Patrick Michaels, author of Meltdown, is yet another global warming skeptic. How can Ian Lowe, President of the Australian Conservation Foundation, in his new book, A Big Fix, claim there are only five global warming skeptics in the whole world! 😉
Michael Duffy interviewed Michaels on ABC Radio National last night on climate change issues, click here for the transcript. The interview will be replayed tonight at about 9pm.
I was interested in Michaels comments on sealevel change and also snow and ice at the Arctic and Antarctic:
Michael Duffy: Patrick, let’s turn now to some of the alleged effects of global warming: are the ice caps melting?
Patrick Michaels: The North Pole ice, at the end of summer, is definitely on its way down. Remember though, when the sun goes down on the first day of fall at the North Pole it starts to refreeze very, very quickly. It’s really kind of misleading to say the polar ice caps are melting. What you really need to say is that there’s a big degradation of ice at the brief end of Polish summer… this is the North Pole. Having said that, remember that there is a raft of scientific literature that shows that from about 4,000 years before present, on back to at least 8000 and some of them go back to about 11,000 years before present, the northern Arctic was warmer than it is today by a couple of degrees.
Antarctica is a different story. For all the news stories you hear about the warming of Antarctica, every story that says Antarctica is warming is wrong. There is a small area in Antarctica, the Antarctic Peninsula, that little land that juts out towards South America that shows warming. But if you average across Antarctica
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.