by Oli Usher
Last Sunday, the Observer published a series of photographs showing a dramatic reduction in summer ice coverage in the sea north of Alaska. The photos were billed as the “secret evidence of global warming [which] Bush tried to hide.”
The article is damning. Photos taken by American military satellites during George W Bush’s presidency, the newspaper explains, were classified by the White House because they exposed the dishonesty of the administration’s line that climate change was unproven. The suppression of the photos fits in to a consistent pattern of spin and disinformation during the former President’s tenure that reveals a complete disregard for scientific evidence.
Mercifully, Barack Obama’s record so far is a great improvement. But in more than one way, the release of the photos has shown echoes of the administration that kept them secret. Just as their suppression was politicised, so was their release; and just as the media has grossly exaggerated arguments against climate change, the coverage of the affair in the Observer and elsewhere has hardly been exemplary.
The timing of the photos’ release is particularly curious. Yes, they were requested by the National Academy of Sciences, which is nobody’s stooge. But when, at the best of times, such requests are usually processed in months, that the publication of the photos followed within hours is certainly worthy of note. The timestamps on the files show they were ready for release months ago. Why now?
It is surely no coincidence that the release of the photos came just as Obama’s flagship American Clean Energy and Security Act was running into trouble. After passing the House of Representatives with only a razor-thin margin of 219-212 in June, the bill is now at risk of being defeated in the Senate despite the sizable Democratic majority there. The proposed law would introduce a European Union-style emissions trading system in the United States, where companies have to buy licenses to pollute – something deeply unpopular with Republicans but also a large minority of the President’s own party.
So what could be better for Obama than to shore up support within the Democrats, polarise the argument and isolate the Republicans by revealing the malfeasance of their former President – while at the same time doing some good for US science? Machiavelli would be proud.
And what of the media? The Observer presented the photos as “demonstrat[ing] starkly how global warming is changing the Arctic”.
But the photos don’t (quite) do that. They do plenty of things which are interesting to climate scientists, not least by letting them measure the extent and number of pools of melt-water that form on the surface of the ice. They also give interesting snapshots of sea ice and glaciers throughout the Arctic region.
But one thing they don’t show is incontrovertible evidence of receding sea ice.
The most dramatic looking of the photos, the ones chosen by the Observer (and other news organisations) to illustrate the story, and which appear on the cover of this week’s Tribune, show two views of the settlement of Barrow on the northern coast of Alaska. In the first, the sea is covered with a thick sheet of ice, leaving only a narrow, iceberg-strewn channel along the coast. In the second photo, the ice has completely vanished.
It looks impressive, but the suggestion that anything at all can be extrapolated from any two years of ice cover, let alone two consecutive years as these photos show, should raise laughs from anyone who knows anything about climate science. No one claims global warming is that rapid, and in any case, changes in the climate are measured in long trends over decades, not in the more or less random fluctuations from one year to the next. Some years are warm, some years are cold – and that has nothing to do with climate change.
In fairness, the misrepresentation here was not by the US Government – the released documents note that “observations of sea ice position reveal considerable year-to-year variability” and that the Barrow photos offer “information on smaller-scale properties of ice” rather than any global insight into the changing climate.
And besides, these new photos are an addition to an already overwhelming body of evidence which supports the alarming conclusions of climate scientists – they do not need to be taken on their own.
Nonetheless, it’s a bit worrying when those defending science feel the need to over-egg the pudding. Nobody should ever have to exaggerate evidence for climate change. There is no need to as the evidence is strong enough to stand on its own. But equally importantly, hyperbole is hugely counterproductive. Those who insist there is a conspiracy and that global warming is a hoax get a lot of airtime (including a recent front cover of The Spectator so bizarre it has to be seen to be believed), and they love picking little holes in their opponents’ arguments. So why make things easy for them?
The sceptics’ arguments are flimsy, but that’s no reason to try to emulate them. To put it bluntly, so what if climate scientists and their supporters are held to a higher standard of evidence and ethics than the coalition of crooks and nutters who choose to deny global warming? We’re right and they are wrong and we have nothing to fear from the truth.
