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What did Harrison Schmitt Know? And When?

In the ongoing controversy over whether former astronaut and New Mexico Senator Harrison Schmitt intentionally misled NASA with his 2009 white paper on climate change, we come to the age old questions: What did Schmitt know? And when did he know it?

Schmitt says in that paper that “Artic (sic) sea ice has returned to 1989 levels of coverage.” When Dr. Mark Boslough, a physicist and computational modeler at Sandia National Laboratories brought to Schmitt’s attention that this was incorrect, Schmitt failed to correct it. Well, not everyone likes to admit making a mistake.

But was it a mistake?

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While the Gulf of Mexico continues to choke on oil from a man-made disaster, the Arctic is experiencing another form of man-made onslaught thanks to climate change. 

Late last month, British explorers hiking in the Canadian Arctic reported that their ice base off Ellef Ringnes Island had been hit by a three-minute rain shower.  A team of Canadian scientists camped about 145 km west also reported being hit by rain at the same time.

Pen Hadow, the British team’s expedition director, told Reuters, “It’s definitely a shocker … the general feeling within the polar community is that rainfall in the high Canadian Arctic in April is a freak event.”

Hadow, whose team is gathering data on the effects of climate change on the Arctic Ocean in the Catlin Arctic Survey, said that “scientists would tell us that we can expect increasingly to experience these sorts of outcomes as the climate warms.”

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Joseph Romm has published part two of an investigation into the dwindling population of polar bears.

While part one examined and dispeled the myth that the polar bear population was increasing, part two takes a hard look at the fact that the population may be decreasing more quickly than has been forecast.