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But I still couldn't put the question out of my mind. The figures that Bellamy cited must have come from somewhere. I emailed him to ask for his source. After several requests, he replied to me at the end of last week. The data, he said, came from a website called www.iceagenow.com. Iceagenow was constructed by a man called Robert W Felix to promote his self-published book about "the coming ice age". It claims that sea levels are falling, not rising; that the Asian tsunami was caused by the "ice age cycle"; and that "underwater volcanic activity - not human activity - is heating the seas".
Is Felix a climatologist, a volcanologist or an oceanographer? Er, none of the above. His biography describes him as a "former architect". His website is so bonkers that I thought at first it was a spoof. Sadly, he appears to believe what he says. But there, indeed, was all the material that Bellamy cited in his letter, including the figures - or something resembling the figures - he quoted. "Since 1980, there has been an advance of more than 55% of the 625 mountain glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring group in Zurich." The source, which Bellamy also cited in his email to me, was given as "the latest issue of 21st Century Science and Technology".
They are constantly quoted as evidence that man-made climate change is not happening. But where did they come from? Singer cites half a source: "A paper published in Science in 1989." Well, the paper might be 16 years old, but at least, and at last, there is one. Surely?
I went through every edition of Science published in 1989, both manually and electronically. Not only did it contain nothing resembling those figures, throughout that year there was no paper published in this journal about glacial advance or retreat.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2005/may/10/environment.columnists
i should write a book for climate change skeptics. would sell like crazy in the US. the information i cite wouldnt matter. people would believe it because they want to believe it. maybe exxon would even sponsor me through some proxy org. though, the same could be said for most climate change proponents.
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