A SNAPSHOT IN TIME

Making Backyard Ice In An Age Of Global Warming

By Todd Wilkinson, 12-24-06

	Photo by Todd Wilkinson

While you are reading these words, I am putting our Montana backyard on ice.

I've been out past midnight for a couple of weeks now trying to make peace with the natural elements and uneven contours of frozen sod in order to make a skating rink for the kids.

I must say that it is starting to look sweet as it shines in the end-of-day sunlight.

We've got a hockey net at one end with webbing strung across the trees to prevent flying pucks from reaching the neighbor's windows, though I fear this makeshift Maginot Line will ultimately prove futile.

We also have face-off dots layered into the surface for my son's pick-up games with friends over the holidays. And in a corner glistens a perfectly-smooth patch where my daughter carves turns and pirouettes.

Making outdoor ice in an age of global warming is going to get trickier.

What passes today as a modest extravagance in attempting to defy the gusts of warm Chinook winds that blow through in January and inevitably will turn this project into puddles is nothing compared to the epic struggle in the mountains between glaciers and the rising global thermostat.

Like ancient mystics, we native-born northerners speak of "old fashioned" seasons when snow was roof deep, days of bitter cold lasted for interminable stretches, and gardens couldn't be planted til June. We talk amongst ourselves of being able to skate on frozen lakes early around Thanksgiving and on natural ice later into the winter than we do now.

The vertical spine of the Rockies has been a frigid oasis in the West.

The manifestations of winter may appear unchanging, but old timers and peer-reviewed scientists know better. They sense the shift in their salty bones and in the metrics of precise measurements.

Decades from now when the glaciers are memorialized in our oral tradition, the same way that Native Americans speak of free-ranging bison in their origin stories, I wonder what our kids will remember of winter?

Maybe I'm being selfish in recreating an artificial skating pond out back and clicking digital photos of the kids playing shinny during Christmas week as we did in the sixties and seventies, but I want them to have more than a mental recollection of how it is, and was.

On this side of the picture window which overlooks the modest rink, I have two file cabinets full of scientific reports and studies I've accumulated dating back to the early 1990s on climate change.

Last week in Washington, D.C., I had a long conversation with former U.S. Senator Tim Wirth of Colorado, who today is president of the UN Foundation created by Ted Turner with an unprecedented $1 billion donation to help elevate the quality of life for less-fortunate people on the planet but in environmentally sensitive, sustainable ways.

It was Sen. Wirth and others, including Al Gore, who held the first formal public hearings on climate change in the nation's capital years ago.

Most humans understand that growing emissions of greenhouse gases are raising the average temperature, warming it in most places and maybe cooling small pockets of the Earth in the future where ocean currents may get disrupted.

When one hears partisan skeptics baying about uncertainty, touting "experts" like John Stossel or the think tanks fronted by the oil industry, or from a relative handful of credible climatologists who represent a very, very small minority, I think of the farce presented in the film "Thank You For Smoking." The movie is a brilliant entertaining satire that would bring a smile to the face of Voltaire. Rent it if you can.

Fictional tobacco industry lobbyist Nick Naylor finds himself in a dilemma. He wants to be a paragon of virtue in the eyes of his son—teaching him right from wrong— and yet, while going on business trips to earn his paycheck, Naylor testifies before Congress as a hired gun for Big Tobacco, denying the horrific effects of smoking, trying to scam a deal in Hollywood that'll bring cigarettes back into vogue by glamorizing them on the big screen and hooking impressionable kids, including perhaps the friends of his son.

A classical moral dilemma pitting rational self interest (what some might call greed) against telling the truth? Sure, there's some of that, but this deception, like the one involving the so-called skeptics of climate change, assumes a more sinister quality.

Every credible journalist I know who has written about climate change has done their homework in assessing the evidence.

Does this make them biased or partisan or, my favorite, "alarmist"?

A few weeks ago, some would argue that a real-life equivalent of fictional tobacco lobbyist Naylor, Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, mentioned in his waning tenure as chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, that maybe he was exaggerating when he said human-caused climate change was "one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American public."

Inhofe declared in his Jurassic swan song that instead of climate change being a hoax, those who are swayed by THE SCIENCE—including a majority of Americans, according to polls—are, in his mind, "delusional."

Of course, by making such assertions, maligning the very process of accumulating empirical knowledge, upon which breakthroughs in medicine, technology, and ultimately better-informed governance have been based, Inhofe is attacking American-style Democracy itself, the very underpinning being free speech.

If McCarthyism taught this nation anything it is that intimidation, blackballing, and harassment of individuals just because they dare to challenge authority, runs counter to the interests of an informed society.

On global warming, there has been strains of McCarthyism confronting both the scientists whose research has corroborated the existence of climate change and the scientists who say their data refutes it, or at least does not tie it to human causes.

What's fascinating is that Mr. Inhofe over the last few years, as leader of the most powerful environmental committee in Congress, has not allowed free, open, honest discourse about the science of climate change in the hearings he's presided over. He has, however, summoned people like science fiction novelist Michael Crichton to be an expert witness.

He also has refused to acknowledge just how little the number of climate change skeptics is.

Inhofe and others have suggested that climate experts from NASA (which put men on the Moon and probes on Mars), the U.S. National Academies of Science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, researchers from the leading universities in the world, the pro-business governments of most nations on Earth, conservative sportsmen's groups like the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, CEOs who are careful in rendering conclusions, and the conservative insurance industry, have got it wrong.

Even the senator, whose tenure in politics HAS BEEN aided significantly by campaign contributions from oil, gas, and coal lobbyists who have been instrumental in stalling action on addressing CO 2 emissions, cannot stop the mass movement of corporate executives, including those from Wal-Mart, BP, Dominion Power and IBM, from saying that climate change must be addressed through alternative energy, at the very least for business, national security and moral reasons.

An Apollo or Manhattan project targeted at rapidly advancing alternative energy makes sense with or without the loom of global warming, Sen. Wirth told me.
He added that when the peer-reviewed science of climate is factored in
and the destabilizing consequences for civilization in the future are weighed—the costs of New Orleans style exoduses from coastal areas; costs of treatment for expanding human diseases; disruption to clean water supplies and food delivery etc) it is as important to vigorously question the credentials of the so-called skeptics as it is to buy into their specious counterpoints.

What is the agenda of the skeptics, who is paying for the data they use, how are they benefiting financially and what proof can they produce other than citations an internet site here or there linked directly or indirectly to lobbyists like the fictional Naylor for whom it is in their personal interest to ensure oil and coal are unbothered by other ways of approaching energy production?

On a personal note, here's another question for readers: For those of us whose mutual funds are invested in oil-related activities—including drilling, auto and air transportation companies, and plastics—are we willing to modify our portfolios to accommodate alternatives to petroleum?

When we look into the eyes of our children and grandchildren, do we place our own rational self interest above the kind of a world they will have to cope with?

Critically acclaimed author Tim Flannery, a paleo-geo historian who wrote The Weather Makers, says he has no problems with dissent.

Dissent is good.

Dissent is necessary.

Dissent, in fact, is the foundation of the peer-review process by which the overwhelming majority opinion on the science of global warming has been built.

What's interesting to note, he says, is that the scientists studying global warming were initially dissenters themselves in the eyes of other scientists who advanced the hypothesis decades ago of global cooling but their prediction of another Ice Age has not withstood rigorous challenge and the growing contravening evidence of warming.

When dissenters refuse to subject their own preconceived notions to scrutiny by thinkers who are learned on the subject, their so-called dissent becomes nothing more than conjecture and thin-iced opinion.

Indeed, I invite—I encourage you— to follow the instructions of Pete Geddes of the free-market Libertarian think-tank, Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment. Geddes advises us to Google the words "uncertainty" and "climate change" ostensibly to prove that the science of climate change is rife with uncertainty and that society should wait to take action.

Here's an example of what you find when you do the search: A report from the 2005 U.S. Congress written with heavy influence from the committee of Sen. James Inhofe and advisors related to the fossil fuel industry he enlisted as experts; a number of skeptical citations several years old, and reams of statements and articles offered up by the think tankers.

Just for fun, also Google the words "uncertainty", "cigarette smoking", and "cancer" and you'll find references to studies, underwritten by the tobacco industry, that deny there are serious health consequences from lighting up.

Do the same thing with asbestos and cancer. Unfortunately for the people who believe their ability to Google somehow makes them an expert on climate change, it does not. The experts are those scientists who have subjected their theories to peer review and are today truly alarmed by what the science is telling them.

The science on climate change is no less convincing than the science that existed on the health effects of tobacco when executives from the major cigarette makers went before Congress and denied the link between their product and lung cancer.

Go back in history a little ways and the same tactics—of carefully orchestrating confusion, obfuscation, and ignorance—were employed by the tobacco industry to ensure their profits were unaffected as millions of their customers died.

The free-marketers and the provincial skeptics doing their Google searches from computers in the American West, write about the blessing of cheap goods sold at Wal-Mart—products manufactured in Chinese factories powered by coal-fired electricity. They tout those goods as helping to elevate the lives of all humankind, but have they ever surveyed firsthand what they are talking about? Would they want their kids to be breathing in the foul Chinese air or scrambling to find potable water?

What they write about in the abstract is detached from reality. There is a price being paid for the luxurious consumer lives we Americans enjoy and the bill is coming due first on the Chinese and second on the atmosphere all of us share.

As I watch my son and daughter wheel across the backyard rink with a puck on their sticks, I ponder the two file cabinets full of scientific documentation confirming human-caused climate change and, near it, just a single drawer of credible studies cited by the skeptics.

I know that I've given the dissenters their fair day in the sun. But how is history going to judge the morals of Mr. Inhofe and members of the Bush Administration on their inaction?

Is the federal response to New Orleans what they have in mind when they say the best reaction to climate change is "adaptive management"? As they tout the opening of new shipping lanes for trade through the melting polar ice caps, is this what they have in mind to offset the swamping under of hundreds of millions of humans worldwide who live along coastal areas?

Is this what they coldly call "externalities" and "tradeoffs"?

Midway through this century when the glaciers in the mountains are gone, and the snow pack has been reduced to a fraction of what it used to be, and the question of how we spend our recreation time becomes the least of our kids' concerns, will anyone remember the final wails of the deniers and the rhetorical tripe of the think tankers?

Maybe someday they, too, will serve as fodder for characters in a climate change movie modeled after Naylor in Thank You For Smoking.

As for the kids who knew real winters, their solace may be that for a few moments, once upon a time at the turn of the 20th century, they dwelled on outdoor Christmas ice before the picture of their memory was snapped.

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