The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consulate at Bergen Norway.
Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone.
Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes.
Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the Gulf Stream still very warm.
Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.
Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.
Within a few years it is predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise and make most coast cities uninhabitable.
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Opps… neglected to mention that this report was from November 2, 1922 as reported by the AP and published in The Washington Post 96 years ago.
“This warming in Norway in 1922 must have been caused by Model T Ford emissions or possibly from horse, cattle and reindeer.”
Lake Geneva, Versoix, Switzerland
Storms with very cold temperatures – 12 deg C, 10 deg F and 100 kmh, 70 mph winds happen quickly while Lake Geneva is still warm enough to have no ice. Wind whips the lake water up and it freezes instantly on everything it lands on. This has happened in 2018, 2017, 2015, 2012, and 2005 as well as at various times in the distant past. The average annual temperature of Versoix is 9 deg. C, 48 deg. F
Lake Geneva, Versoix, Switzerland
Lake Geneva in the summer time.
Fossil fuels and their by-products have made incredible contributions to improving lives of billions of people around the world. More billions in poorer parts of the world desperately need fossil fuels, not solar ovens, solar panels, windmills or nuclear power. They shouldn’t have nuclear plants yet because their governments, economies and education systems are not stable and strong enough. The advanced economies of the world have enough problems trying to have stable governments.
Arguments that nuclear can be implemented universally in a short span of time, less than a century are absolutely unrealistic. Yes, France implemented a nearly all nuclear program in a few decades. But the rest of the world is clearly not France. Vive la France!
Advocates for nuclear power should not use the man-made global warming argument against fossil fuels for two reasons: a) the question of man-made global warming is far from settled and b) the poorer half of the world desperately needs fossil fuels. This has been the position of Environmentalists for Nuclear – USA, EFN-USA, since 2013.
EFN-USA encourages all nuclear organizations and individual nuclear professionals to drop the man-made climate change argument as a reason to promote nuclear so that nuclear power and all of nuclear’s by-products and services including nuclear medicine can develop quickly based on sound technical reasoning, not potentially wrong climate science. Nuclear professionals need to focus on overcoming licensing, technical and public perception challenges. The nuclear industry must finish developing advanced nuclear power and used fuel recycling technologies. France is very close to accomplishing that. Russia and China are racing to be number one and two. Go Canada, South Korea, Japan, South Africa, and everyone else! Hello Germany! Are you going with wind and solar or nuclear? The world needs all the fossil fuels and nuclear power it can get.
Kevin Muller says
The 1922 article is the only report of a local incident in Spitsbergen not a global report. 97% of scientists are proofing that it is caused by fossil fuel burning.
Nuclear power plants: how do you make sure that the radioactive waste is protected for maybe 50,000 years so that terrorists can’t build bombs with the material?
What do you do when it blows up: Tchernoby, Fukushima, etc.?
Why not using sustainable energy on local levels?
I appreciate non biased articles not following a personal, or political agenda.
Thank you.
E. Calvin Beisner says
Thanks for your interest. I’ll reply in sequence:
1. The point of Dr. Shanahan’s citing that article is that global warming alarmists frequently cite short-term, local warming trends and their consequences as evidence of long-term, global warming. Doing that is as illogical as doing the opposite. If they object to the presentation of this article, they should object to the opposite.
2. No, 97% of scientists aren’t proving that dangerous warming (which I assume is what you had in mind but didn’t specify) is caused by fossil fuel use. That’s a myth. See https://cornwallalliance.org/2017/06/whats-wrong-with-the-claim-that-97-of-climate-scientists-agree-about-global-warming/.
3. First, the safety record of nuclear energy is far, far better than for any competing energy source. Second, radioactive waste is a very, very poor source of material for bomb making. Third, insofar as it can be used for bomb making, we guard against that in the future just as we’ve been guarding against it in the past–which so far has been successful. Fourth, there are sources of fissionable material much more easily obtained by terrorists than waste from nuclear generating plants, so it doesn’t make much sense for them to go after that. (Are you aware that nuclear waste is a fraction of a percent pure radioactive material, while bomb-grade uranium or plutonium must be well over 99% pure, and the cost of the enrichment technology puts it way out of reach of terrorist organizations–which is why their far more likely path to having a nuclear weapon is to buy one on the black market from Russia or North Korea?)
4. Neither Chernobyl nor Fukushima blew up. Chernobyl suffered a major fire that broke the containment building. Only 32 deaths were properly attributable to it–and those not from radiation exposure but from fighting the fires. Chernobyl was also built to a design that would never have been approved in the West, and was being operated at the time by technicians who were drunk and had been playing a game of “chicken” for some time, trying to see how close they could come to meltdown without it’s actually happening. Fukushima didn’t blow up, there was no significant radiation released from it, and the deaths in the incident were because of the tsunami, not the reactor problems.Nuclear reactors can’t blow up like nuclear warheads–the purity of their radioactive materials is only a few percent, not the 99% plus needed for explosions.
5. We have no objection to using sustainable energy either locally or on regional or global scales. The difficulties come in defining what makes energy sustainable. Wind, solar, and other renewables are incapable of competing without subsidies with fossil fuels on a cost-per-unit-of-energy-produced basis. See https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2019/11/Kelly-1.pdf.
Patrick says
““Within a few years it is predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise and make most coastal cities uninhabitable.”
Cartoonishly obvious fabrication. Who falls for something like that?
Full article:
http://www.realclimate.org/images/arctic1922.png