A sequence of Landsat satellite images, from summers in 1985, 2002 and 2005, shows the retreat of ice that exposed what is now called “Warming Island” along the east coast of Greenland. (Credit: Jesse Allen, NASA)Early in 2007, The Times published an article by a freelance writer, John Collins Rudolf, recounting a visit to a newly identified island off the east coast of Greenland, dubbed Warming Island by Dennis Schmitt, an Arctic adventurer, composer and linguist from Berkeley, Calif. The island had long been presumed to be a peninsula, until a sheath of ice, retreating under the influence of recent Arctic warming, pulled back to reveal it was unconnected to the main mass of Greenland. Last year, Mr. Schmitt told Mr. Rudolf that he hoped the island would become an international symbol showing how global warming was transforming the world.
This year, Patrick J. Michaels, a climate scientist with the anti-regulatory Cato Institute and a self-described purveyor of “advocacy science,” challenged Mr. Schmitt’s assertion that the island was newly exposed. Dr. Michaels did so first at a recent conclave of climate skeptics organized by the Heartland Institute, then on his World Climate Report Web site. His main evidence was a map in a 1957 book, “Arctic Riviera,” by an aerial photographer, Ernst Hofer. The map shows the little island’s distinctive three-finger profile, with no ice bridge to the main coast.
Dr. Michaels’s Web site doesn’t allow comments, so I invited Mr. Schmitt to respond to the critique here. I’ve attached his commentary below. It’s best read after reading Dr. Michaels’s complaints first.
From Dennis Schmitt:
Concerning recent controversies associated with Warming Island
Dennis Schmitt along the east coast of Greenland last year. (Credit: Jeff Shea for The New York Times)
I have before me the 1957 Hofer book with its rough map of central east Greenland. I also have an accurate topographical map of the region. The first thing I notice is that Reynolds Island is missing from the Hofer map. I see also that Murray Island, which is of greater but comparable size, is present in very rough outline. The rock hand of the old Warming Peninsula is visible as well in very rough outline. Then I notice a straight line drawn arbitrarily across the northern edge of Liverpool Land cutting off and eliminating an entire landscape of mountains, headlands, peninsulas, glaciers, ice shelves and an island. I feel some sense of recognition in studying this image. Indeed the document portrays the land the way I usually see it flying in during the summer. The area’s maritime microclimate generates a prevailing fog belt that may cover up Reynolds Island (180 meters high) but will leave Murray Island (480 meters high) visible in rough outline. Warming Island with its high mountain walls invariably rises above the fog to show its rock outline while the connecting ice shelf along the entire oceanic straight is completely buried in fog. If I were to make a sketch of the region on such a typical summer day I would come up with pretty much the same blank spaces that I see in the Hofer document. The same mountains, headlands, peninsulas, glaciers and ice shelves would be missing from my sketch.
I do not know the specific circumstances behind the documentation of that time but I do understand the various reasons why early maps end up as schematics, only partially complete. I see by the markings of the 1957 document that it is to be construed as indeed only schematic, that it is explicitly incomplete. I see that north of the arbitrary line there is a blank space not to be construed as a positive oceanic emptiness but simply as a lack of data.
The rock in this region is the product of Caledonian collisions of 400 million years ago. When I see so much of this rock missing from the Hofer document I do not really believe that the rock was not present on the day the sketch was drawn. I assume that data is missing not rock. And while it is true that ice shelves are not as permanent as rock, they are (especially when enclosed as the one here is) relatively permanent features of the landscape. Those that make sudden movements do it in ways that make physical and glaciological sense. But even if ice shelves were capable of packing a lunch and going off to work in the morning to return in the evening for dinner that would have nothing to do with the lack of field data in the 1957 document. It is clear in this case that the data is missing, not the ice. The question then arises as to why someone would ignore the limits of the data and pointedly misinterpret the schematic. Well, the human mind is full of reasons.
If a different event, let us say, the strange disappearance in 2005 of Reynolds Island, had been mentioned in The New York Times as a proof of global warming then we would be dealing with the same misinterpretation in a different geographical place. Reynolds Island is definitely missing from the 1957 document. Those with reason to dispute global warming could readily seize the fact that a map shows Reynolds Island as not existing back in 1957. The disappearance of Reynolds Island in 2005 therefore might be construed as part of a natural cycle of appearances and disappearances of Reynolds Island. Global warming might safely be construed as having nothing to do with the disappearance of Reynolds Island.
It may be that the problem with the Warming Island ice shelf lies in the limited ability of the human mind to engage in abstraction. Let us draw three portraits of the 1957 schematic. In each portrait we draw the straight line cutting off all the landscape data to the north. In the first portrait let us fill up that blank space with something really concrete, let us say “pink elephants.” That gives us something “real” in the empty space to support the marginal, abstract talents of our minds. Imagine those pink elephants in that space. In the second portrait we have the same situation but we are going to replace the pink elephants with something different, let us say with “question marks.” Question marks, apart from their physical shapes, provide a message. They say “we don’t know what goes here.” With those question marks in our second portrait the mind has some concrete support as before. But this time the concretion we put in is thematically accurate, it conveys the intended lack of information. Let your imagination chew on those question marks while your abstract rational mind perceives what is real and what is not. Now you should be ready for the third portrait. The third portrait shows the straight line with a blank space that may be interpreted as a data limit in its proper abstraction.
The irony in all of this is that I do not subscribe to the theories of climate change when presented in a doctrinaire way. I see climate change as a nonlinear problem of multiple interactive variables with no absolutely proven outcome. These variables include volcanic out gassing, Milankovich cycles, tectonic plate movements, solar variability, meteor impacts, comet tails, albedo, oceanic circulation, topography, a variety of hidden threshold effects, biological evolution and human technology. The problem has been streamlined with computer models that limit variable participation to generate predictions. This gives us some solid betting odds that we could well put our money on. But the complexities doom us to many probable reversals that may disappoint us if we come to depend on an “ideology of global warming” for our psychological well being. To turn “global warming” into a fixed dogma is to subject it to the same sort of intellectual deterioration as we have seen with the various tenets of “political correctness.” It is important to resist the temptation to press closure on this topic. It is important to listen to the critics.
One of the facts pointed out by the critics is that climate shows a long history of cyclical undulations. That is true, and we observed them in the 20th century. But it is pretty clear to me that at the end of the 20th century something abnormal began to show up in the climate data. We began to see a curve of upward temperature change that was accelerating in its curvature. The second and third derivatives of the mathematical function of the curve were doing something unprecedented. They were showing a spike that, if allowed to continue, would be disastrous. This spike was different from the moderate and relatively inconsequential undulations noted earlier in the century. The spike was one of the reasons for the alarm in The New York Times article of last year.
I am the first person to notice that the press makes errors. I have come to expect them in everything that I read. The New York Times article in question stated that the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf was located off Greenland instead of Ellesmere Island. In 1995 I crossed the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf and I know where it is. The article seemed to have me putting it in the wrong place. I was a bit upset about this, but, in the end, took it as a minor point. Over all the article was accurate. A 2004 article about my discoveries in the Stray Dog Islands off of North Greenland gave credit to someone else for an island I discovered with Jim Shaeffer and Bob Palais in 1996. I was quite upset about this. But the overall article was accurate. On the 2007 topic of “a peninsula in east Greenland breaking away from the mainland to form an island” it is my view that The Times reported very accurately. In this case those who attacked The Times’s article as a hoax would have better applied that particular criticism to themselves.
Dennis Schmitt, April 20, 2008
I don’t want to spend a lot of time, and posts, batting back and forth with Dr. Michaels and others about this bit of Arctic minutiae, but I did think it only fair to give Mr. Schmitt a place to respond. Ultimately, there is limited value in debating whether human-driven warming has caused the uncloaking of any particular Arctic island, the retreat of a snowfield atop any single mountain — even one as charismatic as Kilimanjaro — or the breakup of a particular ice shelf in Antarctica, or any other regional anomaly.
The data on past natural fluctuations are often murky, and the ability of scientists to discern the cause of short-term changes in particular places remains limited. In the end, such fights can distract from the clarity of the long-term picture of a world in flux for centuries to come under a building human influence on climate (and biology, oceans, and landscapes).
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