Environmental Scaremongering..

A nice piece in the Chicago Sun-Times on global warming and scaremongering.

In early May, newspapers across the country reported that a team of "adventurers" from Minnesota was setting off to "document climate change" at the North Pole.

According to newspaper reports, they aim to "draw [attention to] the gradual warming of Earth's climate" and "hope to convince skeptics, especially in the Bush administration, that global warming is real...."

In other words, this summer will bring a barrage of misinformation about the Earth's ice structures provided by non-scientists who make casual observations and then claim they know what caused the situations they are observing.

Scientists, of course, do not operate this way. They don't start their work with a political ax to grind, with the aim of "drawing attention" to something. They don't make a few observations and then jump to conclusions about causation. And they don't ignore the work of scientists who have gone before them.

Scientists, these Minnesota two are not. And yet we'll no doubt hear more about their "research" than we have about the work that really matters -- the science.

A few years ago, R.J. Braithwaite's peer-reviewed article in Progress in Physical Geography described a "mass balance analysis" he conducted of 246 glaciers sampled all around the world between 1946 and 1995. That's 50 years of data. Braithwaite found some glaciers were melting, while a nearly equal number were growing in size, and still others remained stable. He concluded, "There is no obvious common or global trend of increasing glacier melt in recent years."

Just about every day, there is some story in the press about some environmental disaster. Rarely do you hear dissenting views.