fighting back against the push to teach creationism (AKA Intelligent Design) in the public schools.