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WWII LOST SQUADRON ENCASED IN GREENLAND ICE BURIES GLOBAL-WARMING PRONOUNCEMENTS

(Arlington, VA — September 13, 1999) Greening Earth Society science advisor Robert C. Balling, Jr., examines the story of infamous "Lost Squadron" from World War II and in the process of recounting a tale of heroism and adventure discovers reasons why, as he says, "We should be skeptical of bold pronouncements permeating conventional wisdom about global warming."

In July 1942, twenty-five U.S. Army Air Corps crewman were forced to ditch two new B-17 Flying Fortresses and six new P-38 Lightnings on Greenland’s ice-cap when bad weather kept them from delivering the warplanes to Great Britain. Forty-six years later, Pat Epps and Richard Taylor joined the list of aviators who had long-dreamed of recovering the eight planes by managing to locate the treasures under 268 feet of snow and ice. Using "cold mining" techniques, Epps and Taylor were able to retrieve one of the P-38s by bringing it to the surface one piece at a time in 1992. Dubbed "Glacier Girl," the airplane is being reassembled and carefully restored in Middlesboro, Kentucky and is expected to fly again within a few years.

What piqued Balling’s interest in the story is the fact the airplanes were located under so much ice and snow during fifty years when fossil fuel use grew astronomically, and when some global warming theorists predicted shrinking polar ice caps and claimed glaciers were melting around the world. "Apocalyptic stories of melting icecaps are a key ingredient of the greenhouse/global-warming debate," Balling writes in his report.

Balling acknowledges that it is possible that melting elsewhere on the ice sheet might have compensated for the accumulation of snow and ice above the eight warplanes. He points out that review of scientific literature from the 1990s provides information about the possibility of increased snow and ice mass in Greenland, cooling there since the 1950s, cooling of surrounding seas during this century, and reported thickening during the last twenty years. The literature also provides a report of a climate model predicting both thickening and thinning, and another climate model predicting decreasing accumulation along with even less melting. Finally, he notes that UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) temperature records for the area verify cooling at the "ditch site" in Greenland amounting to 2.25°F from the time the Lost Squadron touched down until "Glacier Girl" was restored to sunlight fifty years later.

"Too often in presentations about global warming we are told the world is warming and that the major ice sheets are melting," Balling explains. "In focusing on this story we learn the area in question is cooling and scientific literature telling us that linking temperature trends to changes in ice packs involves a complicated set of processes that defy the simplistic notion that warming automatically yields a loss of mass over major ice sheets." He concludes that things in the real world never are so simple as they might seem.

"Those brave pilots of the Lost Squadron faced a lot of uncertainty regarding atmospheric conditions in their attempt to ferry planes to the European Theater of Operations," he writes. "In a similar way, we face enormous uncertainty in our evaluation of the climate effects of a buildup of greenhouse gases. Those planes located hundreds of feet beneath the ice may be telling us something about the climate of the last 50 years. The great challenge before us is to understand the message. Simplistic claims of recent warming and melting just don’t fly with The Lost Squadron."

Balling’s latest report is the fourth he has produced as a Greening Earth society science advisor. His first analyzed trends in United States "heating and cooling degree days" between 1950 and 1995, and found no statistically significant trends over the period of study. The second reviewed ice coverage data for the Great Lakes and found that, over the course of 31 years, the number of days with "some ice coverage" has increased at a statistically significant rate, contrary to predictions from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency-sponsored research. His third concerned a bizarre, single-year spike in Japanese temperature records. All four studies are available from Greening Earth Society’s website at www.greeningearthsociety.org/reference.htm.

Dr. Balling is Director of the Office of Climatology and an associate professor of geography at Arizona State University. He received his Ph.D. in geography from the University of Oklahoma in 1979. He has published over 50 papers on the subject of global warming and the greenhouse effect in the leading journals of climatology. He is contributing editor to World Climate Report, a bi-weekly online and print publication of Greening Earth Society, to which he serves as one of a half-dozen scientific advisors.

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