Did Global Warming Cause Canadian Militarism?

As another example of a gratuitous throw-away lines, the recent article on Canada's redeployment of its military assets contained this gem:

Global warming is melting the passage — which is only navigable during a slim window in the summer — and exposing unexplored fishing stocks and an attractive shipping route. Commercial ships can shave off some 2,480 miles off the trip from Europe to Asia compared with the current routes through the Panama Canal.

(emphasis added.)


If you aren't following all of the claims for global warming, that one just slips right on by and becomes part of your database of conventional wisdom. Sometime later, you'll be in an argument confidently asserting that the North Pole is melting.

Now, if you are actually paying attention, you'll ask yourself, "But I thought Greenland's ice sheets were growing?" and "didn't a glaciologist claim that Global Warming would cause glaciers to destroy tiny little Wales because warm water would be diverted from the North Atlantic?" and "what about that recent study that showed that, in fact, there was no diversion of warm water from the North Atlantic because of Global Warming?"

If you knew about those studies, you might be a little skeptical about the confident plug for Global Warming in a political story.

And you would be right. Unsupported assertions of a drastically melting Arctic region notwithstanding, this study reached these conclusions:

It seems we understand the submarine results, and it seems that overall Arctic ice did not thin by 40%. We estimate that the actual reduction of Arctic ice was about 12%. Given statistical fluctuations, this is consistent with area reduction of 3% per decade observed from satellites.

Of the 12% ice volume lost, we estimate that about 9% was blown out into the Atlantic and only about 3% of the loss represents less freezing and/or more melting.

A caution must be included. Despite careful effort -- ongoing effort! -- to understand the many aspects of sea ice interaction with its environment, and despite efforts to estimate the detailed history of atmospheric forcing, there is very much that is not understood and not known and not adequately represented in computer models. Our projections from models are "best guesses" given present knowledge. In their details, the projections are surely mistaken. The pattern of thinning agrees with the submarine data only grossly but not in detail. We feel confident to say

Overall thinning of Arctic ice was much less than reported 40%.

The difference from submarine survey results was due to changes in wind patterns, moving ice from the central Arctic and primarily into the Canadian coastal region.

Changes due directly to warming (less freezing, more melting) played very minor roles.

A few moment's thought would tell you why these findings are not totally surprising. Global Warming hysterics often claim that Global Warming risks a weakening or shut down of the Gulf Stream, which will leave Europe with an Arctic climate. But if that were the case, one would expect a thicker ice cap, not a thinner ice cap, and one would expect lower sea levels.

Contrawise, Global Warming hysterics also argue for rising sea levels as ice caps melt, but that contradicts (a) the furst scary scenario and (b) the fact that in a warmer world more water would fall on continents that are still very cold - e.g. Greenland, Northern Canada and Siberia.

So, I guess the optimum Global Warming fantasy is that glaciers overrun Europe and North America while sea levels submerge everything in the tropics.