Global Warming - Nothing But Beliefs

Two weeks ago I posted a copy of an e-mail which Michael T. Eckhart, the President of the American Council On Renewable Energy (ACORE) sent to Dr. Marlo Lewis. In his e-mail Mr. Eckhart used a few strong expressions referring to his opponent's views and threatened to denounce Dr. Lewis as a liar and charlatan if he produces one more editorial against so called "global warming".

The posting provoked an angry response from one of the blog readers. While I wasn't sure Mr. Eckhart would ever read the response, I allowed it to be posted on my blog. The letter and the comment were however traced by many through Google search, so one of the ACORE executives found it today and posted his own comment, suggesting that the correspondence between Dr. Marlo Lewis and Mike Eckhart should be taken in context. The anonymous poster provided some background information to explain what caused Mr. Eckhart to lose his temper.

Mr. Eckhart starts his summary by saying he believes that global warming is occurring. Well, I believe that such claims make my slippers laugh. If we're dealing with science, let's talk about facts, not beliefs. The facts however contradict Mr. Eckhart's claims.

One of his claims is that if the ice bank on Greenland melts, the seas could rise as much as 20 feet. Let's do some math. Earth's water area is 361,126,400 km². So, in order for the sea levels to raise by 20 feet (which is 6m 09.6cm), we need 361,126,400km²*0.006096km=2,201,426.5km³ (cubic kilometers) of ice melting. Could there be that much ice on Greenland alone? Even if the ice was covering all of Greenland (2,166,086 km²), the ice cap must have been over a kilometer thick. But since only 81% of Greenland's surface (1,755,637km²) is covered with ice, the ice cap needs to be 1254 meters thick to cause the sea level raise by 6.1 meters if melted.

But what actually happens with the sea levels? Not only there's no sign of them raising, but surprisingly, in most port cities of Canada, the sea levels are down 1cm compared to previous decades' averages. As for Greenland's ice cap that concerns Mr. Eckhart so much:

Just in time for worldwide concerts to draw attention to the planet’s imminent doom at the hands of anthropogenic global warming, a new find in Greenland suggests that much of the hysteria in Al Gore’s schlockumentary “An Inconvenient Truth” has absolutely no basis in scientific fact.

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So there was another global warming on Greenland. And then there was the Little Ice Age that drove the Vikings out. Greenland which apparently used to be green in the Viking days has now 4/5 of its territory covered by glaciers, while Iceland apparently used to have much more ice 1000 years ago than it has now. What kind of SUVs did the Vikings have?

Mr. Eckhart suggests that the main reason why Dr. Lewis argues against man-made global warming is his opposition to big government. Well, maybe Dr. Lewis' statements that the environmentalists falsely use the threat of climate change to gain control of the power of government actually make sense. After all, this whole debate does seem to be more about carbon taxes and international regulatory entities, rather than about actual measures to fight air pollution.