Now, anyone who knows me knows I’m all for protecting the environment. I’ve come out for the Kyoto Protocol and have criticized the lack of attention being paid the environment and global warming, not necessarily in the debating, but in the actual “doing of something.”
But frankly, when things keep changing, it is damaging to the overall case.
We’ve been told forever that the polar ice caps are melting… That sea levels are going to rise… That the rise in sea levels will change the systems that affect our air temperature… And on and on and on…
So imagine my surprise when I read this:
Increased snowfall over a large area of Antarctica is thickening the ice sheet and slowing the rise in sea level caused by melting ice.
A satellite survey shows that between 1992 and 2003, the East Antarctic ice sheet gained about 45 billion tonnes of ice – enough to reduce the oceans’ rise by 0.12 millimetres per year. The ice sheets that cover Antarctica’s bedrock are several kilometres thick in places, and contain about 90% of the world’s ice. But scientists fear that if they melt in substantial quantities, this will swell the oceans and cause devastation on islands and coastal lands.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has reported that sea level is currently rising at about 1.8 millimetres per year, largely through melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets as a result of global warming. But the panel also expected that climate change would trigger an increase in snowfall over the Antarctic continent, as increased evaporation from the oceans puts more moisture into the air.
It is the only large terrestrial ice body that is gaining mass rather than losing it.
“This is a phenomenal piece of research, but it is what we expected, ” comments David Vaughan, a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK. “These effects have been predicted for a long time, it’s just that no one has measured them before.”
It is?
Whether or not, I’ve agreed with it, I’ve always followed global warming research in one way or another and I don’t ever remember a scientist coming out and saying that they expected the icecaps to grow because of increased snowfall. I remember being told on numerous occasions that the icecaps would continue to disappear. In fact, when these pictures appeared and demonstrated a marked decrease in the size of the icecap, most rational people were alarmed at the difference in the photos. When those photos were released, the idea that the caps are going to disappear and create a massive case of cataclysmic disasters, most of us believed it unquestioningly. Not one scientist I can recall came out and stipulated that global warming was, at some point, going to grow those ice caps.
There’s nothing wrong with saying you don’t know. But to preach one thing forever and then turn around with new evidence and point out that it’s exactly how you predicted it would be is hypocritical at best, and damages the already tenuous credibility most everyday folks view the environmentalists with already.
Source: Nature.com