THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume VIII, Issue # 120, July 11, 2006
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
WILL SEA LEVELS RISE TWENTY FEET,
AS AL GORE PREDICTS?
By Dennis T. Avery
POLITICAL ENVIROMENTALISM & GLOBAL WARMING THEORY VERSUS THE FINDINGS OF TRUE SCIENTISTS: EXPERTS
DISPUTE THE IDEOLOGY & PROPAGANDA OF THE POLITICAL ENVIRONMENTALISTS -- SCIENTISTS SHOW THAT AL GORE'S
MOVIE, AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, OVERSTATED THE IMPACT OF GLOBAL WARMING ON THE POLAR ICE CAPS BY
ABOUT FIFTY-FOLD
FULL STORY:
Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, says human-emitted carbon dioxide will boost the earth’s temperatures
enough to melt the polar ice caps — and suddenly raise sea levels by twenty feet.
Phooey!
First of all, let’s understand just how cold the Antarctic is. Winter temperatures on its high, cold interior plateau range from
40 to 95 degrees F below zero! In the Summer (December), it “warms,” with temperatures dipping only to 49 degrees F below
zero — and sometimes rising within 25 degrees F of the melting point (32 degrees F). But even then, the ice reflects virtually
all of the sun’s rays back out into space.
However, the world’s warming in the past 150 years has produced a change in Antarctica. The huge East Antarctic ice sheet,
which contains nearly 90 percent of the world’s ice, has been thickening. European satellites measured the ice sheet’s
thickness 347 million times between 1992 and 2003, and found it is gaining about 45 billion tons of water per year, because the
planet has warmed enough for snow to fall at the coldest place on earth.
The study, "Snowfall-driven Growth in East Antarctic Ice Sheet Mitigates Recent Sea-level Rise," was led by Curt Davis
of the University of Missouri, and reported in Science on June 24, 2005.
Thickening ice in the Antarctic, in fact, is just about offsetting the meltwater being released from the edges of the Greenland
ice sheet, which has also been thickening in its center. This leaves us with a global warming sea level gain of about 1.8
millimeters per year — or 4 inches per century. The rise has remained constant during the 20th. century despite the moderate
0.6 degree C warming of the planet.
In the movie, a whole Antarctic ice sheet shatters on Gore’s computer screen. In the real world, that isn’t happening. It is only
the Antarctic Peninsula — 2 percent of the continent’s land area that sticks up toward the far-off equator — that is warming.
It recently earned headlines by calving an ice floe as big as Rhode Island, not an unusual event.
But the East Antarctic ice sheet is more than 2,000 times bigger than Rhode Island, and the ice is two miles thick! John Stone,
of the University of Washington, reporting in Science on January 3, 2003, says the West Antarctic ice sheet has been
retreating so slowly for the past 10,000 years that it still has not fully accommodated the end of the last Ice Age, and apparently
still has about 7,000 years of ice to melt — and the East Antarctic ice sheet is melting even more slowly than that.
So. Al Gore says Arctic and Antarctic melting will suddenly raise the sea levels by twenty feet, and the experts say four inches
per century. Seth Borenstein, an AP science writer, did a column on June 27, 2006, headlined, “Scientists OK Gore’s
Movie for Accuracy.” The Dean of Environmental Studies at Duke is quoted as saying: “He got all the important material and
got it right.”
Were they talking about the same movie I saw? Gore overstated the impact of global warming on the Arctic and Antarctic
glaciers by about 50-fold. Or, did he mean that 7000 years was “sudden”? How can socalled scientists applaud his accuracy
either way?
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Policy Issues Relating to Energy, Environment,
& Natural Resources
Dennis T. Avery is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., and is the Director of the Institute's Center for
Global Food Issues (www.cgfi.org). Formerly he was a senior analyst for the United States
Department of State. Readers may write him at Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421. Email: cgfi@rica.net
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