Regular WUWT readers know of the issues related to Arctic Sea Ice that we have routinely followed here. The Arctic sea ice trend is regularly used as tool to hammer public opinion, often recklessly and without any merit to the claims. The most egregious of these claims was the April of 2008 pronouncement by National Snow and Ice Data Center scientist Dr. Mark Serreze of an ice free north pole in 2008. It got very wide press. It also never came true.
To my knowledge, no retractions were printed by news outlets that carried his sensationally erroneous claim.
A few months later in August, when it was clear his first prediction would not come true, and apparently having learned nothing from his first incident (except maybe that the mainstream press is amazingly gullible when it comes to science) Serreze made another outlandish statement of “Arctic ice is in its death spiral” and” The Arctic could be free of summer ice by 2030″. In my opinion, Serreze uttered perhaps the most irresponsible news statements about climate second only to Jim Hansen’s “death trains” fiasco. I hope somebody at NSIDC will have the good sense to reel in their loose cannon for the coming year.
Not to be outdone, in December Al Gore also got on the ice free bandwagon with his own zinger saying on video that the “entire north polar ice cap will be gone within 5 years“. There’s a countdown watch on that one.
So it was with a bit of surprise that we witnessed the wailing and gnashing of teeth from a number of bloggers and news outlets when in his February 15th column, George Will, citing a Daily Tech column by Mike Asher, repeated a comparison of 1979 sea ice levels to present day. He wrote:
As global levels of sea ice declined last year, many experts said this was evidence of man-made global warming. Since September, however, the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began. According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.
The outrage was immediate and widespread. Media Matters: George Will spreads falsehoods Discover Magazine: George Will: Liberated From the Burden of Fact-Checking Climate Progress: Is George Will the most ignorant national columnist? One Blue Marble Blog: Double Dumb Ass Award: George Will George Monbiot in the Guardian: George Will’s climate howlers and Huffington Post: Will-fully wrong
They rushed to stamp out the threat with an “anything goes” publishing mentality. There was lots of piling on by secondary bloggers and pundits.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I got interested in what was going on with odd downward jumps in the NSIDC Arctic sea ice graph, posting on Monday February 16th NSIDC makes a big sea ice extent jump – but why? Then when I was told in comments by NSIDC’s Walt Meier that the issue was “not worth blogging about” I countered with Errors in publicly presented data – Worth blogging about?
It soon became clear what had happened. There was a sensor failure, a big one, and both NSIDC and Cryosphere today missed it. The failure caused Arctic sea ice to be underestimated by 500,000 square kilometers by the time Will’s column was published. Ooops, that’s a Murphy Moment.
So it is with some pleasure that today I offer you George Will’s excellent rebuttal to the unapologetic trashing of his column . The question now is, will those same people take on Dr. Mark Serreze and Al Gore for their irresponsible proclamations this past year? Probably not. Will Serreze shoot his mouth off again this year when being asked by the press what the summer ice season will bring? Probably, but one can always hope he and others have learned something, anything, from this debacle.
Let us hope that cooler heads prevail.
By George F. Will, Washington Post
Friday, February 27, 2009; A17
Few phenomena generate as much heat as disputes about current orthodoxies concerning global warming. This column recently reported and commented on some developments pertinent to the debate about whether global warming is occurring and what can and should be done. That column, which expressed skepticism about some emphatic proclamations by the alarmed, took a stroll down memory lane, through the debris of 1970s predictions about the near certainty of calamitous global cooling.
Concerning those predictions, the New York Times was — as it is today in a contrary crusade — a megaphone for the alarmed, as when (May 21, 1975) it reported that “a major cooling of the climate” was “widely considered inevitable” because it was “well established” that the Northern Hemisphere’s climate “has been getting cooler since about 1950.” Now the Times, a trumpet that never sounds retreat in today’s war against warming, has afforded this column an opportunity to revisit another facet of this subject — meretricious journalism in the service of dubious certitudes.
On Wednesday, the Times carried a “news analysis” — a story in the paper’s news section, but one that was not just reporting news — accusing Al Gore and this columnist of inaccuracies. Gore can speak for himself. So can this columnist.
Reporter Andrew Revkin’s story was headlined: “In Debate on Climate Change, Exaggeration Is a Common Pitfall.” Regarding exaggeration, the Times knows whereof it speaks, especially when it revisits, if it ever does, its reporting on the global cooling scare of the 1970s, and its reporting and editorializing — sometimes a distinction without a difference — concerning today’s climate controversies.
Which returns us to Revkin. In a story ostensibly about journalism, he simply asserts — how does he know this? — that the last decade, which passed without warming, was just “a pause in warming.” His attempt to contact this writer was an e-mail sent at 5:47 p.m., a few hours before the Times began printing his story, which was not so time-sensitive — it concerned controversies already many days running — that it had to appear the next day. But Revkin reported that “experts said” this columnist’s intervention in the climate debate was “riddled with” inaccuracies. Revkin’s supposed experts might exist and might have expertise but they do not have names that Revkin wished to divulge.
As for the anonymous scientists’ unspecified claims about the column’s supposedly myriad inaccuracies: The column contained many factual assertions but only one has been challenged. The challenge is mistaken.
Citing data from the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, as interpreted on Jan. 1 by Daily Tech, a technology and science news blog, the column said that since September “the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began.” According to the center, global sea ice levels at the end of 2008 were “near or slightly lower than” those of 1979. The center generally does not make its statistics available, but in a Jan. 12 statement the center confirmed that global sea ice levels were within a difference of less than 3 percent of the 1980 level.
So the column accurately reported what the center had reported. But on Feb. 15, the Sunday the column appeared, the center, then receiving many e-mail inquiries, issued a statement saying “we do not know where George Will is getting his information.” The answer was: From the center, via Daily Tech. Consult the center’s Web site where, on Jan. 12, the center posted the confirmation of the data that this column subsequently reported accurately.
The scientists at the Illinois center offer their statistics with responsible caveats germane to margins of error in measurements and precise seasonal comparisons of year-on-year estimates of global sea ice. Nowadays, however, scientists often find themselves enveloped in furies triggered by any expression of skepticism about the global warming consensus (which will prevail until a diametrically different consensus comes along; see the 1970s) in the media-environmental complex. Concerning which:
On Feb. 18 the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that from early January until the middle of this month, a defective performance by satellite monitors that measure sea ice caused an underestimation of the extent of Arctic sea ice by 193,000 square miles, which is approximately the size of California. The Times (“All the news that’s fit to print”), which as of this writing had not printed that story, should unleash Revkin and his unnamed experts.
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By the way, as one example of the peer-reviewed articles from the 1970s favoring warming (and, in fact, presumably one of the articles that led to the N.Y. Times piece from Aug 1975 entitled ““Warming trend seen in climate; two articles counter view that cold period is due,” here is the abstract of Wallace Broecker’s Aug 1975 article in Science entitled “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;189/4201/460 :
An impressively-accurate prediction, especially given that it was made at a time when global temperatures had been generally falling a bit for several decades (although not in the Southern Hemisphere)! [I think the only thing that modern climatologists would fault him on in hindsight is a bit too much of an either-or attitude in regards to the effect of man-made pollutants and his resulting tendency to attribute the observed cooling only to natural factors rather than at least partly to man-made aerosols that would nonetheless soon be overwhelmed by the warming effects of the GHGs.]
Smokey says:
Do you really want me to go and dig out your previous posts to prove you wrong or are you just quibbling with my use of the word “post” when the more technically-accurate word would have been “link to”?
Joel Shore,
You’re using the AGW bromides.
Much of icecap.us references many other reports and stories so your blanket rejection is as ludicorus as is AGW.
Andrew C. Revkin reported in September, 2008 that “Experts Confirm Open Water Circling Arctic”. This report was not confirmed by National Ice Center, Navy and Commerce Department, who said satellites were misreading conditions, and that there is too much ice in a critical spot along the Russian coast to allow anything but ice-hardened ships to get through.
Though the report was dubious Revkin used the word ‘confirmed’ in his headline anyway.
Revkin reported it as though it was fact.
He also said “….the North Pole’s being an “island” for the first time in 125,000 years”. His 125,000 years figure is not cited. He links to a Wall Street Journal article that also gives the 125,000 years figure without citation.
Andrew C. Revkin did not use sound data in his blog entry in September, 2008 and he does not use sound data in this case : “Revkin’s supposed experts might exist and might have expertise but they do not have names that Revkin wished to divulge.”
It continues to look to me that global warming is a political issue and not a science issue. Science is used by the alarmist side. Science is not respected by them. Truth does not matter. Truth is collateral damage in their pursuit.
Reference, Andrew C. Revkin from September 2008 :
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/06/confirmation-of-open-water-circling-north-pole/#comment-33383
Joel Shore,
Yes, please. Show me where I linked to ICECAP. I don’t read that site, and I can not understand why you would make that assertion. Certainly my posts on this thread do not come from ICECAP. So why did you claim that they did?
Of course, you may be simply attempting to change the subject. So I ask you again: who have you converted from their former questioning [skepticism] of the AGW/CO2 hypothesis, to being believers in that incredible new hypothesis? Either provide specific names, or explain your interminable posts, which convince no one that CO2 is gonna getcha.
Climate is driven (gasp) not by man, but man is driven by climate. There is nothing alarmist warming or alarmist cooling can do to change climate.
The Earth is not at the center of the Solar System, the Solar System is not at the center of the galaxy, and the Milky Way is not at the center of the Virgo Supercluster. Man does not control climate, and if the day comes that he tries to, he will most certainly foul it up to great demise, seeing how poorly is the understanding.
The only thing that can be done is to anticipate what’s coming down the pipe and make appropriate preparations to “Weather It” out.
6,000 years later, and the best man can do is a prophecy here or there that is heeded sucessfully. That’s it, folks. There’s the goal. Understand this stuff well enough to predict what is coming.
As for saving satellites, well, they have thier value, but you can’t eat them.
Well, if we restrict ourselves just to a few selected threads that I looked in over the last month alone, I find a link in your post at 4:14:36 on 28/01/2009 in this thread: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/27/james-hansens-former-nasa-supervisor-declares-himself-a-skeptic-says-hansen-embarrassed-nasa-was-never-muzzled/ , in your post at 11:09:18 on 8/02/2009 in this thread http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/02/05/fear-and-loathing-for-california/ , and in your post at 12:27:33 on 22/02/2009 (click12) in this thread http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/02/21/co2-does-not-drive-glacial-cycles/ . That is three examples in just a few minutes of searching!
Funny…I was thinking the same thing about you. I am quite sure that you really, really don’t want anybody here to actually read William Connolley’s paper that I linked to http://ams.allenpress.com/archive/1520-0477/89/9/pdf/i1520-0477-89-9-1325.pdf (which is why you immediately launched an ad hominem attack on him) And, I suppose that if I were in your shoes, I wouldn’t want them reading it either!
As to the first question, I don’t know…although there have been at least two people who I remember here saying that, while they themselves are skeptics, they do really appreciate my posts and having the alternate point of view presented. As to the second question, well, I think I have said before that it is a probably a combination of obsessiveness (a la this cartoon: http://xkcd.com/386/ ) and a vain hope that maybe I am making headway!
when discussing the Arctic/antarctic I find it is always about the ice. Area, extent, depth and of course the lack of it, (open water).
When people bring up the subject of sea ice I turn them away from the ice and focus on the the thermal energy. We are afterall talking about global warming, caused by thermal energy.
Most believe that the poles are the planet’s refrigeration units.
These refrigeration units are not just comprised of the ice, they include the sea water beneath the ice.
The effect of polar twilight and darkness on the thermal content of the polar waters is a very real factor.
While ice is more thermally conductive than water, open water is in direct contact with air while one meter of ice is not. The cooling of the sea water goes un-noticed because it sinks below the waves. Water below 0 degrees C sinks pretty fast and pretty far. Just because ice is not forming or isn’t there doesn’t mean that global thermal energy isn’t being lost.
At any given temperature, the thicker the ice, the less thermal loss from the sea water beneath. Open water is where the action is.
To “Joel Shore”
Re: Your Comments on the Meadows Family
Not to speak ill of the dead (Mrs) and the Mentally Infirm(Mr. Doktor Professor), but I actually ATTENDED lectures by these idiots. I presume you did not.
Further, I was subjected at the time to ADDITIONAL lectures by their fellow travelers on the Dartmouth faculty. I presume you weren’t victim of those either.
EVERY ONE of those lectures and “discussions” used the WORST CASE SCENARIO as the “most likely outcome”.
The “running out of chrome” scenario was presented by a tenured full professor in Engineering Sciences. I remember pretty clearly which scenario was presented, as I got into a knock-down, drag-out shouting match with the professor. Don’t remember seeing you there.
In retrospect, the prof’s diatribe sounded like it could have been written by Al Gore, if he hadn’t been serving as the model for Love Story down in Cambridge at the time.
I was there. I heard these idiots IN PERSON. To go back now and cherry-pick their caveats (without reference to what they were actually saying, likely to insure their grant status) is remarkably similar to what our Sunspot Friends at NASA are doing now with their monthly revisions of SC24. What we REALLY meant was….
Let me ask a question that I have posed to the ARRL’s Propagation Guy, a confirmed AGW guy (surprising until you discover he lives in Seattle):
Global temperatures have fallen for eight years. Arctic ice has NOT melted, but may be headed for a 21st century mid-winter record. And the sun is completely blank. Please tell me one thing, one thing only: how many spotless days within the next 365 (which SHOULD see HUGE sunspot numbers, as SC24 should be FLYING according to NASA predictions) would be required before you would concede that (a) there IS no AGW and (b) that we have entered a Solar Minimum Period.
Just mention a number, any number. 100 more spotless days? 200? 300? 365?
(that would be hard to fathom, but at least it would be a number)
I suspect you CAN’T answer that question (just as the the ARRL guy can’t) because you don’t believe that Climate Change has anything to do with natural, Non-Anthropogenic causes.
Just tell us: WHAT would change your mind? What condition, or trend, or data would do it? If, as I suspect, you can’t imagine ANYTHING that would change your mind about AGW, if you can’t lay-out EXACT conditions which would disprove this pet hypothesis of yours (as that’s all it is), then you aren’t practicing science or engineering or even logic, you are practicing faith.
As I tell folks who don’t believe in the Theory of Evolution, I respect your right to your faith. Just keep it the hell away from my government and especially from my ever-burgeoning taxes.
It seems to me that many of the self-proclaimed “scientists” of today are completely ignorant of the most important aspect of science: impartiality. Science is conducted entirely through reason and analysis; the moment when political incentives become involved is the moment when science dies. I think it’s absolutely disgusting that we can see legitimate journalists claim to be educated when all they do is echo whatever Gore pulls out of his arse. Modern science is being smothered by a political front that wears scientist masks.
Can it be pure coincidence that those of us who remember the 1970s remember the threat of an imminent ice age? It seems to be the case that commenters from the USA, Canada and the UK all remember that being the prevailing opinion at the time. It was certainly the case here in the UK, to my certain recollection. That it might not have been supported by a majority of authors of articles published in scientific journals did not prevent it being the case that was put to the public and it was not publicly refuted by the authors of those articles. Of course they might not have had access to the media because they were not seen by the news organisations as “the consensus”.
For all I know there is a simple explanation for the ice-age alarmists gaining the upper hand in the media in preference to those telling nothing but the wholesome truth, but I have never heard one.
Perhaps the explanation is that bad news sells whereas good news doesn’t (unless it’s good news like the impending publication of my first work of supposedly humorous fiction, but I would not be so vulgar as to mention that). Tell people that everything will be pretty much as has been experienced during their lifetime and that of their parents and grandparents, and you simply don’t have a story. Tell them the sky is about to fall in and you can run with it for years.
And therein lies both the similarity and the difference between Chicken Licken in the 1970s and Chicken Licken now.
The new ice-age was going to be harsh and kill people but there was nothing we could do about it. The 220 years of global warming we had already caused had not yet been noticed. If only they had thermometers and intelligent people in those days they could have told us to drive more and throw more logs on the fire and all would be well. But as it was the story was just “it’s going to be cold, get used to it”.
Today’s Chicken Licken scenario has the added frisson of a cure. The new warm age is going to be harsh and kill people but there is a solution. Now we know that we have been warming the planet unnaturally since 1750, nearly 260 years, but we can reverse our wicked ways. Now, isn’t that much more of a story for the media to run? It has so many potential avenues to go down, each of which can develop its own momentum and become the story of the month, securing fame and a potential newspaper industry award for the adventurous journalists promoting it.
The whole thing now has so much momentum that they simply cannot afford to acknowledge weaknesses in the underlying quasi-science. Yes, dissenting voices are allowed a column here and there. That’s just fair play, you have to allow those who challenge your cozy sinecure an opportunity to comment so that you can knock them down by impressing that you are part of “the consensus”. And so the story that sells keeps on selling.
Three YouTube videos on “The Coming Ice Age” scare of the 70’s :
Global Cooling: The Coming Ice Age
What Happened to Global Cooling?
Global Climate Models
I suggest book “Fallen Angels” by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn as a very good illustration of common thinking in 70. Both regarding global cooling and regarding man causing it. It is a science fiction and obviously an exaggeration, but it does reflect current (then) thinking. If they were writing it in 90s it would be written with global warming background instead…
However, what has interested me is that most of the predictions that people seem to claim they made seem to be figments of the imagination.
In my younger days I had the pleasure and honor of assisting in a small way on the book that stop-checked Limits to Growth dead in its tracks. (I actually drew some of the S-curves.)
by early in the next century will have driven the mean planetary temperature beyond the limits experienced during the last 1000 years.
An impressively-accurate prediction
I’d say that was an impressively wrong prediction. Although, it’s interesting you think it is accurate.
There is a chronic problem on the warming side of the debate which is to blur predictions and current facts. So that for many, the prediction is the current reality.
Joel, you often get a hard time here, and I can admire a man who slugs it out in hostile terrain.
But so far as I can tell, regardless who who is “ahead” in the debate at the moment, the Big Mo is on the side of the skeptics. We hear about scientists jumping off the catastrophic-AGW bandwagon a lot lately. But who is jumping on?
Investment Advice to Joel Shore:
Just looking through my investments, trying to draw the wagons into a circle before the the Obama Nation attacks.
I noticed the prices for big coal (e.g. ACI Arch Coal and BTU Peabody Coal) are starting to look very attractive, on the back of all this AGW talk and a Hawaiian President (“is it chilly in here?”)
If you were a smart boy, you’d hedge your rhetoric with a few hundred shares of each. Just a thought.
In fact, if I ascribed ANY intelligence to the Goreacle at all (that is, as much as his dad and grandad had), I would suspect him of (a) talking his AGW trash (b) shorting coal for a couple of years, then (c) when the tide turns (as surely it must) going LONG coal right at the exact bottom. Al will know where the bottom is, because he controls it; it’s the day before he recants his Inconvenient Truth.
Does anyone have a list of accepted AGW theory predictions and time lines?
I find it amusing how people are now saying that there wasn’t global cooling alarmism in the seventies.
Below is a link to a youtube clip entitled: “The Greenhouse Conspiracy” screened in 1990.
Watch from 7:55 minutes, an interview with Dr Stephen Schneider who admits global cooling was the consensus at the time. He himself was convinced of the next ice age(until temps started rising, then he changed his story)
Joel Shore, the links you’ve pointed out so far have all been to graphics which are hosted there, but he may very well have gotten them from other articles they were hotlinked from, without ever visiting the site or knowing anything about it. That, and one was clearly not even an original product of that particular site. Even more importantly, what are the flaws in the actual charts? I do not claim to know enough to accurately evaluate such things myself, but it seems dangerous to dismiss something just because you don’t care for the source. I’d rather hear it explained why the data is flawed, or be shown contradictory information from a more highly esteemed source.
attn Billy Ruff’n
What a splendid idea.
The Fighting Billy Ruffian which fought at Trafalgar and was so called because her men could not pronounce her name:Bellerophon. She has a modern biography by the way and it is well worth reading.
Still your Billy Ruff’n sounds ideal for the job only provided her steel hull is up to handling Arctic temperatures. Which I am sure it is.
After all if Amundsen could do it a hundred years ago why can we not sail the Northwest Passage today? Especially in such a well found and suitable vessel?
Sorry no.
We might have had a chance in 2007 but now the Arctic ice is closing up again: and with terrifying speed.
I doubt the Northwest Passage will be open again in my lifetime.
But what an adventure it might have been.
Kindest Regards.
“Joel Shore (17:37:06) : Serreze made a prediction of something that he thought MIGHT happen.”
Mark Serreze cried wolf. You can’t be respected as a scientist when you make predictions that are so far off beam. It’s not like he was just a little wrong.
Also, it’s a tough sell to try to convince people that these sort of predictions don’t matter one way or the other.
I could just about kiss George Will for bringing up that BUGABOO of my entire upbringing in the 70s – the **coming ice age**! The ice age was imminent – we would all freeze! And somehow, it had something to do with the garbage. We were all going to be buried in endless mountains of garbage within 20 years, and if that didn’t kill us, the ice age would. Of course once someone worked out the numbers and made fools of the garbage-mountain hysterics (a thousand years of garbage in a 35 mile trench) the garbage part died out, but we were still all going to freeze. If the aliens or the Bermuda Triangle didn’t get us first. And so long as we didn’t get eaten by sharks. Then suddenly the aliens were friendly, so that died out too. Then it was Reagan with his hand on the button – we’d all be fried in a nuclear holocaust and then freeze to death in nuclear winter. Then it was the homeless – we’d all die on the streets. Suddenly they came at us with this global warming hooey, and I said “These people are insane. And evil.” Always with the next holocaust. At least fundamental religions give a slight explanation for their coming ends of the world. These people just make it up as they go.
Hooey!
“I find it amusing how people are now saying that there wasn’t global cooling alarmism in the seventies.”
Haha! It was bigger than global warming is NOW, and a lot more hysterical. Because we were not living in an information age with an information superhighway and skeptics everywhere – it was the age of “In Search Of” and Jim Jones and cults and aliens and killer sharks.
Please. The hysteria was at a fever pitch for most of my childhood about any one of those things, and the ice age was assuredly the biggest, because it was the most “scientific.” (Except, it could possibly be so.)
But seriously, can you point me to prominent people who are actually DENYING the ice age alarmism of the 70s? Because they are either young, ignorant and stupid, or they are LIARS.
Smokey,
Joel is just doing what all the [snip] do; if the information on hand doesn’t agree with the result you want, make some up!
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCooling/
Reply: I wish you people would be more polite ~ charles the moderator