Dear Editor, Has the Geological Society finally given up science in favour of propaganda? It would certainly seem so from April’s Soapbox (
Join the decarbonisation bandwagon,
Geoscientist 29 (3), 9, April 2019) where Martin Lack is permitted to make the case for decarbonisation by a mixture of unsubstantiated hearsay, hyperbole and innuendo.
To take a couple of examples:
Martin claims that ‘glacier melting has increased six-fold in the last 40 years’ (Rignot
et al., PNAS 2018). If he had investigated this claim further, he would have quickly discovered that there are differing views on the mass change of the Antarctic ice cap. An equally authoritative study by Zwally
et al. (
J. Glaciol. 2015) demonstrates that Antarctic ice mass has been increasing since 2002. Why the contradiction?
Well, because the change of mass is trivial compared with the total mass of the ice sheet, and we are arguing about decimal places. Even if Rignol
et al. are correct that Antarctica is losing mass at 250 Gt per annum, that represents less than one one-hundred-thousandth of the total ice mass. To all intents and purposes Zwally and Rignol are in agreement—Antarctic ice mass is more or less stable. So why the hysteria?
Martin also regurgitates the claim that the fossil fuel industries conspired to thwart action on global warming by a campaign of disinformation. He should better justify or withdraw this claim, which resonates with media coverage by outlets such as the BBC, the Guardian or the Daily Mail—channels that have fed us a non-stop diet of alarmism for most of this century.
Before rushing to cripple our economy by a too-rapid phasing out of fossil fuels, we need to clearly understand the scale of the threat posed by Anthropogenic Global Warming. That calls for a hard-headed scientific appraisal of the evidence, not the emotional scaremongering favoured by the mainstream media, and now apparently the Geological Society of London.
Joe Brannan (FGS)
References
Rignot, E.
et al. (2019) Four decades of Antarctic Ice Sheet mass balance from 1979–2017.
PNAS 116 (4) 1095-1103;
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1812883116
Zwally, H. J.
et al. (2015) Mass gains of the Antarctic ice sheet exceed losses.
Journal of Glaciology,
61 (230): 1019-1036;
https://doi.org/10.3189/2015JoG15J071