Every once in a while, NPR airs a program which reminds me why it’s so hard for me to find the motivation to contribute even though I do like a fair bit of NPR programming.  Your interview with Peter Ward was just such a program.  You describe Ward as a biologist and then let him go on a 7-minute rant of such outrageous science fiction that even cult leader Al Gore would be saying “I wish I’d thought of that one."  And Guy Raz just went along with Ward as if what he said deserved serious consideration – which it most certainly did not.

Almost every assertion Ward made has either no rational basis or is contrary to history.  Here are just a few:

Ward claims that Miami’s being cut off by rising waters “will absolutely happen if we continue to be producing emissions at the rate we are now."   But the NOAA’s web site shows sea level trends for all of Florida at 0-1 foot per century, with Miami Beach showing a trend of 0.78 feet in 100 years. 

Ward further suggests that we’re likely to have three-foot sea level rises by the end of this century.  That claim is nothing short of paranoid fantasy and your interviewer should have laughed out loud at him rather than acting as if it were a serious scientific judgment. Sea levels around the world have not been rising any faster since our “emissions” began increasing rapidly after WWII.  Elsewhere around the world, low-lying islands such as Tuvalu (Pacific Ocean) and the Maldives (Indian Ocean), the poster children for sea level peril, have had steady sea levels for decades, with actual declines in recent years. Ward also doesn’t mention that a significant portion of “sea level rise” in the few places that have had higher-than average rises in recent decades or centuries is due to that land itself subsiding.  Even the IPCC, the hopelessly corrupt UN climate “research” group predicts much less than Ward – and they’re famous for overstating every bit of theoretical risk from “global warming".

Ward talks about receding glaciers in Antarctica but doesn’t mention that Antarctica has been gaining net ice mass for several decades and that Antarctica holds over 90% of the world’s sea ice.  Furthermore, Ward’s fear-mongering about Greenland melting has been a repeated myth with no basis in the data.

Ward inadvertently makes a strong argument against his own position when he notes that sea levels have risen faster in the past than now even though CO2 levels weren’t as high.  The obvious conclusion is that they are essentially unrelated.  In fact, of the various data sets that one might try to correlate to temperature or sea level changes, CO2 has one of the worst correlations.  Putting aside for the moment the obvious question of correlation versus causation, it must be noted that historically, large changes in atmospheric CO2 occurred after changes in temperature.  Ward also forgets to mention that the impact of so-called greenhouse gases is logarithmic so that each addition of CO2 to the atmosphere has less warming potential that the prior addition of the same amount of CO2. 

Ward’s statement that emissions didn’t “reduce to where we hope they were” (showing he probably needs to take some basic English classes) is wildly misleading.  Even the a left-leaning British newspaper notes that “Greenhouse gas emissions from rich countries fell a record 7% in 2009″.  It’s true the cut was offset by increases from China and India as they work to bring more than a billion people out of poverty. And what’s the implication of this information?  That the solution Ward proposes would be the equivalent of imposing a huge economic recession on the world to reduce emissions of plant food, also known as carbon dioxide, into the air.

Perhaps most reprehensibly, Ward returns to the mindless predictions of Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich, both of whom essentially said that population growth would outstrip human’s ability to feed ourselves.  It’s an argument which assumes away technological improvements and other human adaptations – which is why it’s always been spectacularly wrong.  Any “scientists” who comes back to that argument should be laughed out of a room.  Furthermore, if the planet warmed more, it would be easier to grow more food in more places, so the same phenomenon which Ward claims would raise sea levels would also cause food to become more, not less, plentiful.

In short, Ward offers the same self-serving fear-mongering attempts to raise grant money and sell books that hucksters have been trying to shove down our throats for more than a century.  It was an error when Malthus did it, a lie when Ehrlich did it, and reprehensible when NPR lets Ward pollute your listeners minds with his anti-development, actually anti-human, propaganda.

Ross Kaminsky
Boulder, CO