By ROBERT SEITZ
My last column in Must Read Alaska resulted in a number of comments to which I am compelled to respond. In my attempt to disprove that Alaska is warming 2 to 4 times faster than the rest of the planet, I did not mention anything about the warming we know about and that most people accept.
I remind critics that we had a Little Ice Age that peaked out around 1750 A.D. Yes, our growing season has become extended over my 80 years in Alaska. But with that, things still feel about the same as they have my entire life. It can still frost some time during that extended growing season.
Somebody mentioned glaciers, implying that the absence or diminishment of some glaciers is proof of global warming. If you look up Glacier Bay on the internet and do some digging around you will find that in 1680 there was glacier advancing upon the eventual location of Glacier Bay, but there was no fjord at that time. By 1750, the glacier had extended to the ocean waters and the newly formed Glacier Bay was a fjord. By 1880 the glacier had already receded back 45 miles from the end of the bay.
I am going to suggest that most of the glaciers that have greatly receded or disappeared in Alaska were possibly formed as a result of the Little Ice Age. If Alaska is not warming at an alarming rate, does that suggest that there has not been extra warming from increasing levels of greenhouse gases?
I call attention to “Infrared Forcing by Greenhouse Gases,” a paper by by W. A. van Wijngaarden1 and W. Happer published in 2019. The last sentence of the abstract states: “Doubling the current concentrations of CO2, N2O or CH4 only increases the forcings by a few per cent.”
Here is an excerpt from the conclusion of the paper: “The two goals of this review were: (1) to rigorously review the basic physics of thermal radiation transfer in the cloud-free atmosphere of the Earth; and (2) to present quantitative information about the relative forcing powers of the naturally-occurring, greenhouse-gas molecules, H2O, CO2, O3, N2O and CH4.”
All this tells us that doubling the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere would result in very little increase in temperature on earth from the “greenhouse effect”. The warming we experience may just be the recovery from the Little Ice Age.
If this is true, then we need to rethink our approach to energy development in Alaska. We need to return to science for our guidance. Developing alternate and renewable energy resources in Alaska is still a viable idea as all the remote communities which have large diesel fuel cost need energy sources that serve their needs, affordably. We need to rework the current definition of “sustainable” to infer a fuel source that will be readily available and not one with no CO2 molecules.
Robert Seitz is a professional electrical engineer and lifelong Alaskan.
