By Brian Carnell

Wednesday, October 3, 2001

In early September, NBC ran an intriguingGlobal Warming story. According to the story, the temperature in Glacier National Park had risen over the last century to the point where the famous glaciers were melting. Thanks to humanity's impact on climate, this incredible natural wonder would soon disappear. While that made a compelling story, it turns out to be partly fictitious.

Writing for the Cato Institute, Patrick Michaels notes that interested parties can download detailed temperature records for western Montana, where Glacier National Park is located, on the Internet. The Western Montana Climatological Division maintains climate records for the state that begin in 1895.

The interesting thing about those records is that temperatures in Glacial Park today are almost identical to what they were 107 years ago. So where is the 3 and 1/2 degree increase that NBC claimed was melting the glaciers? This change comes by looking at the data beginning in 1950, when for a variety of reasons the temperature was far lower than it was in 1895.

As Michaels puts it, the anomaly is not that the glaciers are melting -- they were almost certainly melting as soon as that part of the West emerged from a cold period that ended sometime in the middle of the 19th century. The anomaly is that this melting was temporarily slowed down around 1950. Michaels asks,

Why didn't NBC check the regional temperature records for western Montana? Instead of recycling an old story, they could have produced a much better one -- real news -- by showing that Glacier's' glaciers have been melting like this for well over a century and are doing so without any net regional summer warming in the last 100 years.

Ah, but recycling nonsense is so much easier.

Source:

NBC twists facts, again, about Glacier Park. Patrick J. Michaels, Cato Institute, September 15, 2001.

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