FAIRFAX, VIRGINIA, SEPTEMBER 2, 1997---Vice President Albert Gore's contention that Montana glaciers are shrinking because of global warming, a claim first reported in the Wall Street Journal on August 26, is scheduled to be repeated today by the Vice President in a speech at Montana's Glacier National Park. This represents a considerable concession on the part of climate activists, according to atmospheric physicist S. Fred Singer, former director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service and now president of The Science & Environmental Policy Project in Fairfax, Virginia. "Unable to sustain claims of melting ice caps, sea levels halfway up the Washington Monument, droughts, hurricanes, pestilence, etc., activists have reduced the debate to a defense of Montana tourism," says Singer. "That's a concern to be sure, but of a somewhat lower order."
Glaciers have been retreating for more than 10,000 years, a phenomenon generally regarded as a good thing. When glaciers showed a strong resurgence between 1450 and 1850--as Smithsonian visiting scientist Alan Cutler reported recently in the Washington Post ("The Little Ice Age: When Global Cooling Gripped the World," 8/13)--the slowly flowing ice engulfed farms and crushed whole villages. Crops failed, leading to widespread famine in Norway, Scotland, and other northern areas.
"There was a strong warming trend between 1850 and 1940, as the world recovered from the Little Ice Age," says Singer. "But there has been no significant global warming since 1940 and, according to weather satellite data, none at all in the last two decades." The regional record tracks pretty much the same. According to the National Climatic Data Center of the U.S. Department of Commerce, average annual temperatures in the Glacier National Park area of Montana have shown no warming trend over the last century.
"To make a case that glaciers are retreating, and that the problem is global warming, is very hard to do," says glaciologist Keith Echelmeyer of the University of Alaska's Geophysical Institute. "The physics are very complex. There is much more involved than just the climate response."
The World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, in a paper published in Science in 1989, noted that between 1926 and 1960, more than 70 percent of 625 mountain glaciers in the United States, Soviet Union, Iceland, Switzerland, Austria, and Italy were retreating. After 1980, however, 55 percent of these same glaciers were advancing. Echelmeyer notes that, in Alaska, some large glaciers continue to advance in the very same areas where most are retreating.
"The natural wonders at our tourist sites do change over time," says Singer. "Geothermal activity in Yellowstone has become somewhat less reliable in recent years. Niagara Falls moves more than 3 feet upriver each year--328 feet in the last century--because of erosion." He added that the National Park Service announced just yesterday (Sept. 1) that more than 112 million people visited the national parks in the first half of 1997, an increase of 5.3 million over the same period in 1996--and this despite a hefty increase in fees at many of these parks.
"The possibility that global temperatures could rise because of an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a concern that needs to be monitored," says Singer. "But there has been no indication in the last century that we've seen anything other than natural climate fluctuations. Both greenhouse theory and computer models predict that global warming should be more rapid in the polar regions than anywhere else," he says, "but in July the Antarctic experienced the coldest weather on record."
"Without convincing evidence of a trend, we need to weigh concerns about global warming against the very real possibility that proposed restrictions on energy use could have a detrimental impact on much of humankind. We should not risk ruining national economies, driving manufacturing and other industrial operations into less developed and less regulated countries--with the perverse effect of destroying the environment in those countries--and ultimately costing citizens hundreds of billions of dollars without reasonable proof of an extreme environmental problem. And we certainly shouldn't risk it in support of tourism, particularly when tourism in our national parks seems to be doing quite well."
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