The Current Wisdom is a series of monthly posts in which Senior Fellow Patrick J. Michaels reviews interesting items on global warming in the scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press.

The Current Wisdom only comments on science appearing in the refereed, peer-reviewed literature, or that has been peer-screened prior to presentation at a scientific congress.

History to Repeat: Greenland’s Ice to Survive, United Nations to Continue Holiday Party

This year’s installment of the United Nations’ annual climate summit (technically known as the 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change) has come and gone in Cancun. Nothing substantial came of it policy-wise; just the usual attempts by the developing world to shake down our already shaky economy in the name of climate change. News-wise probably the biggest story was that during the conference, Cancun broke an all time daily low temperature record. Last year’s confab in Copenhagen was pelted by snowstorms and subsumed in miserable cold. President Obama attended, failed to forge any meaningful agreement, and fled back to beat a rare Washington blizzard. He lost.

But surely as every holiday season now includes one of these enormous jamborees, dire climate stories appeared daily. Polar bear cubs are endangered! Glaciers are melting!!

Or so beat the largely overhyped drums, based upon this or that press release from Greenpeace or the World Wildlife Fund.

And, of course, no one bothered to mention a blockbuster paper appearing in Nature the day before the end of the Cancun confab, which reassures us that Greenland’s ice cap and glaciers are a lot more stable than alarmists would have us believe. That would include Al Gore, fond of his lurid maps showing the melting all of Greenland’s ice submerging Florida.

Ain’t gonna happen.

The disaster scenario goes like this: Summer temperatures in Greenland are warming, leading to increased melting and the formation of ephemeral lakes on the ice surface. This water eventually finds a crevasse and then a way down thousands of feet to the bottom of a glacier, where it lubricates the underlying surface, accelerating the seaward march of the ice. Increase the temperature even more and massive amounts deposit into the ocean by the year 2100, catastrophically raising sea levels.

According to Christian Schoof of the University of British Columbia (UBC), “The conventional view has been that meltwater permeates the ice from the surface and pools under the base of the ice sheet….This water then serves as a lubricant between the glacier and the earth underneath it….”

And, according to Schoof, that’s just not the way things work. A UBC press release about his Nature article noted that he found that “a steady meltwater supply from gradual warming may in fact slow down the glacier flow, while sudden water input could cause glaciers to speed up and spread.”

Indeed, Schoof finds that sudden water inputs, such as would occur with heavy rain, are responsible for glacial accelerations, but these last only one or a few days.

The bottom line? A warming climate has very little to do with accelerating ice flow, but weather events do.

How important is this? According to University of Leeds Professor Andrew Shepherd, who studies glaciers via satellite, “This study provides an elegant solution to one of the two key ice sheet instability problems” noted by the United Nations in their last (2007) climate compendium. “It turns out that, contrary to popular belief, Greenland ice sheet flow might not be accelerated by increased melting after all,” he added.

I’m not so sure that those who hold the “popular belief” can explain why Greenland’s ice didn’t melt away thousands of years ago. For millennia, after the end of the last ice age (approximately 11,000 years ago) strong evidence indicates that the Eurasian arctic averaged nearly 13°F warmer in July than it is now.

That’s because there are trees buried and preserved in the acidic Siberian tundra, and they can be carbon dated. Where there is no forest today—because it’s too cold in summer—there were trees, all the way to the Arctic Ocean and even on some of the remote Arctic islands that are bare today. And, back then, thanks to the remnants of continental ice, the Arctic Ocean was smaller and the North American and Eurasian landmasses extended further north.

That work was by Glen MacDonald, from UCLA’s Geography Department. In his landmark 2000 paper in Quaternary Research, he noted that the only way that the Arctic could become so warm is for there to be a massive incursion of warm water from the Atlantic Ocean. The only “gate” through which that can flow is the Greenland Strait, between Greenland and Scandinavia.

So, Greenland had to have been warmer for several millennia, too.

Now let’s do a little math to see if the “popular belief” about Greenland ever had any basis in reality.

In 2009 University of Copenhagen’s B. M. Vinther and 13 coauthors published the definitive history of Greenland climate back to the ice age, studying ice cores taken over the entire landmass. An exceedingly conservative interpretation of their results is that Greenland was 1.5°C (2.7°F) warmer for the period from 5,000‑9000 years ago, which is also the warm period in Eurasia that MacDonald detected. The integrated warming is given by multiplying the time (4,000 years) by the warming (1.5°), and works out (in Celsius) to 6,000 “degree-years.” 

Now let’s assume that our dreaded emissions of carbon dioxide spike the temperature there some 4°C. Since we cannot burn fossil fuel forever, let’s put this in over 200 years. That’s a pretty liberal estimate given that the temperature there still hasn’t exceeded values seen before in the 20^th century. Anyway, we get 800 (4 x 200) degree-years.

If the ice didn’t come tumbling off Greenland after 6,000 degree-years, how is it going to do so after only 800? The integrated warming of Greenland in the post-ice-age warming (referred to as the “climatic optimum” in textbooks published prior to global warming hysteria) is over seven times what humans can accomplish in 200 years. Why do we even worry about this?

So we can all sleep a bit better. Florida will survive. And, we can also rest assured that the UN will continue its outrageous holiday parties, accomplishing nothing, but living large. Next year’s is in Durban, South Africa, yet another remote warm spot hours of Jet‑A away.

References:

MacDonald, G. M., et al., 2000. Holocene treeline history and climatic change across Northern Eurasia. Quaternary Research 53, 302–311.

Schoof, C., 2010. Ice-sheet acceleration driven by melt supply variability. Nature 468, 803–805.

Vinther, B.M., et al., 2009. Holocene thinning of the Greenland ice sheet. Nature 461, 385–388.

Mercatus Center senior research fellow (and Cato alum) Jerry Brito has an interesting Wikileaks post on Tech Liberation Front.

The most vocal and strident reaction against Wikileaks has come from folks we can identify as neocons. Aside from demanding that the U.S. hunt down Julian Assange, Charles Krauthammer wrote, “Putting U.S. secrets on the Internet, a medium of universal dissemination new in human history, requires a reconceptualization of sabotage and espionage — and the laws to punish and prevent them.” Meanwhile Marc Thiessen, ignoring the distributed nature of WikiLeaks, called for the U.S. to “rally a coalition of the willing to defeat WikiLeaks by shutting down its servers and cutting off its finances.” And William Kristol, for his part, asked rhetorically, “Why can’t we disrupt and destroy WikiLeaks in both cyberspace and physical space, to the extent possible? Why can’t we warn others of repercussions from assisting this criminal enterprise hostile to the United States?”

Jerry is kind to these commentators, who will find fighting the Internet like fighting the wind. From the right, they join voices on the left who argue for limitations on Internet communications in the name of privacy and human dignity.

Where do libertarians stand? (Or “cyber-libertarians,” if we must.)

Says Brito,

To me, libertarians simply have a narrower view of what information control is desirable, with harm to individuals as the relevant standard. They also prefer individual choices and self-regulation to state control. And to the extent that state control is unavoidable, they want to ensure robust due process and protection of individual liberties.

Today POLITICO Arena askes:

How badly does today’s ObamaCare ruling set back the Democrat’s signature domestic achievement? Should Tenth Amendment enthusiasts take heart that other federal laws with which state officials disagree can be struck down?

My response:

A quick reading of Judge Henry Hudson’s opinion today striking the “individual mandate” provision of ObamaCare gives hope to those of us who have long urged, more broadly, for a restoration of limited constitutional government. As Judge Hudson put in granting summary judgment to Virginia, “the legislative process must still operate within constitutional bounds.”

The administration had argued that Congress had authority to enact and enforce the individual mandate to buy health insurance under its power to regulate interstate commerce. But Judge Hudson responded that “Neither the Supreme Court nor any federal circuit court of appeals has extended Commerce Clause powers to compel an individual to involuntarily enter the stream of commerce by purchasing a commodity in the private market.” Indeed, he noted, the administration’s reasoning could apply to “transportation, housing, or nutritional decisions. This broad definition of economic activity [to include inactivity] subject to congressional regulation lacks logical limitation.” The federal government remains, in short, one of delegated, enumerated, and thus limited powers, notwithstanding the leviathan that surrounds us today.

This is a significant setback for the administration, not least because Judge Hudson cites to a similar argument set forth by federal district Judge Roger Vinson in Vinson’s October 14 opinion denying the administration’s motion to dismiss the ObamaCare suit brought against it by 21 states, with more to follow. There will be more litigation on these issues, of course, but for today, at least, the Tenth Amendment and the limited government it implies are alive and well.

Yes, Virginia, there are limits on federal power.

Today is a good day for liberty. And a bad day for those who say that Congress is the arbiter of Congress’s powers. By striking down the individual mandate, Judge Hudson vindicated the idea that ours is a government of delegated and enumerated — and thus limited — powers. Even if the Supreme Court has broadened over the years the scope of Congress’s authority to legislate under the guise of regulating interstate commerce or to tax for the general welfare, “the constraining principles articulated in this line of cases… remains viable and applicable to the immediate dispute.”

In short, we have come far from the days when pundits dismissed the lawsuits challenging the new health care law as frivolous political gimmicks. This is just one district court — whose opinion is not binding on the judges who will now consider the government’s appeal — but we can now see the day where this unprecedented assertion of federal power is definitively rejected as fundamentally contrary to our constitutional order.

As Judge Hudson said, “Despite the laudable intentions of Congress in enacting a comprehensive and transformative health care regime, the legislative process must still operate within constitutional bounds. Salutatory goals and creative drafting have never been sufficient to offset an absence of enumerated powers.”

ObamaCare has always hung by an absurdity. ObamaCare supporters claim that the Constitution’s words “Congress shall have the Power…To regulate Commerce…among the several States” somehow give Congress the power to compel Americans to engage in commerce. This ruling exposes that absurdity, and exposes as desperate political spin the Obama administration’s claims that these lawsuits are frivolous.

This ruling’s shortcoming is that it did not overturn the entire law. Anyone familiar with ObamaCare knows that Congress would not have approved any of its major provisions absent the individual mandate. The compulsion contained in the individual mandate was the main reason that most Democrats voted in favor of the law. Yet the law still passed Congress by the narrowest of all margins — by one vote, in the dead of night, on Christmas Eve — and required Herculean legislative maneuvering to overcome nine months of solid public opposition. The fact that Congress did not provide for a “severability clause” indicates that lawmakers viewed the law as one measure.

Despite that shortcoming, this ruling threatens not just the individual mandate, but the entire edifice of ObamaCare. The centerpiece of ObamaCare is a three-legged stool, comprised of the individual mandate, the government price controls that compress health insurance premiums, and the massive new subsidies to help Americans comply with the mandate. Knock out any of those three legs, and whole endeavor falls.

Moreover, the individual mandate is not the law’s only unconstitutional provision.

These lawsuits and the continuing legislative debate over ObamaCare are about more than health care. They are about whether the United States has a government of specifically enumerated powers, or whether the Constitution grants the federal government the power to do whatever the politicians please, subject only to a few specifically enumerated restraints. This ruling has pulled America back from that precipice.

On Saturday, Chris Edwards spent three-quarters of an hour discussing Cato’s Downsizing Government project on C‑SPAN’S Washington Journal program. Click here to watch the video.

At the Britannica blog, some thoughts on President Obama, the overreacher-in-chief, at the halfway point of his administration:

In a way, you have to give President Obama credit. In the face of manifest public opposition to most of his high-profile policies — the health-care bill, the automobile company takeovers, cap-and-trade, higher government spending — he pressed on and passed much of his ambitious, unpopular agenda. He said he’d rather be a “really good one-term president” than a “mediocre two-term president.” He may still escape that choice. But he certainly demonstrated that he was willing to sacrifice dozens of Democratic congressional seats in order to get a permanently larger federal government.…

As David Paul Kuhn wrote at RealClearPolitics, Obama’s activist agenda “has revived the enduring American challenge to the state.” Some of us hope that that revival of the small-government impulse in American politics — after the desert of the Bush years — will be President Obama’s most lasting legacy.

More Britannica bloggers on the first two years here.