Rhinocrisy

Without CO₂, we couldn’t enjoy the miracle of dandelion puffs.

Hedgehog points me to a pair of commercials produced by the Competitive Enterprise Institute^*, which, incredibly, seeks to rehabilitate carbon dioxide emissions. “Carbon dioxide - they call it pollution. We call it life.” I kid you not. Their selling point is that carbon dioxide isn’t so bad because we breathe it out. Who doesn’t like choking on their own waste gases?^†

The second of these commercials refers to some studies in Science that it suggests contradicts the recently publicized message that ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland are shrinking, and that we therefore shouldn’t worry about sea level rise (but should instead breathe in some of that wonderful carbon dioxide). The first of these studies was Johannessen, et al., “Recent Ice-Sheet Growth in the Interior of Greenland”. The second was Davis, et al., “Snowfall-Driven Growth in East Antarctic Ice Sheet Mitigates Recent Sea-Level Rise”. Both of these are from mid-2005. CEI might be correct to complain about the sensationalist nature of science reporting. I’ve griped about this in the past, and I’ve been annoyed in the past few days by the spate of bestiality-tinted stories about David Reich’s paper about the speciation history of chimps and humans, with headlines like “Did early humans and chimps interbreed?”. But it’s just plain wrong to present these papers as a counter to the idea that ice sheets are shrinking.

First, these studies (both of which rely on European radio satellite (ERS) data), while perfectly reasonable, are focused on subsets of Greenland and Antarctica. The former concludes that on average between 1992 and 2003, the ice sheet in Greenland increased on average, based on their observation of an increase in high-altitude (1500m +) regions. However, more recent analysis has demonstrated that glacial flow is accelerating - rapidly - and that this increasing flow of ice has dominated in the past five years.

The latter study discusses increased snowfall deposits in East Antarctica, which amount to about -0.12 mm/year of sea level rise. If you’ll recall from my last post on this subject, the West Antarctic ice sheet is decaying, producing a gain of about 0.4 mm/year of sea level rise. It’s pretty well agreed that the latter is definitely the dominating effect. At any rate one should still be alarmed by the fact that you’re getting increased snowfall in what was previously so cold it was the driest desert in the world.

These are not settled questions, by an means, of course. But one should at least find the very reasonable prospect of these observations being correct, and the concomittant catastrophe they imply, terribly frightening. Unless, that is, one happens to be a shill for the ostrich-like powers-that-be, desperately clinging to that source of power no matter what the consequences. We (the rest of the world), however, have no reason to consider ourselves beholden to fossil fuels. No reason to cling to the past, is there, “Competitive Enterprise” Institute?

^* Yes, that is me biking in the rain in that second commercial.

^† I have it on good authority that next month the CEI is planning on releasing a series of commercials encouraging us to rethink our attitudes towards urine. “Isn’t it about time YOU had a Golden Shower?”