Ingham’s W RLD
FEW topics generate more heat than global warming. In fact, the mere mention of it sends the temperature soaring. Quote someone from the climate change camp and you will be denounced as the Antichrist. Quote a climate sceptic and… you will be denounced as the Antichrist. Well, last month I took a tour from Canada to Iceland via Greenland, which meant that climate change was pretty hard to ignore.
In Quebec our city guide, who was 75 if he was a day, said the average date for the first frost there is now two months later than when he was a child.
Then we went to Greenland’s barren rocky coast, where dolphins played among the icebergs, and icecaps peeped over the mountains. On the way the cruise’s resident naturalist and Smithsonian lecturer, Michael Scott, risked the wrath of Trump supporters by pointing to some of the changes Greenland is undergoing.
A Nasa map based on data between 2004 and 2014 revealed that the ice is melting across most of Greenland – an area nine times the size of the UK.
Pulling together several papers, Michael said Greenland’s summer melt season now lasts 70 days longer than in the early 1970s.
This melting is unfreezing the fringes of the permafrost, which may explain why Nasa satellites are picking up fires raging where the ice has retreated.
The fires were probably started by lightning and the smoke, visible from space, shows where once frozen peat is burning away.
A 2013 study of ash deposits in the permafrost suggests that the current rate of wildfires in Greenland is at its highest in 10,000 years.
So what? If the icecap did melt away we would all know about it. Sea levels would rise by up to 22 feet. Even in the worst case scenario that is unlikely to happen until our bones have become the sort of relics that excite archaeologists. But a rise of only a few feet would be enough to let a combination of storm surges and unusually high tides swamp coastal areas, where most of the world’s population lives.
I don’t pretend to know the answers. In the 1970s scientists talked of the threat of a new Ice Age. The climate has always changed and scientists have always squabbled.
But it would be staggering given what man pumps out into the atmosphere if we weren’t changing the planet. Common sense says we can’t carry on polluting.
We also need to use resources more wisely. And then we will leave a better planet for our descendants. And icy old Greenland may remain a misnomer. UP TO 33,000 badgers got a death sentence this week in the Government’s flawed campaign to eradicate bovine TB from cattle.
Badgers can give TB to cattle but so do cattle. A 10-year government study concluded that “badger culling can make no meaningful contribution to cattle TB control in Britain”.
Oxford Professor Lord John Krebs – who commissioned that study – says England’s cull is “pointless and misguided”. Meanwhile Ireland is giving up culling as unsustainable and Wales has been reducing bovine TB without systematic culling.
The Wildlife Trusts says there is an alternative. It costs them £82 to vaccinate a badger against TB and the Government £6,800 to kill one. Time for a rethink. GREEN TIP: Now that the breeding season is over, clean out nest boxes to get rid of parasites. EXPERTS on Exmoor must have good eyesight and steady hands. They have been shortlisted for a prize by the Campaign for National Parks for ridding the streams of invasive American signal crayfish. These bruisers are oversexed and over here and threatening our delicate native crayfish. Exmoor’s solution is to sterilise the aliens. Good luck. IN AMONG the bad news, a ray of hope. Five African antelopes are on the fast track to extinction, the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s latest Red List revealed yesterday. But the snow leopard, king of Asia’s mountains, is recovering thanks in part to conservation work. Man doesn’t have to be a wrecking ball. He can make a positive difference.