Arctic ice is melting today. There is no doubt about it. Many people are alarmed that ships might actually be able to travel through arctic waters in 20-30 years, or sooner. The Washington Post has written about melting glaciers and the disappearance of Arctic sea ice before. Here is a copy of the article. The only thing is: the article was written in 1922 ! One thing the Post did not do was blame the warmer temperatures observed in 1922 on CO2 concentrations.
The 1922 article puts some perspective on what is occurring in the Arctic today. Only 50 years after the Post article, it was global cooling, and the possibility of excess Arctic ice that many people were concerned about.
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Sunday, November 4th, 2007 at 7:57 pm
Global Warming: Is Arctic Ice Melt a Concern? (Post 28)
By Tom Neuville
This entry is filed under Commentary, Global Warming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
One Response to “Global Warming: Is Arctic Ice Melt a Concern? (Post 28)”
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Tom:
Here are some possibilities that might explain the shift from the warming in the 1920’s to the claims of cooling in the 1970’s:
1) Politicians during the ’20’s were warming the planet with hot rhetorical air, except for cool Calvin Coolidge, who took a lot of naps, didn’t say or do all that much, but who once said that
“It is even probable that the supremacy of nations may be determined by the possession of available petroleum and its products.”
2) All scientists are nerdy fools who can’t see the forest for the trees, and get easily mislead by their own experiments and observations, so we should listen to leaders of business more than to scientists. (Don’t tell your scientist friends this. And, hey–Tom, you once described yourself as a scientist, having worked in a science capacity for 3M…. this second explanation could not be true if you were/are a scientist…. or at least we don’t want to go there. (0; )
3) Popular news picks up on what seems sensational in science, but may not pick up on the consensus in scientific thought, so it’s dangerous to cherry-pick stories such as this one from the ’20’s, or the other from the ’70’s, and claim it represents “science” as a whole.
4) The globe was warming in the 1920’s due in part to increased levels of CO2 since the start of the industrial age. It would have warmed even more quickly if it were not for Krakatoa in the late 1800’s, Mt. St. Hellen’s, and all the dust kicked up by two world wars and above-ground nuclear testing. If there was a brief period of cooling, it, too, may have been human caused, *by the very same process that you recently suggested as a cure*: adding more reflective dust to the atmosphere.
(This is not to suggest we should resume above-ground nuclear testing as a way of addressing global warming; I think there would be a down-side to this too.)