Sure, the North Pole Is Melting. So What
By S. Fred Singer
Copyright 2000 Wall Street Journal
August 28, 2000
It is fashionable these days to
blame almost everything on man-made global warming. So it comes as no great
surprise to read in a recent New York Times story that "leads" of open
water in ice fields near the North Pole filled cruise passengers on a
Russian icebreaker with a "sense of alarm" about impending climate
disasters. Two scientists who were lecturing aboard, a Harvard zoologist
and an American Museum paleontologist (experts on animals and fossils, but
not on meteorology), were "shocked," as ABC News reported, to find "Santa's
workshop underwater."
I am a veteran of two Arctic expeditions with the U.S. Navy, and I can
testify that icebreakers always search for leads to make their way through
the ice. After a long summer of 24-hour days it is not unusual to find open
leads all over the place, especially after strong winds break up the winter
ice.
Nor is this a recent phenomenon. In a 1969 Dutch atlas the following
passage appears: "The Northern Ice Sea is never completely frozen; 3- to
30-meter-thick ice floes continue moving slowly around the pole. At the
North Pole the winter temperature is never lower than -35 degrees Celsius.
Summer temperatures can rise to 10 to 12 degrees Celsius." Those last
temperatures are well above freezing.
But all this proves little about climate change or about enhanced
greenhouse warming. For this purpose we use instruments: thermometers at
weather stations, radiosondes carried into the atmosphere by weather
balloons twice daily and, of course, Earth-circling weather satellites that
sense atmospheric temperatures remotely. All of these agree that the polar
regions have not warmed appreciably in recent decades.
Climate models do call for a warming trend as levels of atmospheric
carbon dioxide rise because of the burning of fossil fuels. Hence the
dilemma: Do we believe theoretical models of the atmosphere or the
atmosphere itself? I prefer to believe in the atmosphere and the actual
observations that show no current warming. If this clashes with the
accepted popular wisdom and media hype, so be it. I go with published
data.
The Earth did warm between about 1900 and 1940, with the climate
recovering from a previous cold period that climate experts refer to as the
Little Ice Age. As a result of these changes, which have nothing to do with
human influences, it is warmer now than it was 100 years ago. This has had
an influence on polar ice, which has been slowly thinning, as it melts from
beneath. And the ice will continue to thin for some time to come even
though the climate is no longer warming. Moral: It takes a lot of time to
melt ice.
Weather satellites tell us that polar ice cover is shrinking -- likely a
delayed effect of the pre-1940 warming. The Northeast Passage has opened
up, allowing ships to sail from London to Japan along the coast of Siberia.
It's all part of a natural climate cycle and need not cause concern. Recall
that 1,000 years ago the climate was so warm that Vikings settled Greenland
and grew crops there for a few centuries. Just imagine, Santa's reindeers
would have had to swim to get here from the North Pole.
Mr. Singer, former director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service and chief scientist at the Department
of Transportation, is professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia.
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