By Debra J. Saunders
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
A funny thing happened during Australian climate change
professor Chris Turney's venture to retrace a 1912 research expedition in
Antarctica and gauge how climate change has affected the continent: Two weeks
into a five-week excursion, Turney's good ship MV Akademik Shokalskiy got
trapped in ice. It turns out, global warming notwithstanding, that there's so
much ice down under that two ice-breaking vessels sent to rescue the research
team cannot reach the Australasian Antarctic Expedition.
Years ago, global warming believers renamed the
phenomenon "climate change" -- probably because of pesky details such
as unusually cold weather undercutting the warming argument. Now, just as
advocates argue that earth is approaching a tipping point, there's so much ice
floating in Antarctica during the Southern Hemisphere's summer that the
Australasian Antarctic Expedition posted in a statement: "We're stuck in
our own experiment."
Does this incident mean that climate change is an
illusion or a hoax? Of course not. Even during its summer, Antarctica is
subject to extreme weather. "Bad weather is the norm in Antarctica,"
climatologist Roy Spencer observed.
But it does show that like the rest of us chickens,
scientists have feet of clay. Turney had told journalists that his expedition
wanted to collect data that could be used to improve climate models. Too bad
the folks who are supposed to predict climate decades into the future are
guided by scientists who could not manage to avoid ice floes during a five-week
trip.
"We were just in the wrong place at the wrong
time," Turney told Fox News. He believes that the ship was stuck in old
ice from a 75-mile-long iceberg that broke apart three years ago.
Fair enough. But there's still the issue of ice volume.
Climate changers usually warn about Arctic ice, which has been receding over
the past few decades, but rarely address the overall growth of ice in
Antarctica.
"I'm sure some researchers can find a possible
explanation where humans are causing both Arctic ice melting and Antarctic ice
growth, but I'm skeptical of scientists who blame every change in nature on
human activities. Nature routinely causes its own changes, without any help
from us," quoth Spencer, himself a climate change contrarian.
"Sea ice is disappearing due to climate change, but
here ice is building up," the Australasian Antarctic Expedition
acknowledges. It's a conundrum. If warming is melting ice in the Northern
Hemisphere, why isn't it melting ice in the Southern Hemisphere?
Believers seize on all manner of weather -- less Arctic
ice, more Antarctic ice -- as proof of climate change, but as Spencer notes,
there is no climate change without man-caused global warming.
Turney told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that his
goal is to excite the public about science. As for climate change, "in the
scientific community, it's remarkably solid." And
"self-evident."
He pushes a framework of science being data-driven and
free from politics. Yet it's hard to escape the suspicion that whatever the
icebound researchers experience, they will frame it as proof that climate
change is unassailable.
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