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Written by Jack Kelly |
| Friday, 27 June
2008 |
You've probably heard the permanent ice cap in the Arctic has
receded considerably, because the people who are worried about
global warming talk about it all the time.
You may not know ice in Antarctica is growing. This is an
awkward topic for global warming alarmists, because if global
warming were, ah, global, this shouldn't be happening.
So how could ice be melting at the north pole while it's
building up at the south?
"Recent massive volcanoes have risen from the ocean floor deep
under the Arctic ice cap, spewing plumes of fragmented magma
into the sea," Agence France Presse reported June 25. "The
eruptions, as big as the one that buried Pompei -- took place in
1999 along the Gakkel Ridge, an underwater mountain chain
snaking (1,100 miles) from the northern tip of Greenland to
Siberia."
A team of scientists led by Robert Sohn of the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution in Massachussetts has gotten a look at
the ocean floor 13,000 feet beneath the Arctic pack ice.
"What they saw was unmistakable evidence of explosive eruptions
rather than the gradual secretion of lava bubbling up from the
earth's mantle," AFP reported.
Magma is molten rock. Most magmas have temperatures ranging
from 700 degrees Celsius to 1,300 degrees Celsius. Might not
the magma have played a role in melting the ice above it?
According to the data gathered by scientists in the Geophysical
Fluid Dynamics Laboratory of the National Oceanographic and
Atmospheric Administration, noted the Web logger "Sweetness &
Light," the precipitous decline in the ice pack began in 1999,
when the eruptions occurred. If this is a coincidence, it's a
remarkable one.
But it's a coincidence that went unremarked upon in the AFP
story. There is a tendency in contemporary journalism to
attribute any adverse development in nature to anthropogenic
global warming, no matter how strained the connection, and to
downplay other, more plausible explanations for the phenomena.
Numberwatch, a British Web site, has a list of more than 600
things that journalists have linked to global warming, including
the cold wave in India this February; the migration of
cockroaches in Australia; an attack of killer jellyfish off the
coast of Northern Ireland; staff shortages at brothels in
Bulgaria; a snowstorm in Baghdad in January, and increased
cougar attacks in Canada.
CBS and MSNBC posted on their Web sites June 17 a story linking
global warming to earthquakes.
"New research compiled by Australian scientist Dr. Tom Chalko
shows that global seismic activity on earth is now five times
more energetic than it was 20 years ago," the story said. "The
research proves that destructive ability of earthquakes on Earth
increases alarmingly fast and that this trend is set to
continue, unless the problem of 'global warming' is
comprehensively and urgently addressed."
If the Earth warms too much, it could explode, "Dr." Chalko
said.
Mr. Chalko has never studied the earth sciences. But he
practices meditation, telepathy, and astral travel, his Web site
says.
Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit is the man who proved the
"hockey stick" graph of global warming was a fraud. This is
what Mr. McIntyre found when he visited the Web site of the U.S.
Geological Survey:
"Earthquakes of magnitudes 7.0 or greater have remained fairly
constant throughout this century, and, according to our records,
have actually seemed to decrease in recent years," the U.S.G.S.
said.
The average number of major earthquakes in the 20th Century was
18 per year, the U.S.G.S. said. "Our records show that 1992,
and 1995-1997 were the only years that we have reached or
exceeded the long term average of earthquakes since 1971."
"Dr." Chalko is a crackpot spreading nonsense. But CBS and
MSNBC didn't check either his claims or his bona fides before
rewriting his press release and reporting it as "news."
As Newsweek's Evan Thomas famously said of his magazine's rush
to condemn the Duke lacrosse players falsely accused of rape,
"the narrative was right, but the facts were wrong."
The warmest year of modern times on record was 1998 -- nearly
ten years ago. Global temperatures have been declining for the
last four years. Last winter was the coldest in decades in most
of the world.
But those are mere facts. For global warming alarmists, only
the narrative matters.
Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former
deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan
administration. He is national security writer for the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. |