A Nobel Peace Prize laureate has come to the desert to be an advocate for ice.
Henry Pollack shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with his colleagues on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and former Vice President Al Gore. Pollack is on campus today to promote his book, A World Without Ice, which was released in October. The book chronicles the history of Earth’s climate and polar ice caps.
“It’s a book about climate change told through the prism of ice,” he said. “So it goes back in time to the last Ice Age when we had a lot of ice and few people and moves forward in time to today when we have much less ice and more people.”
Pollack said the book makes a case for humans being behind rising global temperatures.
“Humans don’t realize it, but they’re the most powerful geological agents on the planet,” he said. “And the book talks not only about climate change, but also about a lot of other weather things that humans are doing.”
While Pollack recognizes the political debate raging about man’s influence on global warming, he said his book takes a standpoint outside of politics.
“By telling the story through the prism of ice, it removes it somewhat from the political arena,” he said. “I say that ice is a very neutral observer of climate change. It doesn’t read newspapers. It’s not red, and it’s not blue. It’s white.”
Stephen Dinkel, president of Lobo Conservatives, said a lot of money can be made by perpetuating the idea of global warming. He pointed to an incident in mid-November, commonly referred to as “Climate-gate,” where documents used by the climatic research unit of a university in Norwich, England, were leaked to the public.
The e-mails mention academic journals known for their global warming skepticism and encourage members of the scientific community not to publish in them.
Dinkel said “Climate-gate” is evidence that there’s more to the issue of global warming that hasn’t been explored.
“It’s more reassuring evidence that the debate is not over,” he said. “The whole aspect of ‘Oh, global warming is happening, you need to be on board,’ is now being debunked.”
Olivia Hawkins, a volunteer with UNM’s branch of a national environment-advocacy group called 1Sky, said attention to “Climate-gate” detracts from the heart of the issue of global warming.
“I feel like the ‘Climate-gate’ debate is regressive,” she said. “It’s not really moving this effort forward in a positive way. It was a selective publication of e-mails and it’s kind of taken out of context. It’s not really engaging in the issue in a responsible way.”
Dinkel said global warming advocates stand to make a lot of money by perpetuating the global warming conspiracy, which is why they’re trying to sell the general public on the idea.
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“I think people are lying because a lot of money is at stake with the whole ‘green’ movement,” he said. “We can say here in New Mexico, because we’re a big energy state, a lot of money is at stake.”
If the movement were authentic, Dinkel said, political advocates wouldn’t be making so much money.
“Al Gore is making a boat load off of this stuff,” he said. “If you really want to save the planet, you can do it in a non-profit sort of way, where, yes you’re being helped out … but you’re not making cha-ching out of it.”
Should the global warming debate linger on trivialities, Hawkins said the human race will pay.
“I believe that a healthy climate is the primary basis for a healthy people,” she said. “We’re not necessarily seeing the adverse effects in the U.S. right now, but all over the world they’re seeing the effects. There’s droughts in Africa and other places are getting floods and are unable to handle it.”
Pollack said melting ice could raise sea levels worldwide 3 to 6 feet.
“There’s no coastline anywhere that’s prepared for that amount of sea level change,” he said. “You displace between 100 and 200 million people through that range of sea level rise.”
*
Henry Pollack Lecture
Today
4 p.m.
Northrop Hall, Room 122*
