Arctic Warming Scares Continue, Despite Meagre Data

Though 2004 has been one of the cooler years in recent history, the drumbeat of the energy-rationing crowd continues unabated with a new report about the impacts of a warming climate on the Arctic. Released with great fanfare by a coalition of governmental and non-governmental groups, the report assures us that we’re headed for wrack and ruin unless we immediately reduce our emissions of the otherwise benign gases (like carbon dioxide, a plant nutrient) that are being blamed for climate change.

The Arctic warming report is an excellent example of the favoured scare technique of the anti-energy activists: pumping largely unjustifiable assumptions about the future into simplified computer models to conjure up a laundry list of scary projections. Among other dire predictions that the Arctic warming report manages to scare up, they claim that coastal communities will face increasing exposure to storms, that thawing ground will disrupt buildings and other infrastructure, that indigenous people will face major economic and cultural impacts, and that rising sea levels will cause coastal erosion and other changes. Indeed, though the report claims to rely on moderate estimates of warming, scary pictures of cracking buildings; people using respirators; and barrels of what appears to be liquid waste floating in a sea of broken-up ice punctuate the report. But how solid are these crystal-ball predictions?

Of the 140 pages in the summary of the report (the technical report won’t be published until January), only three pages directly discuss observed changes in the Arctic climate, and that data shows a startling contradiction: Though the extent of sea ice is shown in decline from 1950 onward, the average temperature shown for about 20 years of that period (from about 1957 to 1978) was below average. That’s right, the ice was melting while the average temperature was colder than usual.

Perhaps, had the report been more extensively reviewed, this contradiction of common sense might have been explained, but while there were some 250 scientific contributors to the report, it only had seven outside reviewers. One of those reviewers works for the World Wildlife Federation, an environmental advocacy group with a long history of climate alarmism. Another reviewer works for a non-profit group in Colorado advocating renewable energy and energy efficiency. That reviewer is described in a CBS radio show, The Osgood Files, as a modern-day Robin Hood, who takes from the rich and gives to the poor. A third reviewer was Canada’s former ambassador for circumpolar affairs, a non-scientist primarily involved in promoting aboriginal-rights issues. Only three of the external reviewers hold academic posts, and only one of those is actually an Arctic climatologist.

And while the report claims that its projections are very likely in the opinion of the authors, the limitations of regional climate modelling are well known. As Science journalist Richard Kerr points out in Rising Global Temperature, Rising Uncertainty, Climate forecasting, after all is still in its infancy, and the models rely on a sparse database: a mere 100 years of global temperatures. Even Michael Oppenheimer, chief scientist at Environmental Defense acknowledges, the processes determining regional climate change can take place at too fine a scale to be captured by most climate models, which often subdivide the landscape into regions 30 or more kilometres across and use a single number for the surface features and weather within each one.

As for estimating future greenhouse gas emissions, Australian economists Ian Castles and David Henderson, have shown the scenarios pumped into the Arctic warming report to be deeply flawed. The chosen scenarios, favoured by the pro-Kyoto United Nations, overstate future greenhouse gas emissions because they overstate future economic growth in developing countries. A report in The Economist neatly illustrates this, when it observes even for the lowest emission scenarios, the average income of South Africans will have overtaken that of Americans by a very wide margin by the end of the century. The article goes on to explain that because of this economic error, the UN scenarios of the future also suggest that economic wrecks such as Algeria, Argentina, Libya, Turkey, and North Korea will all surpass the United States.

The threat of rapid climate change is certainly one to be taken seriously. But it is equally important that we understand what is really happening with the climate before we take actions that will divert scarce resources into potentially fruitless, or even harmful policies. Without solid information, such policies will likely hurt individuals by raising the cost of energy, and hurt societies by reducing their economic freedom and ability to compete in a global environment.