By: Jim Taylor

Global warming no longer a crackpot theory


There are no young glaciers in the Rocky Mountains any more.

        All glaciers are old, of course. A glacier consists of snow that has fallen over thousands of years and compacted itself, by weight and pressure, into solid ice.

        But our glaciers also look old now. They’re as grey and wrinkled as a mummified corpse.

        The days when you could drive up the fabled Icefields Parkway between Lake Louise and Jasper and see vast fields of glittering pristine snow have gone. Even where last winter’s snowfall still gleams white in the heights, patches of old glacier poke through.

        Some glaciers have shrivelled so significantly that guidebooks need to include historical photographs to explain why they were once given names like Crowfoot or Angel.

        Parks Canada estimates that glaciers in the Canadian Rockies have lost two-thirds of their volume in the last 150 years, and about a quarter of their volume in the last 20 years.

        For the moment, that means more water in the rivers that flow out of the mountains. But only because the glaciers are melting faster. It’s like the false impression of wealth you can get by withdrawing extra cash from your investment capital. It won’t, and can’t, continue indefinitely.



All over the world

  This is not just a local observation.

        In the Himalayas, the greatest concentration of glacial ice outside of Antarctica and Greenland, melting has created more than 20 large new lakes in Nepal and Bhutan. For the moment, they’re contained by moraines—piles of rock and earth deposited when the glaciers were growing. If the lakes break through those natural dams, they will devastate villages and cities downstream.

        In the high arctic, too, sea ice is melting. Satellite imagery and human testing both show that the volume of sea ice has shrunk by almost 50 per cent in the last 30 years.

        At that rate, the Arctic Ocean may be open water by mid-century. Which explains the sudden rush by Canada, Russia, and the U.S.A. to stake their territorial claims to the continental shelf under that sea ice. Because it may contain as much as 25 per cent of the world’s still-undiscovered oil and gas reserves.

Russia has already sent an ice-breaker to carve a path to the North Pole and plant the Russian flag on the sea bottom.

        On land, the effects of global warming are equally dramatic. Canadian biologists have found that arctic ponds on Ellesmere Island, created during the brief polar summer, have been disappearing. Sediment samples reveal that those ponds have existed for millennia. In just 24 years they have dried up.



Contradictory effects

Many people remain skeptical about global warming—perhaps because the effects seem contradictory.

        So the Mediterranean suffers droughts. Temperatures in Greece set records, the highest in a century. Macedonia declared a state of emergency. Italy’s River Po is drying up.

        At the same time, England experienced massive floods from unprecedented rainfalls.

        But both extremes result from the same cause—us!

        Using computer modeling, scientists from several major national climate research bodies, led by Environment Canada, found a clear link between human activity and the exceptional British rainfall.

        “What this does,” stated a report in The Independent, “is establish for the first time that there is a distinct ‘human fingerprint’ in the changes in precipitation patterns… It is not just the climate’s natural variability which has caused the increases, but there is a detectable human cause by greenhouse gas emissions. The ‘human fingerprint’ has been detected before in temperature rises, but never before in rainfall.”



Empirical testing

Science, as I’m sure we have all heard many times, depends on empirical testing. Results must be measurable, and they must be predictable. Any other person must be able to achieve the same results, using the same materials and the same methods.

        Once established, that predictability can be used in reverse, to confirm the initial suppositions. For example, if you mix two unknown substances together and the result is common salt, you can be confident the initial substances contained sodium and chlorine.

        That, basically, is what the scientific teams did. They started with some suppositions about human-sourced greenhouse gases. Plugged into climate change models, those suppositions accurately predicted both rainfall and drought.

        The term “greenhouse gases,” incidentally, does not refer only to car exhausts and industrial smokestacks. Water vapour is also a potent heat-trapping gas. So attempts to reduce our dependence on carbon-based fuels may have contrary effects. Evaporation may be increased by, say, dams built to generate hydroelectricity, or by large-scale irrigation systems for growing biofuels.



Ocean warming

        Increased evaporation is, in fact, the primary cause of increased hurricane incidence.

        A paper published by the Royal Society in London found that between 1900 and 1930, an average of six tropical storms battered the Caribbean and Gulf Coast each year. By 1940, the average had jumped to ten tropical storms a year. Since 1995, the annual average has been 15.

        “The record shattering 2005 season,” wrote Jim Loney for Reuters, “produced 28 storms, of which 15 became hurricanes, including Katrina.”

        Significantly, each jump in storm activity was preceded by a 0.7 degree increase in ocean temperature.

Southern Brazil had its first-ever hurricane last year. Not since records were first kept in colonial times has a hurricane formed in the South Atlantic and come ashore in Brazil.

        Global warming is no longer a wild-eyed theory. From glaciers to hurricanes, it is fact. And it is demonstrably affected by human activity. We can argue about relative causes; we can argue about its effects; we can argue about tactics for reducing it. But there can no longer be any argument about its reality.

        We humans are changing the climate of the earth. We need to get serious about reducing the impact of what the British report called the ’”human fingerprint.” We cannot simply expect the earth to heal itself while we continue to inflict damage.

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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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