National Geographic's Warming Warning – 10 Years Later

Geoff Sherrington writes: National Geographic Magazine had a Global Warming issue in September 2004. New instruments have given new data. By planning now, NatGeo can make a revised issue 10 years later, in September 2014.

The 2014 edition should aim to correct what is now known to be wrong or questionable in the 2004 edition. We can help. Here are some quotes that need attention. The first three have some commentary, as is suggested for the remainder.

1. “The famed snows of Kilimanjaro have melted more than 80% since 1912.” P.14

This might have been correct at the time of writing pre-2004, but by 2008 Ms Shamsa Mwangunga, the minister for Natural Resources and Tourism in Tanzania wrote ”contrary to reports that the ice caps were decreasing owing to effects of global warming, indications were that the snow cover on Africa’s highest mountain were now increasing”. By 2011 we can read “Unfortunately, we made the prediction. I wish we hadn’t,” says Douglas R. Hardy, geoscientist who was among 11 co-authors of the paper in the journal Science that sparked the pessimistic Kilimanjaro forecast. “None of us had much history working on that mountain, and we didn’t understand a lot of the complicated processes on the peak like we do now.” In October 2007 Mr Justice Burton of the UK High Court ruled, for the purpose of teaching, against unqualified use of this passage summarised from the Gore book “An Inconvenient Truth”. Mr Gore’s assertion was that the disappearance of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro in East Africa was expressly attributable to global warming – the court heard the scientific consensus that it cannot be established that the snow recession is mainly attributable to human-induced climate change.

2. “… researchers believe that most central and eastern Himalayan glaciers could virtually disappear by 2035.” P.14

This arose from a brochure from India to the World Wide Fund for Nature, not peer reviewed, which eventuated in year 2350 being replaced by 2035 in the IPCC 2007 report – and missed by the peer-review process. The correction process by the IPCC was tortuous and lamentably acrimonious when a single direct statement should have sufficed.

3. “… raising average global sea level between four and eight inches in the past hundred years.” P.19 This estimate was conventional wisdom until the specialist satellite era, when measurement technology improved. As the NOAA figure shows, Jason 1 (data from 2002) and Jason 2 (2009) have complicated the story, with data showing ocean levels falling at times. The Jason instruments were specifically designed for ocean level measurement. More time is needed before the modern estimate of ocean change can be calculated. It is noted that Ocean Heat Content, OHC, a cause of ocean level change, has barely changed since measurements became acceptable through an increase in the number of Argo buoys in year 2002 or so.

Graph is from http://oceans.pmel.noaa.gov/

And so it goes, as listed below. The following abbreviated quotes from NatGeo 2004 need examination in the light of accumulated knowledge. Note that peer-review, having been repeatedly found wanting in the years before 2012, is not a requirement for commentary, though it can be desirable. In several important ways, such as immediacy, the modern blog world has adequate accurate commentary, to allow suggested revisions or retractions of the quotes below.

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1. “The famed snows of Kilimanjaro have melted more than 80% since 1912.” P.14

2. “… researchers believe that most central and eastern Himalayan glaciers could virtually disappear by 2035.” P.14

3. “… raising average global sea level between four and eight inches in the past hundred years.” P.19

4. “But the recent rate of global sea level rise has departed from the average rate of the past two to three thousand years and is rising much more rapidly – a continuation or acceleration of that trend has the potential to cause striking changes…” P.19

5. “Even relatively small storm surges in the past two decades have overwhelmed the system of dikes, levees and pump stations … upgraded in the 1990s to forestall the Gulf of Mexico’s relentless creep.” P.19

6. “Vulnerable to sea-level rise, Tuvalu, a small country in the South Pacific, has already begun formulating evacuation plans.” P.19

7. “The scenarios are disturbing even in wealthy countries like the Netherlands, with nearly half its landmass already at or below sea level.” P.19

8. “The 20th Century has seen the greatest warming in at least a thousand years, and natural forces can’t account for it all.” P.20

9. “Both greenhouse gases and temperature are expected to continue rising.” P.20

10. “Thick smoke towers over a forest near Fairbanks, one more sign that Alaska is getting hotter…. Computer models predict that CO2-induced warming could eventually raise the incidence of fires by more than a half.” P.25

11. “If the West Antarctic ice sheet were to break up, which scientists consider very unlikely this century, it alone contains enough ice to raise sea level by nearly 20 feet.” P.27

12. “Ocean temperatures are rising in all ocean basins and at much deeper depths than previously thought (NOAA)” P.27

13. “Oceans are important sinks …. and take up about a third of human-generated CO2.” P.28

14. “ … three greenhouse gases … orchestrating an intricate dance between the radiation of heat from Earth back to space (cooling the planet) and the absorption of radiation in the atmosphere (trapping it near the surface and this warming the planet).” P.29

15. (At Barrow) “There are no words, though, to describe how much and how fast the ice is changing.” P.33

16. “Researchers long ago predicted that the most visible impacts from a globally warmer world would occur first at high latitudes: rising air and sea temperatures, earlier snowmelt, later ice freeze-up, reductions in sea ice, thawing permafrost, more erosion, increases in storm intensity. Now, all these impacts have been documented in Alaska.” P.33

17. “The Fleishmann’s glass frog is barely hanging on …. As Earth’s temperatures rise, scientists are exploring climate’s role in a worldwide amphibian decline.” P.34

18. “Alpine plants are edging uphill and beginning to overrun rare species near mountain summits.” P.41

19. “This is the first instance in which humans appear to be accelerating the change, and warming could take place so quickly that species will not have the time to adapt and avoid extinction.” P.41

20. “At some point, as temperatures continue to rise, species will have no more room to run”. P.41

21. “Coral necropolis …. Increasingly the planet’s coral is in hot water, parboiled in periods of calm, sunny weather … In 1998 the world’s coral suffered its worst year on record, which left 16% bleached or dead.” P.41

22. Re: turtle breeding “Storms amplify the trend (to more females) shearing away trees that provide cooling shade to nests on beaches. ‘Severe weather events … really knock the socks off in favour of the females’.” P.47

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Fast forward to page 73 because there are enough quotes already, to find –

23. “A warming world will harm some – and benefit others. Home heating costs will likely fall in New England … The prospects are grim for drought-plagued Ethiopian children, who could see rainfall decline by 10 percent over the next 50 years. Widespread poverty and dependence on subsistence agriculture make Africans the most vulnerable to climate change.” P.73.

There are a couple of boxed headers along the way. Two are

24. “IT’S NOT A BELIEF SYSTEM; IT’S AN OBSERVABLE SCIENTIFIC FACT.” P.33.

25. Then “WE’LL HAVE A BETTER IDEA OF THE ACTUAL CHANGES IN 30 YEARS. BUT IT’S GOING TO BE A VERY DIFFERENT WORLD.”

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To the Editor of National Geographic, we are a third of that way to that very different world and many can’t pick the difference yet. Given the possibility that NatGeo 2004 was an enthusiastic issue, we think it would be a good idea to bring out a more measured NatGeo 2014.

Our blog readers are a skilled and diverse. They will prepare and distribute the actuality of the NatGeo 2004 claims as understood in 2012. Please feel free to use these in the re-write, a step which would gain you prestige because scientifically, it is the ethical move.

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NatGeo has apologised for some past errors. The July 2004 edition had some images of hunters with tusks captioned to be from a dead elephant found in the bush. Trouble was, the tusks had numbers on them showing capture several years before in another country. Earlier, there was the apology and subsequent stronger rules when an altered image of the Pyramids of Egypt was printed on the NatGeo cover of Feb 1982. That lead to a statement of NatGeo rules for altered images.

Finally, on photography, we note the dark photograph, double spread a few pages into the 2004 issue captioned “Heating Up …” It used back lighting and a low sun angle to help give water condensate the appearance of particulate smoke, two vastly different entities, going skyward from what seems to be one chimney of 4, plus some out-of-view cooling towers in Ohio. It fails criterion 2 below.

The National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) Code of Ethics offers nine ethical standards to member journalists. The basic premises of the NPPA’s nine standards are:

1. Accurately represent subjects

2. Do not be manipulated by staged photos

3. Avoid bias and stereotyping in work; provide complete information and context

4. Show consideration for subjects

5. Avoid influencing the actions of the photographic subject

6. Editing should not give the wrong impression of the subjects in the photograph

7. Do not compensate persons involved in photographs or in getting a photograph

8. Do not accept gifts or other favors from those involved in a photo

9. Do not purposely interfere with the work of other journalists.