Can't Hide An Agenda Behind Ice-hard Data
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday November 18, 2006
Stephen Kemp (Letters, November 16) sees me as an Antarctic scientist with a hidden agenda; a wolf in sheep's clothing. Because I spent some years working for the oil industry Mr Kemp presumes I am on a secret mission to tell everyone not to worry about sea-level change and keep burning oil. It may surprise Mr Kemp that there is much real data suggesting we are seriously depleting the world's economically accessible oil reserves and that the "oil" crisis in the next few decades is far more serious and immediate for mankind's increasing populations than any crisis caused by sea-level change.
There can be no argument that the world has enjoyed a very hot period since the mid-1980s and that this will cause economic hardships in many areas of the world. The problem for Mr Kemp and all concerned is that greenhouse computer models have been churning out predictions of sea-level change for some time and, for some reason or other, they do not seem to be getting it right. It is incontrovertible that ice sheets, glaciers and snowlines are receding in Europe, Iceland, New Zealand and North and South America, but that melting of ice and snow will not supply enough ice to make any change to sea levels. You have to radically decrease the Greenland and/or Antarctic ice sheets to change sea level and the present decline of those ice sheets as measured by NASA's satellites indicates rates of about only seven millimetres a year. Have we reached a stage that to be an environmentalist one has to have a whole package of beliefs or be excommunicated from the "club"? If I am a heretic with an agenda in reporting NASA data factually (and Mr Kemp did not question the data or the maths), maybe NASA and I have both lost the faith and we should both be excommunicated. Dr Howard Brady Oatley
© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald
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