George Pender In the Ice Mont Blanc

(Guest Post)


In the Ice

I had never been inside a glacier before today.

Nevertheless, as I type this I am sitting on an ice bench carved out inside “The Mer de Glace” on the northern slopes of the Mont Blanc massif.

200 metres deep, about as wide and five miles long, this river of ice is scraping along the valley, carrying me and everything around me at the hectic pace of one centimeter per hour (300 feet per year).

Each year an employee of the “Companie de Mont Blanc”, hacks out a thousand cubic meters of ice to construct a tunnel, a tourist attraction, with lights and ice sculptures inside. The surface is astonishingly clear and I can see internal bubbles, soil and lumps of rock, preserved from many centuries ago.

I took a cable car to get here but it only ran two thirds of the way down the valley. There was then a staircase of 350 steps (about 80m vertically) to get down to the ice and the entrance to this burrow. The reason: The cable car was built in 1980, and the glacier has considerably ablated in the intervening decades.

After fifty or so steps I passed a sign affixed to the rock – “Level of Glacier 1990”. One hundred steps later “Level in 2000”. The final two hundred steps brought me to the entrance at the face of the ice.

It seems clear that the Mont Blanc area has warmed over the last thirty years.

At the same time, in the UK, winter cold snaps may well be getting more severe. I am inclined to believe that this is due to diversion of the Gulf Stream by melting polar ice, causing Britain to approach a climate more commensurate with its latitude (north of Newfoundland). Then again perhaps I will be proved wrong by a spate of mild winters over the next few years(?)

Whatever the case it is beyond doubt that the current atmospheric CO2 concentration is nearly 40% higher than would be found in the bubbles in the walls of this cave.

A good exercise for A-Level physics students is to get them to use basic thermal physics to estimate the warming effect of this increase. Correct answers will lie the range of 0.2 to two degrees, depending on assumptions. (If you want more detail than this, writing to some people in East Anglia should do “the trick”!)

I do not intend to lecture the reader on the direct challenges of global warming, nor on the need for global action to slow the changes so that people can adapt to a new climate. There are plenty of others to do that. Instead I want to recognize the other threat that goes along with this, perhaps the greater threat.

Whilst an entirely laissez-faire attitude towards emissions is no more desirable than the same attitude would be for defence there is nevertheless a grave danger in endorsing the right of governments to pass laws regulating any activity that causes emissions, any activity that uses electricity. We would effectively be granting governments a near unlimited moral mandate to interfere in lives of the citizenry.

If Margret Thatcher’s favourite economist, F A Hayek, were alive today I feel sure that he would be advocating international cooperation based on consent, with national or even local implementation. This would be set upon general principles focused on supply-side activity. He would not flinch from his belief in the rule of law and the importance of maintaining privacy. He would furthermore insist on principled limits on the means employed by, and not just the legitimate aims of, the state. We should do the same.

Most of all, he would maintain that people should be free to use their own judgment and their own abilities, to prepare themselves, their loved ones, their businesses and their customers, for what is to come.

This will not be possible under a collectivist minded government. People cannot prepare for shortages, to help themselves and others, if they fear that the state may be prepared to make confiscations.

Socialists will certainly try to twist this crisis to claim that individual freedom has failed and therefore must be subject to greater curtailment. We must, at this point, stand ready to remind them that the crisis, to a very great extent, is one of their own causation.

After all, the reason it is so hard to convince the pubic of the dangers of climate change is not that they are simply selfish or stupid. It is rather the case that people are, quite understandably and rationally, suspicious of government sponsored scientists implicitly advocating greater powers for government. Indeed many scientists seem to expect citizens to take a very unscientific attitude, and to simply accept “Government by expert”.

The sceptical attitude on this issue is demeaned as “denialism” and people who might otherwise voice their doubts, often along a path to fuller understanding, are instead simply bullied into silence. The entirely understandable and rational response of people under these circumstances is an intensification of their scepticism.

Were it not for the virtual nationalisation of science, particularly in Europe, it would be considerably easier to convince people to take these challenges seriously, to accept some reasonable regulation and also to prepare for, and to mitigate against the changes.

One cannot help but ask - “Where are the Lord Actons, the Lord Kelvins and the James Clarke Maxwells of today?” The answer: They are largely gone along with the private wealth which was necessary to maintain them.

Conservatives and old liberals tend to believe that money can do more good administered by private hands than it can after confiscation as tax. This is nowhere more manifestly true than when it comes to the funding of climate science today.

If a profound crisis does result from the challenges of climate change, the socialists will have played much more than their fair share in causing the problems.

If we are not to sink into what Churchill called that “abyss of a new Dark Age” we must stand ready to oppose the familiar but fearful instinct which has so often, and with such tragic consequences, caused people to reach for collectivism to solve the problems of its own creation.

Anyway, I’d better get going, it’s chilly in here and I’ve got some steps to climb.