By Patricia Liles
For the Journal

Alaska's mining industry tackled the hot topic of global warming during the biennial Arctic International Mining Symposium held in Fairbanks March 18-22, with presentations by a national lecturer discussing global temperature trends, augmented by information about Alaska weather trends.

Patrick Michaels, a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and a research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, discussed a chart showing an increasing trend in global average surface temperature anomalies, recorded by IPCC since 1900.

“The temperature history taken from the surface shows two distinct warming periods,” Michaels said. “One, from 1910 through 1945, which was not caused by an excess of carbon dioxide in the air. Then another warming period, from 1975 to the present.”

The highest above-average surface temperature on the chart was recorded in 1998, which was about 0.5 of 1 degree Celsius above average. Since 2005, the steady upward trend of average global surface temperatures has decreased slightly. According to the chart, 2007's average surface temperature was 0.4 Celsius above average, slightly lower in temperature than the prior year.

Rather than increasing temperatures on hot days, the warming trend shows up in warmer days during the cold season, Michaels said.

During his presentation, Michaels offered scientific evidence to challenge a number of claims of global warming impacts. A study claiming that sea ice in Antarctica is shrinking is flawed, Michaels said, because the chart of evidence begins with a year in which the amount of ice was larger than the remainder of the study period.

Leaving out that starting point in mid-2002, the same data chart shows a steady amount of gain and loss of sea ice in Antarctica, Michaels said. And a longer history of southern hemisphere sea ice activity, beginning in 1979, also shows a steady range of increasing and decreasing sea ice activity, according to Michaels.

He also tackled the myth that the ice shelf in Greenland is melting and could fall off, driving up the water level of oceans, as portrayed in Al Gore's movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Evidence of that claim was the “discovery” of a new island off the coast of Greenland, land formerly thought to be a peninsula, but now is thought by some to be an island because of retreating glaciers and rising ocean water levels.

The scientific researcher who “discovered” the new island in September 2006 gave it an Inuit name that means “warming island,” hoping it would become an international symbol of the effects of climate change. But the land mass was actually known and documented as an island by aerial photographer Ernst Hofer in his book, “Arctic Riviera,” published in 1957, Michaels said.

In his discussion about future warming trends, Michaels displayed a chart showing more than a dozen models predicting an upward climb in temperature of up to 3 degrees Celsius over an 80-year period.

Below the anticipated models was a line showing the actual observed temperatures for the past 25 years, a trend that, if it continues, would produce an increase in temperature of about 1 degree Celsius over the same period.

“They have predicted too much warming,” he said. “Remember about global warming, it's easy to make a forecast but it's hard to be right.”

Passing legislation to force the nation to reduce emissions by a significant percentage, up to 70 percent, is not wise economically, Michaels said.

“Do you know how much capital would be required to reduce emissions by 70 percent? It's the wrong way to get to the future,” he said.

He also argued against ethanol fuel production, saying that in 2007, a third of the corn crop was turned into ethanol.

“That's a huge amount of food. We're the first nation to burn up our food supply,” Michaels said. “It won't do anything but make poor people hungry.”

Local climate researchers followed up with data from studies examining the effect of shorter winters to Interior groundwater supplies. Dan White, from the Institute of Northern Engineering at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, described data collected from groundwater monitoring wells in the Anvil Mountain aquifer, near Nome.

“Summer precipitation contributes little” to groundwater supplies, White said. “The longer frost-free season and the less snow pack, the less amount of precipitation that falls as snow. In general ,there is less recharge.”

Aquifers depend greatly on snow melt, he added. “For water supplies, 1 inch of snow in the winter is better than 1 inch of rain.”

Yet some areas of Alaska are seeing warming trends in temperatures, with fewer days of frigid cold, according to a following presentation by Martha Shulski from the Geophysical Institute at UAF. Average temperatures from 1949 through 2007 have warmed by a mean of 3 degrees Fahrenheit, she said, with the greatest change in the state's Interior.

Most noticeable is the decline in the number of days colder than 40 degrees below zero, she said. The number of days of extreme heat, above 80 degrees Fahrenheit, is also moving up, but not as much as the decline in extreme cold days, Shulski said.

Precipitation records do not indicate as uniform a trend during the same period as temperature changes, she said.

“From 1949 through 2005, most of the state has seen an increase in precipitation,” she said.