Icing A Climate Scare Transcript

Narrator:

Dramatic claims about the melting of the world’s glaciers due to global warming have provided some of the most powerful images used by climate alarmists to push the claim of a climate emergency.

In 2019, activists and celebrities, including Iceland’s Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir and the former UN human rights commissioner Mary Robinson, even held a funeral for the Ok glacier in western Iceland, which in 1901 had covered 38 square kilometers, but which by 2012 had shrunk to less than one square kilometer.

A decade ago at Glacier National Park in Montana, staff put up signs warning visitors that due to global warming the ice would likely be gone by 2020.

And in 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change drew headlines around the world after its scientists announced that mountain glaciers in the Himalayas would be gone by 2035, threatening irrigation and drinking water supplies for large regions of India and Bangladesh.

John Robson:

But the science behind these claims has a bad habit of melting upon close inspection. I’m John Robson and this is a CDN Fact Check on the case of the disappearing glaciers.

We begin with Iceland’s Ok glacier. While most of the world’s warming since 1901 happened after 1980, NASA’s Earth Observatory reports that it had already shrunk from 38 square km down to 3 before 1978, making it impossible to attribute it to recent greenhouse gas emissions.

As for Montana, it’s now 2023 and the glaciers in Glacier National Park are still there—its the signs announcing their demise that are gone. What’s more, as climatologist Judith Curry has written, those glaciers actually didn’t exist some 6,500 years ago. Because, despite claims that current conditions are the “hottest ever”, or “unprecedented”, the Holocene Climatic Optimum back then was definitely warmer than today.

Narrator:

The Montana glaciers then grew and retreated in several phases over the millennia, reaching their largest extent since the end of the last ice age in 1850 at the end of the Little Ice Age. Most of the melting since then occurred before 1966 and the rate of loss has been slowing ever since. From 1850 to 1966 they lost about 4.5 percent of their mass per decade. From 1966 to 1998 they lost 3.7 percent per decade and from 1998 to 2015 they lost only 1.8 percent per decade. Again, it’s the opposite pattern to what we’d expect if it was due to greenhouse gases.

John Robson:

And as for the IPCC claim about Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035, well that’s quite the story. Here’s what the IPCC said in its Fourth Assessment Report, Working Group II Chapter 10, based on their supposedly rigorous peer reviewed scientific methods.

Narrator:

Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.

John Robson:

And there the claim sat for three years before the IPCC suddenly announced it was completely bogus.

Narrator:

While the Himalayan glaciers are retreating in many places, they aren’t disappearing any faster than glaciers in the rest of the world, and furthermore, as glaciologist Lonnie Thompson noted at the time, only about 600 of the 46,000 glaciers in the region, are even being monitored so scientists simply don’t have data for nearly 99 percent of them.

John Robson:

So how did that bogus claim get into the report?

Narrator:

With a bit of digging, UK investigative journalist David Rose discovered in 2010 that the claim originated with offhand conjectures by glaciologist Syed Hasnain in a 1999 magazine interview, which were then recycled in a 2005 report from the environmental activist organization the World Wildlife Fund, which were then picked up and inserted verbatim in the 2007 IPCC Report.

John Robson:

You know, one of their reports that are strictly based on peer reviewed scientific literature - unlike skeptics claims.

And as if that’s not bad enough, the IPCC’s Lead Author of that section admitted to Rose that they knew the statements were baseless at the time, but they decided to include them anyway to put pressure on political leaders in the run-up to an important UN climate meeting at Copenhagen in 2009.

Narrator:

We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

John Robson:

That’s an interesting approach to “settled science”: to say something you know is untrue in the hope of getting political leverage. And indeed it also emerged at the time that the then-head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, had been warned about the error well before the Copenhagen meeting, but he sat on the information until after it ended.

And incredibly, it gets worse. The WWF Report that the IPCC relied on had made a big error in its own math, claiming that one glacier was retreating at a rate of 134 meters a year, even though the data they presented implied it was retreating at 23 meters per year. Someone typed the wrong numbers into their calculator and nobody bothered to check. That’s some kind of peer review.

And… drum roll please… it gets worse yet again. Experts in the Government of India also disputed the IPCC’s claim about the melting of the Himalayan glaciers, releasing a report in November 2009 drawing attention to the lack of evidence supporting the IPCC position, and stating, “Himalayan glaciers have not in any way exhibited, especially in recent years, an abnormal annual retreat.”

Pachauri reacted angrily to that report, dismissing it as ‘voodoo science’. Yet only a few months later the IPCC would admit not only that they were wrong, but that they had known about the error long before.

Narrator:

Indeed, the warnings about the error began much earlier. Georg Kaser, a glaciologist at the University of Innsbruck told reporters that he had warned the IPCC back in 2006, before the Fourth Assessment Report was even published, that its data was, as he put it, ‘so wrong that it is not even worth discussing.’ He also went back through the IPCC review comments and saw that while glaciologists were involved in another part of the report, in the part that discussed Himalayan melting “not a single glaciologist” was involved in the review process.

John Robson:

And we can go on, if you can stand it. A year after publishing the bogus claim about the disappearing Himalayan glaciers, IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri, who also happened to be heavily involved in an environmental think tank in India called TERI, recruited none other than Syed Hasnain, the original source of the bogus Himalayan glacier data, to run a glaciology unit at TERI, and lined up a half million dollar grant from the Carnegie Foundation to support him.

Still it’s important to remember that we skeptics have all the money.

Narrator:

But what about the glaciers themselves? A few years after the IPCC’s Himalaya fiasco, new data came out that showed that most glaciers in the region have exhibited stable or increasing ice mass in recent years.

John Robson:

So the only thing melting was the IPCC’s credibility. But enough about that. Now I’d like to show you my holiday photos. Wait. Don’t change the channel, I promise they’re not pictures of me reclining on a tropical beach sipping margaritas or pretending to hold up the Leaning Tower of Pisa. They’re pictures I took nearly a decade ago on a cruise through Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park.

Narrator:

When many people think about the world’s disappearing glaciers, they point to Alaska’s fjords as exhibit A. And the Park Service certainly encourage you to do so, throwing in the standard warning about the effects of global warming and the need to see the glaciers while they’re still there.

John Robson:

But the truth is the glaciers in Alaska follow the pattern we’ve seen elsewhere, namely that while they have retreated since the end of the Little Ice Age (yes, that old thing again), most of the retreat happened prior to the mid 20^th century which means it can’t be blamed on greenhouse gases, especially not man-made ones, and certainly not man-made ones that were released after the middle of the 20^th century.

Which the Park Service actually admitted to in the glossy brochure they gave us.

As you note, it has the usual boilerplate about all the ice melting (“Some glaciers are retreating here, others are advancing— unlike in some mountains in the contiguous United States where glaciers may soon be a thing of the past.””)

But it also has very nice and very revealing maps of the history of the glaciers in this area. And these pictures don’t lie. There was a massive expansion of the glaciers from the end of the Medieval Warm Period up to around 1750, the depths of the Little Ice Age, at which point they extended well out into the Pacific Ocean. And then they started to shrink… fast.

Narrator:

By 1795 when Capt. George Vancouver visited the area, the ice had already retreated five miles inland, and by 1879 when conservationist John Muir visited, it had gone another 40 miles inland.

The rapid melting continued. In a 1923 study, Professor William S Cooper of the University of Minnesota noted that as of 1920 the ice had reached more than sixty miles inland, all the way to the tip of the Torr Inlet.

John Robson:

But this was long before the interval of modern global warming. How can that be? How is it possible, if you believe climate orthodoxy, that the minor shrinkage of the glaciers over the past 50 years is just the tail-end of a natural warming process unrelated to rising atmospheric CO2 or any other human activity? (And  I’d like to mention here that if you look further back, you find that retreating glaciers often disgorge artefacts dating back a thousand years, or two thousand, in the latter case meaning that the region in question was ice-free or nearly so back in Caesar’s day – which you can’t blame on man-made CO2 any more than you can on the Ides of March.)

Certainly the Glacier Bay National Park brochure in question, not having been edited by the Michael Manns of this world, refers blithely to the “Little Ice Age” admitting that, yes, there are naturally significant temperature cycles:

Narrator

“Glacier Bay today is the product of the Little Ice Age, a geologically recent glacial advance in northern regions. The Little Ice Age reached its maximum extent about 1750.”

John Robson:

Now, when alarmists don’t simply try to deny the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age ever happened, they often insist that they were merely isolated regional phenomena. But what region incorporates the European Alps and the West Coast of North America? At a certain point the “Northern Hemisphere” starts to sound like “global” to the untrained ear.

And if even that view seems parochial, and alas for this tale of regional limited impact, there is a very similar pattern of glacial advance and retreat visible even in… New Zealand, whose capital of Wellington is at 41° south latitude, below the Tropic of Capricorn. The most iconic glacier down that far under is the Franz Josef, and as Brian Fagan wrote in The Little Ice Age

Narrator:

“By the early 18th century, Franz Josef’s face was within three kilometers of the Pacific Ocean, a river of aggressive ice pointing like an arrow toward the coast.”

John Robson:

Now Fagan, who actually is something of climate alarmist, hastily adds that “Today, Franz Josef, like other New Zealand glaciers, is in retreat.” But he’s too honest a chronicler to skip the real story that thousands of tourists a year hike up “through rocky terrain that was completely covered with ice during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.” But not even the early 20^th let alone the mid 20^th .

Narrator:

“They can see how the glacier is a barometer of the greater cold of two centuries ago, followed by modern day warming. Signs along the access path marked the spots where the end moraines halted at their maximum extent, then document the spectacular retreats and glacial fluctuations since 1850.”

John Robson:

And he further notes that “The glacier retreated steadily until about 1893, when a sudden forward thrust destroyed the tourist trail to the face.” That’s weird. Natural fluctuations. Indeed “In 1909, advances of up to fifty meters a month were reported.”

Sudden, violent ones.

Narrator:

“Franz Josef then retreated again before recovering about half the ground lost earlier in the 1920s. By 1946, the glacier was at least a kilometer shorter than it had been three-quarters of a century before. The pattern of advance and retreat continues to this day, with the retreats more prolonged than the advances.”

John Robson:

So here we have the same pattern showing up way down in the Southern Hemisphere. At a certain point it sure starts look global.

Narrator:

The bottom line is that if you’re going to use glaciers as thermometers you have to pay attention to what they show. They were small during the Roman Warm Period, grew in the Dark Ages, shrank again in the Medieval Warm Period, grew dramatically during the Little Ice Age and started shrinking rapidly when that natural cooling gave way to natural warming. But most of the retreat happened long before human GHGs had any significance at all and was not caused by it. If anything in more recent years many glaciers have slowed down their rate of melting.

John Robson:

It’s a natural phenomenon and a cyclical one. Exactly the opposite of what those dramatic photos, funerary orations and angry “Gotcha” tweets claim.

For the Climate Discussion Nexus I’m John Robson and I’ve seen the ice.