Greenpeace claims about Antarctic ice shelf ignore scientific reality!

AUCKLAND, New Zealand - April 12, 2009 - "Greenpeace has yet again ignored scientific reality in the recent misleading claims by its political advisor Geoff Keey about the threatened collapse of the Wilkins Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula," says Terry Dunleavy of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition.

"Even while climate campaigners such as Greenpeace, Al Gore and David Suzuki become increasingly shrill in their demands for action on the part of governments towards the impossible goal of 'stopping climate change', the science that supposedly supports such actions is falling apart," said Mr. Dunleavy. "Greenpeace's citation of the threatened collapse of the Wilkins Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula is a case in point. There is little evidence that such an event is abnormal or unnatural when seen in a significant time perspective and there is even less evidence that human greenhouse gas emissions have anything whatsoever to do with events in the Antarctic."

Leading Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball agrees. "Relating the ice shelf deterioration to human activities is an illogical, unsubstantiated, public relations link typical of Greenpeace. As they are always doing, they are taking natural events and presenting them as unnatural.

"Keey's concerns about the speed with which change is occurring in some parts of the Antarctic speaks to the false premise underlying the mistaken view called uniformitarianism - the idea that natural change is gradual over long periods of time. In reality, climate change occurs all the time and is often quite rapid; the sudden cooling and then equally sudden warming during the Younger Dryas period ten millennia ago is a case in point. In the space of only about a decade, the Earth cooled as much as five degrees Celsius (perhaps more in some locations such as Greenland), stayed that way for about a millennium and then warmed equally quickly. That warming was about 100 times faster than the modest temperature rise that many believe occurred during the 20th century. Younger Dryas cooling and warming was, of course, entirely natural, occurring before civilization even started, but ignorance of such events allows Greenpeace, Gore and others to claim that sudden climate change today is unnatural. It is not", said Dr. Ball.