It seems that Newsweek's "science" editrix, Sharon Begley, wants you to make the leap that the Gangotri glacier, one of the largest in the Himalayas, has been shrinking for the last 25 years at three times the historical norm because of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).

In the May 5, 2008, issue of Newsweek, in the article "Heat your vegetables," she begins her halfwitted rant with, "Whenever global warming began looking too bleak..."  She then takes a swipe at the coal industry, which no doubt generates the electricity to her power-sucking laptop, before rapping their knuckles for not noticing that a glacier is melting:

One of the Himalayas' largest, [Gangotri glacier] has been shrinking since the late 18th century. But over the last 25 years it has shrunk about half a mile, a rate three times the historical norm... "Without the ice melt, the Ganges and the Yellow rivers could dry up in the dry season, shrinking harvests," says Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute. "If the Ganges flows only part of the year, double cropping [in which farmers plant rice and wheat in back-to-back growing seasons, and which underlies India's green revolution] breaks down."

Ranting that Passes for Journalism

Time now for another deconstruction of Newsweek's alarmist-in-Chief, Sharon Begley.

Yes folks, this time she's equated airport delays with the dire consequences of global---oops, I mean climate change. She's also taken notes from Gore's new vocabulary that you can't use “global warming” because “climate change” can apply to any weather scenario.

Yesterday it was raining. Today it's sunny. That's called climate change, but Begley is again worried about those of us who don't care about global warming and she has a theory:

Memo to everyone who doesn’t care about climate change—you know who you are—because you figure 1) more heat waves? I have A.C.; 2) rising sea levels? I don’t live in Bangladesh, and I have enough money to keep rebuilding the sea walls around my weekend place; 3) more droughts and floods, causing food shortages? I won’t have any problem buying whatever I need. Scientists have identified consequences of climate change that you won’t be able to buy your way out of: the worst airplane delays you can imagine.

Newsweek's enviro-alarmist and resident green propagandist, Sharon Begley, has a new future-forecasting puff piece on why we can be so 'stupid', especially with her looking out for our well-being. She has predictions galore based on very bad science already discredited by far wiser persons than her, but that doesn't stop Begley from scolding us dumb Americans who are in for a very bumpy near future. Below, just a few of her ridiculous predictions from this very slanted piece: (emphasis added)

The required adaptations will be much more profound than turning up the air conditioning a notch come summertime. Melting glaciers will trigger "glacier lake outburst floods," warns the IPCC; if you have a child wondering which field to enter, damengineering and -building look like excellent bets. Permafrost is melting, so villages and roads in the (once) frozen north that are built on it will have to be relocated. Sea-level rise is inundating the wetlands and mangrove swamps that once absorbed storm surges; sea-wall design and construction will also be a growth industry, at least in areas that can afford it. For the tens of millions of Bangladeshis and other impoverished people living in coastal regions that will be underwater, inland areas can "adapt" by making room for unprecedented waves of environmental refugees. In a warmer world, the atmosphere holds more moisture. When moist air collides with Arctic air, freezing rain will fall, as it did in the nation's midsection in December, leaving tens of thousands of people without power for more than a week. Let's hope some smart utility engineers are figuring out how to build power lines that don't snap when they've got hundreds of pounds of ice on them.

As scientists and policy types figure out what changes will be necessary to cope with global warming, it's obvious that massive sea walls will be required to hold back rising oceans, that enormous new reservoirs will be needed to cope with the alternating droughts and deluges that many regions will suffer and that a crash program to develop heat- and drought-resistant crops would be a good idea if people are to keep eating....

With the swoop of her pen, or these days her keyboard, Begley is now convinced that man-made climate change is endangering birds of certain feathers. In one of her many non-referenced peril piece, she states rising "sea levels due to global warming isn't helping shorebirds." Funny how this apparently disastrous rise in sea level has gone unreported everywhere, except maybe in a certain PowerPoint presentation. Begley is asking Newsweek's readers to take her multi-tiered statements as a matter of faith (as fact would be pushing it). Read the entire piece, and try not to stumble over the hundred or so other reasons for why these birds may be in peril, but it just wouldn't make flashy headlines or reading. This must have been her Thanksgiving message to her loyal readers.

Suburbanites who put out black-oil sunflower seeds for their local songbirds are small compensation for the threat that suburbanization itself poses to several species. The red-cockaded woodpecker, for instance, has seen its home in the Southeast's long-leaf pine forests converted to suburbs and farms, isolating populations and slashing its numbers.

In discussing the practicality of Geo-Engineering as an emergency procedure to counter "dangerous global warming" and how "pitiful the world's efforts to control greenhouse gases are," Begley once again subjects the reader to facts that sound alarming, especially when they are taken out of context. Let's look at a few of her "Cassandra-ish" statements in her piece:

According to satellite measurements, sea levels rose 3.3 millimeters per year from 1993 to 2006; the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had projected less than 2 millimeters.  

Let's take a snapshot of the last 100 years. Sea level change can be estimated from tide gauge data. These data reflect both water level changes and vertical land movement and the two have to be separated in order to estimate changes in sea level. Based on available analyses the rise over the last 100 years has been in the range 10-20 cm (or an average of 15).* That would be .15 cm per year or 1.5 mm per year. So Begley makes it sound like climate change projections are far too conservative.

Also, the IPCC projected loss of arctic sea ice at 2.5 percent per decade from 1953 to 2006. It's actually been 7.8 percent, or 30 years ahead of projections.