Guest post by Steven Goddard
Last week, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon warned that “polar ice caps were melting far faster than expected just two years ago“
This was based on a number of widely publicized scientific studies released this year claiming that both the Arctic and Antarctic are melting faster than expected.
As recently as last week, scientists were sounding the alarm.
Tues., April 28, 2009OSLO – The ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica have awakened and are melting faster than expected, a leading expert told peers ahead of a conference of ministers from nations with Arctic territory.Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, an expert with the Center for Ice and Climate at the University of Copenhagen, told the conference in the Arctic town of Tromsoe that the need for a wake-up call was genuine for the polar and glacial regions.
He apparently didn’t read this paper from last Autumn’s AGU Meeting
Ice loss in Greenland has had some climatologists speculating that global warming might have brought on a scary new regime of wildly heightened ice loss and an ever-faster rise in sea level. But glaciologists reported at the American Geophysical Union meeting that Greenland ice’s Armageddon has come to an end.
One has to wonder if some scientists are lacking access to the Internet, as the amount of polar sea ice on the planet is above the 30 year mean.
Yesterday, NSIDC announced that “Arctic sea ice extent at the end of April 2009 was within the expected range of natural variability.” and “The decline rate for the month of April was the third slowest on record“
The NSIDC graph below shows that April ice extent has actually increased by more than the size of Texas over past last two years. Clearly The UN Secretary General is mistaken when he claims “”polar ice caps were melting far faster than expected just two years ago.”
I took this graph a step further and compared 2009 vs. past years. Current April extent is the greatest in the last 8 years. It is greater than it was 20 years ago.
If you look at the last 20 years, there is no statistically significant trend in the data.
Arctic ice extent is essentially normal.
It is important to remember that ice area between mid-April and mid-August is what affects the earth’s climate, because that is when the sun is up highest in the sky. When the ice reaches it’s minimum in September, the sun is so low above the horizon that the presence or absence of ice has little impact on the earth’s SW radiation balance. A more complete explanation here .
Also, the claim of Polar Bear endangerment is based largely on the idea that the ice is supposedly breaking up earlier than it used to in the spring. The “third slowest melt on record” would hardly support that popular claim.
I continue to be astonished at the amount of misinformation being propagated by some scientists and governmental officials. The correct information is readily available to anyone who has access to Google and five minutes of time. What is the real agenda?
What is the real agenda?
A global command economy.
If you want incoherance in the news check out the science section in Google News for Canada. In the same gathering of news about the Artic ice, you find both melting and unexpected freezing articles. Maybe it is a sign that things are stating to chance in the MSM.
In my experience politicians don’t often bother to do their own reseach. They prefer meeting people, talking and exerting their influnece. They tend to rely on staff for research, who may sometimes prefer to tell them what they think they want to hear, or even have their own itineraries. “Yes Minister”, etc. And matters of climate change are probably more an annoyance to a lot of them, to be delegated to the minions (apart from those that are making money out of it)
The Alarmists have already been proved wrong. That was the easy part–the Earth has done it for us.
The next step is getting the Alarmists to ADMIT they were wrong and that, I’m afraid, will take heaven AND Earth.
Linear trends of cyclic data are as subject to Twain’s axiom as the remainder of Statistics in the wrong hands.
At some point this cadre of politicians will need to confront the notion that continued AGW alarmism in the face of enormous data to the contrary – is a losing proposition. There are enough political consultants and pollsters and spin doctors on the planet to make this abundantly clear to even the most hardened alarmist.
In the face of these facts – and having the benefit of hindsight – how do these politicians plan to extract themselves from the backlash that is inevitable. Do they think they will not be held responsible for perpetrating an inhumane hoax? At what point do these intelligent purveyors of human evolution look in a mirror and admit that fear-based social engineering has run out of… ahem, gas?
It’s difficult to know whether to laugh or cry…
We absolutely do not know how big the range of natural variation is for the Arctic and Antarctic ice packs. We’ve only been measuring for a few decades and that coincided with a warming period.
The default position should be the skeptical one. All changes observed in the last 30 years are presumed as natural until shown otherwise by the preponderance of the evidence.
BTW: Computer models do not produce evidence! Evidence is facts derived from direct observation. Computer models do not output facts, either.
This is an ethics problem, not a science issue.
And speaking of ethics, how long will it take Secretary of Energy Steve Chu to sound the klaxon of Armageddon over this latest “study”?
Well this is lucky for the Catlin group I suppose. There will likely be enough ice for the rescue planes to land on when it comes time to extricate them. Still, I have to wonder what their “reports” will yield. Anyone taking bets?
Why is it that when a major scientific expedition has just reported the surprise discovery that newly formed arctic ice was often twice as thickas expected, only one newspaper in the world thinks it is newsworthy?
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/05/04/lawrence-solomon-deep-arctic-ice-surprises-scientific-expedition.aspx
“One has to wonder if some scientists are lacking access to the Internet, as the amount of polar sea ice on the planet is above the 30 year mean.”
What they are lacking is any notion of integrity.
There’s a news story coming that’s could bring down the AGW hoax like a house of cards. Compare this graph with the arctic graph above:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_timeseries.png
Notice that the slope of the antarctic sea ice for May is about 4 million sq. km. per month. That’s more than twice the slope for the arctic and that means that the total is going to rise a lot over the next month (or more). There is a good chance the all time HIGH record for sea ice worldwide will be broken. This is at such perfect variance with the idiotic pronouncements by the AGW fanatics that they won’t be able to dance away.
I’d like to see a headline that starts with the words, “Break Out the Tar and Feathers.”
I think part of the reason for all the furor about the Arctic Ice is that this is just as much an iconic image as the Polar Bears. Because of the lag in pumping heat from the tropics to the poles, the Arctic Ice continued melting even after the globe started cooling. Also, a picture of a globe with the Sea Ice extent is an easily understandable graphic. Temperature series with a small drop didn’t mean a lot, but wide swaths of ice disappearing before our eyes does. I think this present incoherence is just a manifestation of panic that the last great graphic in support of ‘global warming’ and the power derived from carbon taxing is going belly up.
The world’s politicians, and journalists, and corrupt scientists can’t keep up the charade much longer.
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OT – BBC update re Caitlin:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8033969.stm
‘The latest resupply was only made possible because the charter firm Kenn Borek Air fitted special fuel tanks to allow the aircraft extra range and so avoid the need for a refuelling stop.
This limited the amount of weight that could be carried, so while food, fuel and batteries were delivered, a scientific instrument known as SeaCat, designed to to be lowered into the sea beneath the ice, had to be left behind.
Chip Cunliffe, operations chief in London, said: “It has been a difficult 10 days trying to get the flight in, with the weather consistently frustrating us, and a technical problem with one plane causing us to turn back on one earlier attempt to reach them.
“Using additional fuel tanks has made this resupply easier in the end; and it’s a relief to get the team moving once again.”
The expedition, originally due to run into the end of May, is now being concluded a week early amid concern about the strength of the ice as the summer melt approaches.
The Catlin Arctic Survey team hopes its ice thickness data – coming primarily now from drilling following the failure of a mobile radar unit – will help scientists better understand the changes taking place at the highest latitudes.’
They got a resupply in but sounds like they are cannning the expedition due to the cold weather and the effort of drilling through such thick ice…
Anthony,
The articles you cite talk about land ice and not sea ice. The two may be correlated, but I don’t think that can be tacitly assumed.
Even if the ice area and extent keep growing for the next decade, politicians will keep on talking about the melting ice and the need to do something; need those tax dollars, don’t you know.
Looking at those first two graphs of April Ice Extent, perception is everything.
The first shows the trend down for 30 years and the hint of possible recovery is hidden in plain view.
The second, with a flat line drawn through this year’s April level makes a possible recovery of ice extent more visible.
So, if the ice extent this September is greater than last year, will the talk next year still be of the loss of Arctic ice as seen through 2007? Silly question — of course!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Lie
The Big Lie (German: Große Lüge) is a propaganda technique. It was defined by Adolf Hitler in his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf as
=> a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously”.
Some of the hysteria has been to keep the fraud going until Copenhagen happened and carbon taxing could penetrate the last great polity not embracing it, the United States. But Cap and Trade seems to be foundering on industrial state Democrats having their oxen gored. New Zealand, and now Australia seems to be seeing the light. Copenhagen, whatever happens there, will be ignored, and the globe will continue to cool, for how long, even kim doesn’t know.
But I think the high water mark of the hoax has been reached. We can start reminiscing about Michael Piltdown Mann, now. I remember being so amused as a child that the world’s intelligentsia could have been fooled so extensively by the Piltdown Mann, but I’m just stunned at how much bigger a manifestation of the essential foolishness of man this climate warming hogwash has been.
Though it won’t have quite the far reaching impact on the rightful placement of man in the cosmos as the Galileo affair did, the immediate social impact of this correction in our consciousness will be far greater than that scientific revolution. Interesting times we live in. I never expected to see this.
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The popular media routinely provides politically motivated disinformation (on every important topic). That’s all the information most working people with families have the time to peruse. The politicians know that.
I find that the disinformation regarding AGW is effective. Most minds I meet are closed and in the pro-AGW mode — yet, most minds do not have the background to understand the subject. People simply believe propaganda often repeated. Its nothing new in human society. That bothers me, but I don’t have a solution.
I think that we all know what the real agenda is — financial oppertunism (Gore), grants etc. and the dreaded “la la la I cant hear you” syndrome.
“What is the real agenda?”
That is the real question.
To be fair, she (Dorthe Dahl-Jensen is a she, not he) was commenting on the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, not sea ice, as Steven Goddard is commenting on.
Jørgen
The real agenda? It’s simple: Follow the Money. There are too many political and professional careers based upon AGW. For example, watch this recent BNN interview with former World Bank economist Nicholas Stern:
http://watch.bnn.ca/squeezeplay/may-2009/squeezeplay-may-4-2009/#clip168429
No surprise he is flogging his new book claiming that things are getting even “worse” than they thought just a couple of years ago, all the skeptics are stupid, CO2 is all to blame, blah, blah, blah.
(I wonder if economist Stern had the foresight to predict the recent world-wide economic collapse, or was he too busy chasing the AGW phantom menace?)
Laurence Kirk (09:21:38)
Good points on your OT Catlin update. As I commented on the fuel cache post:
“BBC is reporting that the team has been resupplied.
And now the real spin begins.
Remember, at mission start they were to travel 1,000 km in 100 days. So, after 65 days they’ve done all of just under 400 km. And now they won’t even do 100 days ( the ice is melting, don’t you know). With a start date of 28 Feb, 100 days would have meant they’d be on the ice till 8 Jun. Now it’s being spun that the mission was going to end at the end of May but will be cut short a week. Which gives them about another 20 days or so before being plucked off the ice.
Or, to use the Catlin technique –
550 km in 85 days (okay, maybe 600 km in 85 days).
Not quite as thrilling sounding as 1,000 km in 100 days.”
Let me reemphasize the point – while the spin is that it’s being cut short a week, in reality it’s being cut short by two weeks. So much for five years of meticulous planning.