Guest essay by Jim Steele, Director emeritus Sierra Nevada Field Campus, San Francisco State University.
On July 29, 2013 the BBC’s Hardtalk journalist Stephen Sackur wrote “The Alaskan village set to disappear under water in a decade.” He opened the story with “within a decade Kivalina is likely to be under water. Gone, forever. Remembered – if at all – as the birthplace of America’s first climate change refugees.” He then quotes a local who laments, “The US government imposed this Western lifestyle on us, gave us their burdens and now they expect us to pick everything up and move it ourselves. What kind of government does that?”
Given the context, such a statement sounds like the locals were feeling abandoned by global warming. But the tone also reminded me of the complaints by many native Arctic people who were relocated by the US, Canadian and Russian governments in a 20th century battle to secure claims to Arctic territory. Such a vulnerable location seemed odd for a permanent settlement.. Sure enough Wikipedia supported my suspicions Kitvalina. The original village was located at the north end of the Kivalina Lagoon but was relocated to its present location in about 1900. Reindeer were brought to the area and some people were trained as reindeer herders, suggesting there as a government attempt to force a permanent settlement. From the history I can glean on the internet “the people of Kivalina, like the Ipiutak before them, utilized the barrier reef only as seasonal hunting grounds, making camp there in warm-weather months.” Their recent plans to relocate due to erosion and an expanding population are opportunistically blamed on global warming.
The Arctic people have long been victimized by “southern people’s” politics. Relocation of indigenous families became a tactic employed by all the “polar bear countries” in an international chess match to stake claims on Arctic resources. In 1925, Denmark relocated families in Greenland to counter any Norwegian claims to the island. The following year the Soviet government moved a small Eskimo community to Wrangel Island in order to replace an occupation of Alaskan Eskimos that had been established there by American interests. The relocation of families was also a crucial cold-war tactic by Canada to insure their claims on the Arctic, but not just against any Russian threats, but more so from perceived encroachments by the United States.631
In 1944, Henry Larsen, a staff sergeant in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, became the first to navigate the Northwest Passage from the west to east and back again. This celebrated feat greatly strengthened Canada’s claims to Arctic lands, and offset any potential Scandinavian claims based on Norway’s Roald Amundsen’s successful crossing of Canada’s Northwest Passage in 1903-06. However the US military bases built during World War II were now perceived as a threatening foothold. So in the 1950s Larsen was put in charge of relocating several Inuit families to Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay in the far northern reaches of the Canadian Arctic. Grise Fiord is known by its Inuit name that means “the place that never thaws.” Although these were strategic places in ongoing international maneuverings, it was a region long abandoned by the Inuit’s ancestors. Government stories of an unspoiled land where hunting was more bountiful enticed Inuit families to leave the milder climates of their villages along the central Hudson Bay. Government officials sealed the deal by suggesting there was absolutely no risk and promised a swift return passage if the families found their new settlement unsatisfactory.
But it was a promise that Canadian officials never intended to keep. Ironically, the woman who played Nanook’s wife in the popular 1930s documentary “Nanook of the North” and her son (who was fathered by the documentary’s producer) were among the families relocated to Grise Ford. Although “Nanook of the North” had enthralled Americans and Europeans with a glamorized depiction of Inuit resilience and adaptability, their new settlements doled out such incredible hardships their resilience was severely tested. The struggles of those families have now been well documented in the book, The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival. It was the film producer’s granddaughter, daughter of his half-Inuit, half-Caucasian son, who finally forced the Canadian government to own up to their betrayal. The Canadian government finally made a public apology in 2008 and paid reparations to the offended families.
Sackur’s article continues the long tradition of half-truths. To indict climate change he wrote:
- “Kivalina’s story is not unique. Temperature records show the Arctic region of Alaska is warming twice as fast as the rest of the United States.”
- “Retreating ice, slowly rising sea levels and increased coastal erosion have left three Inuit settlements facing imminent destruction, and at least eight more at serious risk.”
- “No longer does thick ice protect their shoreline from the destructive power of autumn and winter storms.”
However his story relies on zombie data. It was indeed true that Alaska had been warming twice as fast as elsewhere. In a 2012 paper climate scientists from Alaska Climate Research Center, University of Alaska reported, “a sudden temperature increase in Alaska was recorded starting in 1977, seemingly driven by the change in polarity of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) Index, which went from dominantly negative before 1977 to dominantly positive values after that year” However unlike Sackur they also reported for the 21st century ” The mean cooling of the average of all stations was 1.3°C for the decade”1 Alaska is now one the most rapidly cooling areas on earth.
Sackur’s reference to “slowly rising sea levels” are also questionable. Go to the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level website and view the 2 stations nearest to Kitvalina. At Nome Alaska the sea level is rising so slow it appears to be dropping over the last decade.
http://www.psmsl.org/data/obtaining/rlr.monthly.plots/1800_high.png
Or look at Prudhoe Bay .
http://www.psmsl.org/data/obtaining/rlr.monthly.plots/1857_high.png
Except for a brief surge for a few months in late 2013, Prudhoe Bay sea level has been dropping there as well. The shifting PDO is also known to change sea level across the Pacific Ocean.
Finally it is hard to understand Sackur’s claim, “No longer does thick ice protect their shoreline.” In 2012 the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported “ice extent in the Bering Sea was much greater than average, reaching the second-highest levels for January in the satellite record.” NASA’s Earth Observatory wrote, “For most of the winter of 2011–2012, the Bering Sea has been choking with sea ice… NSIDC data indicate that ice extent in the Bering Sea for most of this winter has been between 20 to 30 percent above the 1979 to 2000 average. February 2012 had the highest ice extent for the area since satellite records started.” And in 2013 Bering Sea ice was again above normal as seen in National Snow and Ice Data Center picture.
So why has the BBC published this story filled with references to zombie data and half-truths? The region’s temperatures are cooling, sea level is dropping and sea ice is above average. The story about Kivalina has been published many times before and residents sued Exxon six years ago. Are they trying to rekindle global fear in a time of paused global warming? Are they now tools of the IPCC? Climategate emails revealed Michael Mann’s distress at a BBC’s story that the PDO could delay global warming, and he told his fellow advocates he would have a talk with their “science” writers. Did Michael Mann and the fellow IPCC warming advocates successfully pressure the BBC to present such a biased and unsupported story that does not educate the public about the complexities of climate change but instead attempts to instill gloom and climate fear? I once saw the BBC as a trusted source, but count me as a climate war casualty. I will never again trust another BBC climate article.
1. Wendler,G., et al. (2012) The First Decade of the New Century: A Cooling Trend for Most of Alaska. The Open Atmospheric Science Journal, 2012, 6, 111-116
Mr. Steele is author of Landscapes & Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism
The BBC regularly employs a cunning ploy to promulgate its bias. If you have a view that can be considered “minority” it will chose to exclude it on the basis of it being a minority view – AGW skepticism, anti-immigration, radical nationalist etc.However, if it happens that they support a minority view then they will promote it regularly. Vegetarianism is a minority lifestyle choice but never ignored by the BBC, yet if they employed the same rules as they do for AGW-skpeticism vegetarianism would never be heard of on the BBC.
Actually, the fate of the BBC is entirely dependent on the horse trading of aspirant Prime Ministers and the unaccountable shady interests that control who gets elected in this pseudo-democracy of ours.
Mr Murdoch always pays a keen interest and he will vigorously back anyone who seeks to destroy, weaken or curb the wings of the BBC. He will use full spectrum dominance surveillance to destroy anyone who looks too closely at his own behaviour, be that adultery (2nd and 3rd marriages immediately the 1st and 2nd divorces came through: crass hypocrisy for a man whose newspapers end careers in public service for anyone caught playing away from home), hacking (industrial level hacking across swathes of British industry is carried out by his ‘organisation’: trust me, I worked for a management consultancy whose computers were all hacked by News Corporation); funding wars (Mr Murdoch saying that Britons must fund a war is unacceptable as he is a tax avoiding non-com US citizen, not a UK subject) etc etc.
Mr Murdoch’s loyal acolytes in the current Govt are Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt and David Cameron (courtesy of whatever he was getting up to with Rebekah Wade, formerly CEO of News Corporation). He wishes to make money in the UK education sector, which is why an acolyte has t be in the Dept of Education. Jeremy Hunt was placed where he was to ensure that the competition review on News Corporation had an appropriate result.
The BBC has never had any integrity over global warming. It would be fined hundreds of millions in a court of law if a case were ever brought concerning the wilful breaking of its own charter of neutrality where global warming is concerned.
The real question about the BBC is whether it is being cannibalised by BT and others, which as a private organisation is no doubt more acceptable to the Right Wing. BT Sport launches today, which will provide a stiff challenge to the future of BBC sport (indeed it is poaching several BBC staff, just as ITV did for the French Open tennis coverage).
I’m sure the ‘free market’ solution would be to buy it up, sell off its constituent parts and walk off with the loot.
What gets lost in all of this is whether the UK public want that to happen or not.
Did anybody happen to notice the awesome, peeling left that is freight-training off at the the lower left corner of the top picture? That thing looks epic.
Agree with all this, except it’s wrong to think the BBC has only recently become a leftist mouthpiece. In ‘Island of Sheep’, written in the 1930s, John Buchan describes a terribly knowing, cynical, anti-British leftism (more recently we might call this ‘radical chic’) as reducible to the culture of the BBC.
Perhaps a modest bias in comparison to today, but appearances can be deceptive. Many of the educated classes both before and after WW2 thought the USSR a very good thing, as Buchan knew. The BBC was always the educated classes explaining the world to the rest of us, in that condescending way they have. Why education should lead leftwards is not fully clear to me, but it just does. As Ronald Reagan said once, the problem with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant, it’s that they know so many things that are not so.
the BBC like all non-private independent organizations has become its own mafia, where the inner Greats milk as much as they can and everything rotates around sustaining their privileges.
Remember, many who had to step aside because of the Savile child sex scandal were in the 28gate list. Coincidence of course :-/
I suspect they ‘ramp’ up the bias during a Hot spell in the UK to add weight to their alarmist material .. PSYOPS is now part of the BBC’s Climate Change strategy I think??
The use of the future tense in the title is surely grammar and logical error.
And a more recent 1st person account is “Confessions of a BBC Liberal”: http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?118107-Confessions-of-a-BBC-liberal
Birds of a feather, squawking together.
Or toes, even.
The BBC seems to regard the Gov’t as one of its divisions, if anything, whether Labour or Conservative.
There has long been a struggle between science practitioners (i.e. those like Engineers) and science academics in the UK. You can trace this whole “class warfare” right back to the “new rich” who made vast wealth in the industrial revolution. These “Engineering” upstarts were hated by the landed gentry who were still largely living off the wealth stolen by William the Bastard in 1066 by effectively enslaving the indigenous population.
As the Universities were the education institutes for the landed gentry … and because societies like the Royal society were formed as a welfare scheme to landed gentry “scientists” who couldn’t or wouldn’t make a living in the “dirty” industry (far cleaner than grovelling about in cow shit). Science, so academia has maintained this snooty nosed attitude to practical science.
And the BBC are just continuing the tradition of a class society where the nice upper class “science” is practised by the nice people like academics and the Royal society, and the nasty horrible people who make money for the country through science and contribute so much to WUWT … they continue to be the scum of the earth who shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the polite society of “Scientists”.
And yes, This is all a terrible stereotype that doesn’t exist in real science … but the BBC don’t have real scientists. Their science is all the make believe fiction of the media which is itself just a stereotype of real life. So, the BBC are largely devoid from the reality of modern science and engineering.
… or perhaps more accurately (as I turned on the radio to listen to the BBC for the first time in a month (it used to be several times a day) … we in the real world are divorced from the BBC. It is now largely an untrusted irrelevance.
Brian H,
Good link to Antony Jay, I knew of him but well worth reading again.
He’s balanced in his view, being able to remember when Britain was an authoritarian country. For those of us only paying attention since the 60’s, the libtards at the Beeb are incomprehensible, from another world. But there’s always a reason, even if now defunct.
This story has a video post on weather.com and the reporter says “Town Will Disappear by 2025!”
-not it might or could but, “will disappear”
This from your friendly weather channel…
Here’s the link:
http://www.weather.com/news/science/environment/alaska-on-the-edge-climate-refugees-20130515
I’m ROFL at the complaint of tribal people in AK about having to move due sea level rise.
Many people had to relocate in the past. For example, at the bottom of Esquimalt Lagoon in Colwood BC is a tribal village that was submerged thousands of years ago as sea level rose on the mid-west-coast of North America.
(I don’t remember why it did, I recall it was widespread but one has to check that plate tilting was not a factor. Some geologists today suspect that the uneven sea level change in recent years in the BC lower mainland, southern VI, and Olympic Peninsula area is due to plate tilting. Changes are small, some positive and some negative, IIRC the general pattern matches plate location and expected tilt direction.)
Today anyone can get much help, if allowed – North Korea would refuse – though if they want to cry CAGW they shouldn’t get help from modern fossil-fuel-burning transportation.