Your browser may have trouble rendering this page. See supported browsers for more information.

|<<>>|157 of 208 Show listMobile Mode

Glaciers advancing … run for your lives

Published by marco on

Updated by marco on

 Swiss wrap a glacierThe Real Junk Science by George Monbiot (AlterNet) covers a recent letter by a pillar of the scientific community (no, really, he apparently is … or was) in which he claims that most glaciers in Europe are, in fact, growing. Global warming naysayers have naturally taken this as “proof” that global warming is a sham dreamt up by fruity eco-socialists who want to ruin it for everybody.

Monbiot’s look into the validity of the claim takes him on a twisty path a myriad of citations, each building on the last without adding an ounce of proof. The question quickly becomes: how are sources of information validated? In the scientific community, there is a process called peer review which acts as a reasonable filter for bias (though not a perfect one, by any means). In the court of public opinion, it is repetition that elevates a fact or study to citability.

The basic issue of global warming boils down to the following:

“If man-made climate change is happening, as the great majority of the world’s climatologists claim, it could destroy the conditions which allow human beings to remain on the planet. The effort to cut greenhouse gases must come before everything else. This won’t happen unless we can be confident that the science is right.”

If a heavy hitter like Bellamy comes out with figures like “555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980”, he’s bound to have done his homework and carefully considered putting forth an opinion. Strangely, when Monbiot contacted the World Glacier Monitoring Service itself, they said that Bellamy had “cited data which was simply false” and that the “latest studies show unequivocally that most of the world’s glaciers are retreating”.

The question remains as to where Bellamy then got his data.

It turns out he read it on Not by Fire, but by Ice. A quick visit confirms that the site positively oozes scientific reliability and in no way looks like the web site of a deranged mind. The maintainer of the page and publisher of the “studies” therein is a “former architect” with no scientific training. The figures about growing glaciers are, in fact, available in many places and do not originate with IceAgeNow. It is this study that is repeated over and over again and it is almost the sole source which contradicts the sea of evidence supporting global warming. Where did it come from? According to Fred Singer, who initially posted the figures on the internet, they come from “a paper published in Science in 1989”.

At this point, Monbiot had neared the end of his journey, as this claim is immediately verifiable by searching a few issues of the Science magazine. No articles on glaciers or global warming were published that year. The evidence cited by global cooling supporters dissolves in a puff of smoke on closer examination. They depend instead on repetition and the basic laziness and gullibility of people to make it true. To refute global warming, you must first ignore almost the entire scientific community and “…embrace instead the claims of an eccentric former architect, which are based on what appears to be a non-existent data set.”