Of Polar Bears and Himalayan Glaciers
February 7th, 2010
So what do polar bears in the Arctic and glaciers atop the Himalayas have in common? Well, for one thing, both are “poster children” for “global warming”. Both, we are told, are disappearing before our very eyes because of our wicked ways, by our profligate fossil fuel fueling of our lives and economy. Our fossil fuels are said to be filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and creating a greenhouse of the planet … which is for some ( including those who vacation in Hawaii or the Caribbean, etc.?) an evil thing. Alaska is better than Florida, I guess.
Never mind that that the planet’s climate cycles naturally, and throughout even recent history has been both much warmer and much colder - many times over. The two “poster children” have survived these natural, pre-human (or fossil fuel) cycles – unless you happen to believe in Creationism of the Young Earth variety, which I doubt any Global Warming Alarmists are! And never mind that neither poster child is actually in any danger! Both are doing quite well, actually.
Polar bears have even had quite a renaissance the past few decades, approximately quadrupling their population. And, generally, when and where sea ice and snow pack is diminishing, the bears should be able to re-adapt to life on land and land’s flora and fauna. That’s exactly what evolutionary theory would say they should be able to do. And lo and behold, many are. Facing loss of their presently preferred ice landscape, polar bears quickly backtrack on their evolutionary history, and start looking and acting more like the neighboring brown bears that we believe polar bears descended from. It seems even bears can naturally cycle back and forth between white and brown, ice and land.
The Himalayan glaciers, while not growing – without an ice age they shouldn’t – have been shown to not be melting away near as much as some people (including the UN “expert panel”) have said. There’s been a lot of exaggeration – an urban legend of sorts - fed by urban-living mountain climbers who just seem to remember more golden days and grander ice packs. Actual scientific and satellite observations do verify the glaciers are thinning, as they’ve done many times even in more recent times, but not near so much disappearing.
And there’s something else they have in common: neither would be benefited by any of our favored “Climate Protection Plans”, such as those from Kyoto and Oslo. Everything the pols and Al Gore want to do will have minuscule effects on present ice melting anywhere, but especially in the Himalayas. It’s not the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that’s most responsible for the Himalayan ice sheets thinning. It’s soot, particulate matter, that’s painting the snow and icepack gray and absorbing sunlight, warming them and melting them. It’s true that the soot is mostly from use of fossil fuels, but most of that is coming straight out of India and China, whose technology is crude and not at all environmentally sensitive. And both China and India reject, or are exempted from the Kyoto and Oslo plans and regs.
Even more irony: the US, whose energy plants are the cleanest in respect to soot and aerosol emissions, is still the most targeted country. So our BB gun is to be shelved while the big cannons, India and China - and the “Developing Countries” - are left to fire away.
Even more irony: Soot drops out of the atmosphere within weeks, and its effects abate. Carbon dioxide, which most of the regulatory schemes target, takes about a century to drop out of the atmosphere. So, should we actually cut carbon dioxide to zero today (extinguishing … no, eliminating all life so its remains won’t decay into methane and carbon dioxide, etc) it would still take a hundred years for it finish doing whatever harm it is doing. Of course, exempting India, China, and Developing Countries, who are growing at unbelievable rates, we are going to diminish nothing, really.
Anyway, as you can see, polar bears and Himalayan glaciers have a lot in common.