The Arctic, like the rest of the world, experiences natural cycles, and some of them can be pretty radical. While most of the world enjoys a pretty stable 24-hour cycle of sunrise and sunset, with the sun visible roughly half of each day, a little longer in summer, a little shorter in winter, the Arctic (like the Antarctic) goes from 24-hour sunlight in mid-summer to 24-hour darkness in mid-winter.

Long-term geologic records indicate that it also experiences larger swings from warmer to colder than other parts of the world. While the rest of the world, recovering from the Little Ice Age, warmed about 0.8C over roughly the last 130 years, perhaps 0.4C of that since the mid-1970s (which followed cooling from about 1940 to 1970), the Arctic warmed considerably more from the mid-1970s onward, perhaps two to three times as much.

Solar cycles (solar energy output, solar magnetic wind output), galactic cosmic ray influx (modulated by solar magnetic wind), ocean currents (the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which flipped from negative, cooling, to positive, warming, around 1977 and is likely to flip back about now, ushering in a cooler period; the El Nino Southern Oscillation; the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation), and other natural phenomena have caused global warming and cooling at various times throughout earth’s history, and the effects in the polar regions are always more radical than in the temperate and equatorial zones.

One thing we know is that whatever Alaska’s average temperature trends might have been lately, there’s been no statistically significant global warming for the last 18 years and 7 months, which means Alaska’s temperatures over that period can’t be attributed to global warming—manmade or otherwise.

But that didn’t stop President Obama from blaming all of Alaska’s warming, and all the phenomena associated with it (melting permafrost, reduced sea ice, coastal erosion, and more) on manmade global warming, hence turning it all into a rationale for his job-killing, cost-raising, impoverishing climate and energy policies.

Particularly galling was a comment he made about the little village of Kivalina. Its 400 or so Inupiat residents perch perilously on an island on northern Alaska’s coast. In recent years, declining sea ice has left it more susceptible to wave-driven erosion, so its residents have voted to relocate. Obama blames Kivalina’s problems on sea-level rise driven by anthropogenic global warming (AGW)—despite the fact that the rate of sea-level rise globally hasn’t accelerated compared with its rate for centuries, even millennia, past.

As a way of driving home his point that such situations justify his climate policy, Obama said, “Think about it. If another country threatened to wipe out an American town, we’d do everything in our power to protect it.”

Probably so. But “another country” isn’t analogous to the massive forces of nature that drive the cycles of global warming and cooling and everything else linked to them. And even in war, protection doesn’t necessarily mean erasing the threat. It can mean eluding it.

Kivalina’s problems certainly justify some expense for relocation, to elude the threat, and the costs of relocation will be minuscule on a national scale (though likely high compared with its residents’ combined income—welcome to reality). But do they justify Obama’s climate policies, costing hundreds of billions of dollars a year to achieve CO2 emission reductions that will have no measurable effect on global average temperature a century from now, let alone any effect whatever on what threatens Kivalina?

To put it another way, if Kivalina were located at the foot of a gigantic, active volcano, and seismic evidence showed the volcano were about to erupt massively, would Obama recommend evacuating the villagers at little cost with almost certain success, or trying to prevent the volcano at a cost of trillions of dollars with practically zero chance of success?

Using Kivalina’s peril to justify policies to mitigate global warming is as ridiculous as that.

 

 

Featured image by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.