Of Photo-Ops, Glaciers, and Climate Change

Of Photo-Ops, Glaciers, and Climate Change

By Michael Rubin 

September 6, 2015

Commentary Magazine

Last week, President Barack Obama traveled to Alaska to opine on the perils of climate change. Thebackdrop for his rumination was the Exit Glacier, which has retreated 187 feet in the past year (and 1.25 miles in the last 200 years). “This is as good of a signpost of what we’re dealing with when it comes to climate change as just about anything,” he said.

Obama isn’t the first politician to use a retreating glacier as a backdrop both to opine on the perils of warming and to advocate for active government intervention in the economy to mitigate the supposed effects of climate change.

Back in 2007, Nancy Pelosi, majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives and a bipartisan group of representatives, traveled to Greenland for a day, in theory to learn about global warming and observe Sermeq Kujalleq (Jakobshavn Glacier), “the world’s fastest glacier” near Ilulissat. It has become a mandatory stop of the global warming tour. As this Greenlandic tourist website proclaims:

Climate change becomes more of a hot topic each day. The Ilulissat Icefjord, and the Greenland Ice Cap that produces it, are increasingly in the spotlight. We Greenlanders are thankful for the growing interest in an issue that we live with and adapt to constantly, but even more so, we are proud to be at the center of important research with global implications. Visiting the Ilulissat Icefjord is not only about seeing a large calving glacier or melting icebergs before it’s too late. It is a unique opportunity to be active in the climate change conversation here at ‘ground zero’ and to let your experiences in Greenland inspire your life back home.

I visited Ilulissat shortly after Pelosi and spent several days there due to a strike by Air Greenland. Wandering the town after spending several hours exploring the glacier on foot, by air, and by boat, it was hard to conclude that Pelosi did not spend too much time studying global warming. She was in town for a day, and almost every store in town had a thank you note from the Majority Leader from her time shopping. And while the speed of Sermeq Kujalleq is impressive and might be worrying if representative of all glaciers, Pelosi, and crew neglected to mention is that the adjacent Sermeq Avannarleq (“The dead glacier”) is remarkably stable.

Back to President Obama. The Exit Glacier may be in retreat, but other Alaskan glaciers are growing. What Obama did essentially was cherry-pick to force conclusions that the evidence would not necessarily support (much like he did to justify the Iran deal). And that assumes that climate change and global warming would actually be as bad for the economy and humanity as some of the doomsayers preach. After all, as I’veargued over at the American Enterprise Institute, between 1900 and 2000, the average global temperatures rose 0.65 Celsius. During the same period, global average life expectancy pretty much doubled to over 60 years old. Average global per capita income increased almost ten-fold over the same period from $680 to $6,500. If rate of warming is the concern, the end of the “little ice age” between the 14th and 19th century should have brought a retraction in global health and economy, but it didn’t. Likewise, height of Islamic civilization coincided with the “medieval warm period.”

A few months ago, I was talking to a Navy meteorologist about her job. She had done her training at Pennsylvania State, one of the best programs for meteorology. She was explaining how difficult it was: she needed to study the same hard science and advanced mathematics as other scientists, but while physicists, biologists, chemists, and others can strictly control laboratory conditions to isolate variables, meteorologists and climatologists cannot. That makes predictions—and often the science itself—far more difficult. While evidence suggests some anthropogenic impact on warming, politicians and scientists emphasizing the human aspect are undercut by the repeated failure of their models to predict warming trends, even if such failures might simply be the result of the extraordinary complexity of the atmosphere.

With the Iran deal apparently done (if the Iranians themselves don’t throw a wrench into it), both President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have suggested they will focus their remaining efforts on tackling climate change. Let’s hope that Obama and Kerry will be prepared for a more serious debate and will have the self-confidence and mastery of the facts to argue rather than mudsling or engage in vacuous photo-ops on the taxpayer dime.

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Of Photo-Ops, Glaciers, and Climate Change

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