WWF’s Dr. Neil Hamilton on Global Warming in the Arctic
the Director of the International Arctic Program
ice thickness has decreased dramatically since 2003:
It’s now about half as thick.
In its report “Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air,” the Union of Concerned Scientists slammed ExxonMobil for lying: “underwriting the most sophisticated disinformation campaign since the tobacco industry,” as well as for “funneling about $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of ideological and advocacy organizations that manufacture uncertainty on the issue.”
One big-oil front group, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has received $1.6 million from Exxon since 1998, using the funding to distort global warming research and attack any meaningful action to regulate carbon dioxide emissions.
By Tudor Vieru, Science Editor; 11th of July 2009,
What do you think prevents some people from acknowledging global warming is real?
I think the most common reason is that most people are not exposed to the real facts about what is happening. It’s much easier to pretend it’s not happening when you can’t see, on very short time scales, the actual impacts. Coupled with this psychological reality is the fact that the inertia in the Earth System means that behavior today will have significant impacts tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, rather than being immediate.
The most serious impacts of climate change today are not seen by most people in the western world as few venture into the developing world, or the poles, where most of the action is. This, coupled with the fact that is is rarely possible to directly link climate change to a specific event in a specific place, all helps to seed doubt into many minds.
The final ingredient in this story is a [well funded, powerful] minority of people and corporations who deliberately provide disinformation and set out to confuse people, for their own ends. The coal and oil industries among others have repeatedly demonstrated their credentials in this area. The result is that normal intelligent people are confused, and rather than take on what seems to be a daunting challenge, will tend to walk away from the question.
What were/are WWF’s activities in the region? Do you have anything planned for this year?
WWF is the largest and most active conservation organization in the Arctic, by far. We have significant operations in all arctic countries, and a major set of programs that are expanding rapidly. Above and beyond our regular work this year is very special because of the climate change talks in Copenhagen in December, where we will stage a series of events to highlight the danger to the world of the melting of the Arctic region.
We will continue our work in the Arctic Council, with polar bears and walrus, and of course hope to convince the countries around the Arctic to put in a place a strong and binding governance framework to protect the entire arctic marine environment. The polar bear work of course attracts a lot of interest. One of the really interesting things we do that attracts much attention is to work with indigenous people in Russia to protect their villages from polar bears, which are coming into town to find food, because the sea ice has retreated so much.
We are working to expand this ‘Polar Bear Patrol’ across the Arctic region, saving both polar bears and people. In real campaigning mode, this summer WWF is part of a major expedition to sail through the North East Passage, across the north coast of Russia, to illustrate both the impacts of climate change in the Arctic today, and to push for urgent global action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The voyage should be impossible, as for the entire period of human history it has been covered with ice. This year might be the last time when such a voyage could be considered an adventure, as if things keep going the way they are today anybody will be able to sail safely through the Arctic.
How do you think the Northeast Passage is affected by global warming?
The North East Passage is little different from anywhere else in the Arctic: it has already been dramatically affected. Melting sea ice is the most obviously visible impact, but other impacts have profound effects on the people who live there as well: pronounced warming, changing species of fish, changing plants, earlier flowering of plants, earlier breakup and later freeze up of rivers and channels, thinner fast ice, thawing of permafrost, different weather, rising sea levels, and so on. The treeline in Canada is moving north quite quickly with substantial ecological impacts.
What do you think are the challenges facing Arctic conservation?
The biggest challenge is that we are entering unknown territory. Today’s best conservation models are based on an environment that does not change, but in the Arctic this is no longer the case. We will need to develop a new conceptual framework that, in a quantitative way, is able to deal with changing climatic regimes and a changing ecology. If we can do that for the Arctic we will be much better placed to deal with climate change in other parts of the world, because things change faster and further in the Arctic than anywhere else.
Once you go beyond the basic approach, another set of questions arise: what do you do about ice-dependent species? How do you conserve the marine environment? What about new species that move northwards as a result of warmer temperatures? All of these are currently open questions that we do not have very long to address.
How is it that thin ice has replaced thick, multi-annual ice in volume?
The answer to this is simple: the ice is melting so fast that we are close to losing all of it in the summer. Last year during the peak melt season in September we were losing more than 75,000 square kilometers of ice each day. In 2003, thick multi-year ice made up 60 percent of the Arctic’s total ice volume, compared to just 40 percent first-year ice.
But, five years later, the picture flipped. In 2008, first-year ice accounted for 70 percent of the Arctic’s total ice volume, with just 30 percent from multi-year ice. And ice thickness has also decreased dramatically: it’s now about half as thick.
How We’re Cutting the Ground from Under Our Feet
11th of July 2009,
Just recently, in a NASA paper, the American space agency revealed that “The near-zero replenishment of the multi-year ice cover, combined with unusual exports of ice out of the Arctic after the summers of 2005 and 2007, have both played significant roles in the loss of Arctic sea ice volume over the [satellite] record.” (Ron Kwok, ICESat team member, JPL, NASA).
This research, conducted over four years, revealed a worrying trend in only a short period of time, confirming other studies arguing that the ice would begin melting faster and faster as the years went by. It’s important at this point to note that there are two types of ice in the Arctic, the thinner, seasonal one, generated during the winter and melted in the summer, and the multi-annual, thicker variety, which is able to endure for many years.
Using measurements from its Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), the American space agency has proven that the most dramatic changes occurred between 2004 and 2008, when the balance between the two types of ices drastically shifted. These results essentially imply that the ice meltdown that happens each summer takes up more of the ice sheets than freezing adds during the winter season. As a result, the ice caps are constantly shrinking, and will continue to do so, as long as global warming exists.
The Critics
Companies in the fossil fuel industry have spent millions of dollars on lobbyists in Congress and at the White House, as well as on so-called research institutes, which came up with all sorts of explanations for why global warming is happening.
Many critics simply say that studies show a cooling trend in the Antarctic, and that the Arctic is only experiencing a temporary warming. But the studies they based their claims on only span a few years, and are not decade-long investigations, such as those ran by NASA from the agency’s satellites.
The current line of thinking among global warming critics goes something like this,
“Global warming and climate change do not exist, but, if they do,
They are a natural trend, and are therefore not caused by man, but, if they are,
The problem is not as big as scientists would have you believe.”
It’s easy to see in this line of reasoning that the big companies are following a strategy that would reduce their losses to the greatest extent. For some, that is completely unnecessary, considering the fact that consensus already exists among the academic community as to the existence of global warming and climate change. Additionally, literally hundreds of studies have up to this point linked methane and carbon dioxide to these phenomena, and have proven that they have a direct adverse effect on both the atmosphere and the oceans.
deeply concerning is the fact that the warming in the Arctic is accelerating a vicious circle, that will see even more warming and melting. Under the frozen soils of the tundra (permafrost), around the Arctic Circle and further north, researchers say, lie vast amounts of trapped carbon dioxide and methane, both dangerous gases for the atmosphere. In a recent study, conducted by researchers in Canada, the United States and Australia, scientists Dr. Pep Canadell, Ted Schuur and Dr. Charles Tarnoca have uncovered the fact that the Arctic permafrost actually holds some 1.5 trillion tons of frozen carbon, about twice as much carbon as contained in the atmosphere.
This is dangerous because global warming has the most devastating effects in the polar regions, where temperature rises are most significant. When this happens over the areas covered with permafrost, it melts the frozen ground, and releases the dangerous gases into the atmosphere. If only one tenth of the greenhouse gases stored under the permafrost are released into the atmosphere, then the levels of carbon dioxide in the air will be brought up to a level never before encountered. Countless animal species, plants and ice sheet are endangered by only a 2-degree Celsius rise in global temperatures, but a vast amount of hydrogen could bring about the forecast Arctic and Antarctic meltdown a lot sooner than anticipated.
“Permafrost carbon is a bit of a wildcard in the efforts to predict future climate change. All evidence to date shows that carbon in permafrost is likely to play a significant role in the 21st century climate given the large carbon deposits, the readiness of its organic matter to release greenhouse gases when thawed, and the fact that high latitudes will experience the largest increase in air temperature of all regions,” explains Candell, the Executive Director of the Global Carbon Project at CSIRO, in Australia.
The Politics and Industry
former president George W. Bush always tried to please his friends in industry (especiallly fossil fuels).
This is proven by the legislation he passed or attempted to have approved before leaving. The decisions include, among others:
1. Ancient pine woods to be transformed in Pine Woods, a new suburb, following a back-door deal the Bush Administration made with the nation’s largest private land owner, Plum Creek Timber;
2. An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ruling saying that farmers no longer need to report the amounts of pollutants they put in the ground and in the atmosphere;
3. The removal of a ban that the mining industry was subjected to, which prevented it from dumping wastes from surface coal exploitations within 100 feet (33 meters) of creeks or streams;
4. The opening of lands near national parks for oil and natural gas exploitations, with no consideration for the environment and the decision’s impact on local ecosystems.
In a recent TV show, Chevron CEO David O’Reilly said that US 2050 emission goals were “too ambitious,” which translates into “bad for our business.”
When all is said and done, scientists argue that the temperature increase on the planet must not exceed 2 degrees Celsius. If this happens, then the floods, droughts and changed weather patterns will bring forth atmospheric manifestations the likes of which we’ve never seen before. The seasonal phenomena that we’ve grown accustomed to, such as monsoons and cyclones, will experience a change in patterns, affecting the millions of people they usually help feed. The situation is especially concerning in Asia, where the monsoons are responsible for feeding about half of the planet’s population.
Even politicians, despite their “innate” reluctance to accepting global warming, at the last G8 summit, decided to curve greenhouse gas emissions, so as to avoid this temperature increase. Undoubtedly, the most affected ecosystem, if this happens, will be that of the Arctic. Penguins, walruses, polar bears and foxes will all have their natural habitat destroyed. These animals relay heavily on the ice for survival, and changes in the amounts of ice at the Arctic have already negatively affected the polar bear populations. The ice is so thin that it can no longer support their weight, and the bears sometimes swim for tens of miles before finding a patch of ice they can climb to.
Conservation programs are especially difficult to set up under these circumstances, mostly because you cannot hope to save some animals in a specific area if the area itself is no longer there. Setting up polar bear reservations can only be done at the North Pole, but, if the entire cap melts during the summer, than there will be no ice remaining for this population. This is a danger highlighted by environmental groups WWF and Greenpeace, which regularly organize expeditions to the region. The reason why the Arctic is different from the Antarctic is that the former has an ice cap floating on water, while the latter has ices over a continent.
Nobody expects that mitigating the effects of global warming will be easy. Unfortunately for us, it’s not just the effort of changing infrastructures that prevents us from taking firm steps towards reducing our carbon footprint, but also the opposition from corporation and businessmen who have an interest in maintaining the status-quo, for their own profits. In its report “Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air,” the Union of Concerned Scientists slammed ExxonMobil for “underwriting the most sophisticated and most successful disinformation campaign since the tobacco industry,” as well as for “funneling about $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of ideological and advocacy organizations that manufacture uncertainty on the issue.”
Additionally, more and more critics fail to comprehend the fact that it’s our planet and, ultimately, our lives on the line, and continue to play the costs card, saying that changing our ways is too large of an investment, and that there is insufficient evidence to prove that global warming is man-made. These are the same people who advocate national and energy security, and are also responsible for bringing countries such as the United States to a point where they emit the largest amounts of pollution in the world. Fortunately, it may be that new leaders will break this cycle, despite opposition.
One thing you, the readers, need to understand, is that companies and those with an interest in maintaining the status-quo, will go at any lengths to cast doubts and confusion over reliable scientific data. They will manufacture evidence, which they will then relate to existing studies, and turn them on their heads. These points of view will appear in networks such as Fox in the US, and so-called experts will be brought in.
People such as NASA’s Roy Spencer are the prime target for these individuals, precisely because the American space agency offered the most conclusive evidence that global warming and climate change exist. By interviewing him, those who will have you believe that global warming is a myth will try to make you think that disagreement exists even within the agencies and research institutes supporting global warming, which is not true. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but hanging on to it in front of overwhelming evidence is not good science, but cheap propaganda.