Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer took George Stephanopoulos for
a ride Sunday over Glacier National Park, and not just in a
helicopter.
Thanks to his proposal to mine eastern Montana’s coal beds and
gasify the coal into synthetic fuel, Schweitzer is enjoying steady
national press. Consider that he’s a newly elected, red-state
Democrat, with homespun charm and bolo tie, and you can understand
the media’s crush.
Pursuing creative, cost effective uses of our natural resources
is fine by me, but now the governor’s gone too far. He’s exploiting
the specter of global warming as a justification for his “synfuel”
plan.
That was the point of Schweitzer’s helicopter ride with
Stephanopoulos: to display Glacier National Park’s shrinking
glaciers which are, as Stephanopoulos put it, “dramatic evidence
that global warming is not, as some argue, a hoax. The glaciers
that gave this park its name are melting.” In touting the segment,
ABC News billed the park as “a national treasure [that] is melting
away from global warming.” Hard hitting, critical journalism was on
the way.
The helicopter ride accomplished little more than provide nice
scenery. In March, the park’s 1 million acres are blanketed in
snow. The governor and the Clintonista flew over Jackson Glacier
and imagined its shrinkage. If the men were truly environmentally
conscious, they would have used hang gliders — that one helicopter
joy ride likely emitted a great deal of exhaust and wasted a
considerable amount of fuel, not to mention possibly causing
avalanches or disturbing wildlife.
Without any pesky, challenging questions from Stephanopoulos,
who so far from Washington was clearly out of his element,
Schweitzer could make his case unchallenged: There were once over a
hundred glaciers in the park. Now there are fewer than 30.
Measurements of “temperature and precipitation from around the
world” show global warming is real. Ergo, Glacier National Park is
the “canary in the mine.”
I’VE HEARD THIS STORY many times. In fact I’ve told a version of it
myself more than once. As a boat captain for three summers on
St. Mary Lake in Glacier National Park, I would
point out Sexton Glacier and explain that it’s only one of about 30
glaciers left in the park. At one count, there were once over a
hundred. Usually, a hand would shoot up: “Because of global
warming?” No, not at all.
If Schweitzer and Stephanopoulos took the boat tour (summer
only), they’d understand Glacier makes poor anecdotal evidence for
global warming. Passengers learn that the small alpine glaciers in
the park today were formed in a “Little Ice Age” that began only
several hundred years ago. A better name for Glacier, as many will
tell you, would be “Glaciated” National Park. Its most dramatic
beauty comes not from the spits of ice which are rarely seen
without considerable trouble, but from the dramatic peaks and
bathtub-shaped valleys which were carved out by glaciers thousands of feet thick.
Yep, thousands. These enormous valley glaciers formed and
melted, perhaps multiple times, well before man began even
imagining the industrial revolution. And now, the disappearance of
fairly insignificant alpine glaciers is the result of man-made
global warming? Sorry, but for a place where I’ve been snowed on in
June, July, and August, I’m not buying.
SINCE GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS didn’t bother the governor for any
evidence of his claims, I thought I would. His office was ready to
send a 24-page file of information. Two-thirds were generic global
warming briefs from the National Resources Defense Council — a group
known to be in the tank for global warming. In the stack, the only
information pertaining to global warming’s effects in Glacier was a
two-page fact sheet from the Montana Department of Environmental
Quality and a one-page summary of the glacial recession.
No one disputes they’re shrinking. But skeptics will want data
to support Schweitzer’s claims. It should be easy enough: show that
local increased temperatures correspond to glacial shrinkage. The
Montana DEQ memo cites generic warming talking points: global
average temps, snow pack, polar ice cover, and the like. The most
the governor’s office could give on Glacier National Park was that
glaciers are rapidly reducing in number and size: “Since the
mid-18th century, reduction in area of the park’s glaciers ranges
from 46%-77%.” If they’ve been shrinking since before the
industrial revolution, what’s man got to do with it?
Pressed for better evidence, Schweitzer’s office sent a couple
links: one to a study detailing the park’s susceptibility to long-term
climate change, and another to a United States Geological Survey
study. The USGS estimates that glaciers began receding around 1850.
While the USGS points vaguely to “above average summer temperatures
and below average annual precipitation” from 1920 to 1940, the
specifics aren’t very convincing. The finished USGS study assumes that global temperatures
are rising, based on the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate
Change’s estimate of less than one-half degree Celsius. More
specifically, the authors point to another study which found that
“in alpine regions the warming is even more pronounced.”
How about looking at western Montana and Glacier National Park?
The USGS authors cite annual summer mean temperatures from nearby
weather stations at Kalispell, West Glacier, and Babb. (I’ll grant
them their choice of locations, even though the first two are in
climate zones vastly different — and much warmer — than the
Continental Divide, where most glaciers are located.) Though data from the latter two stations are
sporadic, the authors claim a temperature increase of 1.66 degrees
Celsius from 1910 to 1980. That’s it. No details on fluctuations,
statistical significance, or r-squared values. As Virginia
climatologist Patrick J. Michaels wrote
for Cato in 2001, “With climate data, it’s easy to play the
standard game of picking a starting point in the record to prove a
point. Precisely, one can come up with 3 1/2 degrees of warming by
looking at data beginning in 1950, rather than considering the
entire history.”
A CLOSER LOOK CALLS warming in western Montana into doubt. Michaels
examined the history of the Western Montana Climatological Division
and said, “Inspection of the entire summer history yields no
statistically significant warming whatsoever.”
The Great Falls National Weather Service office’s report goes further than that. Rather than a
steady increase, average annual temperatures in the area show a
decline into the late 1920s, then an increase into the early 1940s,
then a decline until the late 1950s. Temperatures rose in the
1960s, and dropped in the early 1970s, followed by fairly constant
temperatures in the late 1970s and 1980s before a sharp increase
just before 1990.
Perhaps Governor Schweitzer, with a state bureaucracy at his
disposal, couldn’t produce evidence of warming around Glacier
because it doesn’t exist. I looked at average temperatures at the
Kalispell airport from 1899 to 2005. For that period,
annual temperatures are quite steady — a linear regression even
yielded a negative slope. What about the much ballyhooed
summer temperatures? I looked at July and found the same thing. The
narrower period used by the USGS authors — 1910-1980 — produced
cooling results for annual and July temperatures. I would be
interested to see how the USGS authors found increasing
temperatures. We really don’t know if the area around Glacier is
warming.
What evidence is there for man-made global warming melting the
glaciers in Glacier National Park? None. Glaciers in the park have
been consistently melting since man laid eyes on them. They’ve come
and gone before, as they probably will again. Schweitzer is right
to admit that there’s nothing we can do now to stop the glaciers
from melting. But to claim them as a reason for his synfuels
proposal is awfully arrogant — for the man Schweitzer and for Man.
Global warming theory feeds a natural inclination to see ourselves
as the problem and/or the solution. In this case, we’re
neither.
