Researchers: Climate change natural - not human caused

August 1, 2006

By MARY AMES/Frontiersman

ALASKA - Mike Sfraga, director of the University of Alaska geography program, and Bruce Molina, a geologist with the U. S. Geological Survey, have studied the Earth for decades, falling into crevasses along the way. Now, as part of their newly launched Bradford Washburn Glacier Repeat Photography Program, both scientists are watching closely as many of Alaska's glaciers retreat, melting away into the mountains where they were born.

A healthy glacier is advancing, has a bulbous nose at its terminus and a convex surface, Molina said. An unhealthy glacier is flat or concave. A healthy glacier gets a volume of snow at its head each winter that equals or is greater than the melt volume of the summer and has a huge moraine to stabilize it.

Whether humans are causing the climate changes that are causing the glaciers to melt is one of the main questions confronting the scientists.

&#8220I'm positive it is from multiple causes,” Molina said. &#8220The physics are there. If you put pollutants in the air, you will heat the Earth. Yes, it impacts temperatures. But melt glaciers - no.”

Glaciers come and go naturally and have for 20 billion years. The Earth couldn't care less, he said. If humans were extinct, the glaciers would still be melting today, he said.

&#8220Are we going to fix things by creating less greenhouse gases?” Molina said. &#8220No. And if you think so, you don't know how the Earth works - you're a politician.”

The real problem everyone is ignoring is the unchecked world population, and that problem is still growing, he said.

&#8220In a ‘perfect' third world, 80 percent of the people die from disease,” he said. &#8220You add first-world medicine to the mix and the populations grow to exceed their limiting resource.”

Molina considers clean water to be a major limiting resource.

It's called &#8220carrying capacity,” Sfraga said. Sfraga used Jared Diamond's book, &#8220Collapse” as the textbook for the senior seminar class he taught last semester.

&#8220I was surprised at how in tune with this issue the students were,” Sfraga said. &#8220All 20 were engaged in some other group. They were aware, understood and applied what they read.”

Sfraga listed some of the vanished societies that Diamond examined. On Easter Island, people cut down the last tree, knowing the consequences of their actions but compelled by religious beliefs, he said. And the Greenland Colony emulated European culture and farming practices that didn't work in Greenland, he said.

The multi-year project is funded by the University of Alaska Geography Program, the USGS, University of Alaska Fairbanks School of Natural Resources and Agricultural Sciences, the UA Office of Research and Academic Affairs and the UAF Office of Research Services. Sfraga and Molina are co-directors of the project and are clear about what is needed for the future.

&#8220We are going to need more and more students trained in field science and Earth science,” Sfraga said. &#8220Alaska should have the best of all the states.”

And students still need to be trained in the field, Molina said.

&#8220You can't appreciate what it's like to be in a whiteout in the classroom,” he said.

Contact Mary Ames at

352-2284 or mary.ames@

frontiersman.com.