Patrick Michaels, author of Meltdown, is yet another global warming skeptic. How can Ian Lowe, President of the Australian Conservation Foundation, in his new book, A Big Fix, claim there are only five global warming skeptics in the whole world! 😉
Michael Duffy interviewed Michaels on ABC Radio National last night on climate change issues, click here for the transcript. The interview will be replayed tonight at about 9pm.
I was interested in Michaels comments on sealevel change and also snow and ice at the Arctic and Antarctic:
Michael Duffy: Patrick, let's turn now to some of the alleged effects of global warming: are the ice caps melting?
Patrick Michaels: The North Pole ice, at the end of summer, is definitely on its way down. Remember though, when the sun goes down on the first day of fall at the North Pole it starts to refreeze very, very quickly. It's really kind of misleading to say the polar ice caps are melting. What you really need to say is that there's a big degradation of ice at the brief end of Polish summer... this is the North Pole. Having said that, remember that there is a raft of scientific literature that shows that from about 4,000 years before present, on back to at least 8000 and some of them go back to about 11,000 years before present, the northern Arctic was warmer than it is today by a couple of degrees.
Antarctica is a different story. For all the news stories you hear about the warming of Antarctica, every story that says Antarctica is warming is wrong. There is a small area in Antarctica, the Antarctic Peninsula, that little land that juts out towards South America that shows warming. But if you average across Antarctica
Jen,
have you actually read the interview? Patrick Michaels is hardly a greenhouse "sceptic". He projects 1.7C of warming this century which lies well within the IPCC projection. His numbers are also very closely to what scientists such as Jim Hanssen have recently suggested. He is somewhat sceptical of some of the science, but the upshot is that his projections lie within the range obtained through the concensus IPCC approach. You will find that most if not all scientists are sceptical about various aspects of the science... if they were not they would not be scientists!
He makes a couple of nice points, which need clarification. The first is the point about 1% CO2 increase. This is an old approximation used in early scenarios which reflected the equivalent CO2 increase - remember during the 1970s and 1980s CH4 and CFC doubled the effective CO2 increase from around 0.5% to around 1%. I'm suprised he doesn't realise this...
The second point is calling 1.7C "very small". When added to the just less than 1C already experienced this means we will accumulate nearly 3C of warming since industrialisation commenced (200 years). This is about 50% of the warming experienced at the end of the last glacial maximum, and which occured over 10,000 years. To suggest that a warming this large occuring at a rate of 20-50 times faster than the fastest rate nature can throw at us is... brave.
David
Detribe - Michaels has not mentioned a few salient points - most of increase in sea level comes from an expanding warming ocean. Collapse of land based ice systems (as opposed to free floating) are discussed in above references. And just because we have a net depositional effect now doesn't mean it will continue forever as warming increases.
"Neither of the two papers that you refer to appear to have anything to do with a polar ice cap, but rather with floating sea-ice. On such niceties does science turn."
Cathy - I take your nice comment to underline the point that melting of artic sea ice would have relatively little impact on sea levels as the ice floats in the sea. That together with thicking of antarctic ice implies global effects of polar ace caps on sea levels are at least somewhat ambiguous. Your quite understated witty point - quite relevant to Michaels argument starting this - seems to have been glossed over by the other postings in this thread.