Exploding convenient truths

BY RAFFY BOUDJIKANIAN

raffy.boudjikanian@transcontinental.ca

The lines between human activity-caused global warming and natural causes for climate change are blurrier than generally accepted, according to a speech by glaciologist and geographer Robert Gorman at the Ecomuseum last Thursday night.

"There is no doubt the fact that we're putting 15 per cent more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than what would naturally be there is having an effect," said Gorman.

However, he also suggested that climate change is a natural process that is being accelerated by human activity rather than completely caused by it.

Gorman, who has spent 25 years observing and predicting ice patterns in the Arctic, and now does the same remotely from Ottawa for shipping company Fednav, said that it is important to consider differences between climate change and decadal oscillations.

"Climate change is really slow, long-term creeping change over centuries," he said. Decadal oscillations, on the other hand, are changes in energy patterns around the world that come and go at cyclical intervals, leading to hurricanes, causing various shifts in sea-level pressure and ice formation.

He said that scientists are still figuring out the relationship between climate change and decadal oscillations. "It's not really well understood," he added. Despite this, some media mistakenly report the effects of decadal oscillations as caused by climate change.

For example, though a recent report by CBC suggested that a huge ice fracture in the Arctic's Beaufort Sea area may be attributed to climate change, Gorman dismissed the claim. "I see this every year," he said.

He called the too-easy explanations of news media or even former vice-presidential candidate Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth as "hollywoodization" of climate change.

The Eco Museum room where Gorman delivered his speech was packed with a full audience. Peter Couture, who works at the museum and attended the presentation, praised Gorman's breadth of knowledge. "It certainly taught me a lot that I didn't know," he said.

Surprisingly, very few hands went up in when Gorman asked his listeners whether they thought that climate change was the result of human activity.

"How many are not putting their hands up because they're afraid of changing the way they live?" Gorman asked as the room laughed.