With over a decade and a half since the IPCC AR4, it is instructive to see how the “run away melting” of Arctic sea ice is progressing.
Mass media outlets have been paying little attention to Arctic sea ice in recent years apart from cries of alarm at carefully selected low points in the record. After much excitement and breathless claims of imminent “ice-free summers” in the Arctic starting around and inspired by the release of IPCC’s AR4 in 2007, we were told that Arctic sea ice was “the canary in the coal mine”, the harbinger of the catastrophic changes happening to the climate system and caused by human actions.
Fortunately for the purveyors of this point of view, 2007 experienced the lowest summer sea ice extent in the relatively short satellite record. Worse, after a few years of mild recovery, we witnessed the OMG minimum of 2012. Media spin went into over-drive with claims it was “worse than we thought”, and claims from activist-scientists that the Arctic was in a “death spiral”.[1]
Now with over a decade and a half since AR4 it would be instructive to see how the “run away melting” is progressing. To check in on our canary and see whether it has fallen from its perch and is lying in the saw-dust with its stiff little legs sadly pointing towards the heavens.
NSIDC maintains a very instructive and useful interactive graph [5], allowing display of any selected years from the satellite record on a day by day basis . They also publish the ice extent data for each day of the 45 year record in text format, as well as the date and magnitude of minimum ice extent each year.
Since the September minimum is the most volatile this became a favourite metric and was a regular media climate highlight each September. In 2007 Al Gore was famously saying (unnamed) scientists had told him there may be no more Arctic ice at all in summer by as early as 2013.
Climatologists frequently explain the idea of the “albedo feedback” whereby less ice leads to more solar energy entering the sea, causing warmer waters, more ice melting, more solar … and a “tipping point” being reached where irreversible, run-away melting would occur. This explanation, while plausible, is of a naive simplicity and does not even examine what other effects more open water may have and what other feedbacks, positive or negative, may come into play.
More conductive heat loss since the ice was a good insulating barrier.
More evaporative heat loss due to more open water exposed to persistently strong Arctic winds.
More radiative heat loss, since water has a high emissivity in the infra-red and will be radiating more 24/7 throughout the summer and continuing into the winter when the Arctic is in permanent darkness and there is zero incident sunlight.
Even in the summer months, the little sunlight there is arrives at very low incident angles and a high proportion is reflected not absorbed at all. This weakens the supposed albedo feedback. It seems this has not been measured or quantified in place. It remains speculative but is somehow expected/assumed to be a dominant factor in the changing polar climate.
So what does the 45 years of daily satellite data tell us?
Figure 1. Arctic sea ice extent ( areas with less than 15% ice coverage ).
We can see that in 2007 and even up until 2012, the reduction in sea ice extent was indeed reducing significantly and at an accelerating rate. A quadratic function, corresponding to a constantly increasing rate of melting, did provide a reasonably good fit to the date from around 1995. This does not prove that AGW was the cause of that change but it did at least seem a reasonable hypothesis which merited proper investigation. Instead this was taken as a self-evident truth which did not require any proof.
Had that indeed been the case there would have been no summer ice by around 2023/24. However, as the subsequent record now tells us, this simplistic interpretation no longer fits the observed data and therefore is formally rebutted. Not to recognise this would be “science denial” or to display a “flat-earther” mentality. It may even constitute “climate change denial” !
With 16 years more data under our belts, we see a very different outcome. The 2023 sea ice minimum on 18/19 September was indistinguishable from that of 2007 when all the hysterical screaming began. ZERO net change in 17 years. The linear trend since 2007 is indistinguishable from zero ( around -0.17% per year ). Sadly, virtually no one seems to be aware of this GOOD NEWS because there is a stony silence from the media who steadfastly avoid mentioning it and climatologists who prefer to divert the discussion elsewhere : ice maximum, Antarctic sea ice, calving glaciers …. anything but canaries !!
At best we are told the lowest 17y on record are the last 17y, without also being told that period shows no net change.[2] Or we are told sea ice IS shrinking implying it is still happening. The grammatically a falsehood and at best wilful misdirection. eg. NASA Vital signs: “Key Takeaway: Summer Arctic sea ice extent is shrinking by 12.3% per decade due to warmer temperatures.”[3] Climate science seems to have moved from “Hide the decline” to “Hide the lack of decline” !
Regime change Sumatra et al 2023 [4] Determines that there has been a regime change in the Artic since 2007 witnessed by the thickness and character of ice flow through the Fram Straight.
“Here we show that the Arctic sea ice regime shifted in 2007 from thicker and deformed to thinner and more uniform ice cover. Continuous sea ice monitoring in the Fram Strait over the last three decades revealed the shift.”
Figure 2.
Analysis of year-to-year variation in the date of the summer sea ice minimum also shows a distinct change around 2007 from a trend to later date of minimum ice from 1987-2007 to a trend to earlier minima from 2007-2017. This jumped to later dates close to 2007 timing in recent years. There is a strong biannual (circa 2y) component throughout the record. There may also be indications of the repetition of a 30y cycle here but the dataset is too short for a clear determination of such a pattern.
The detailed daily satellite data of sea ice extent provides the basis for extended study to understand the variation and forces driving change. Sadly much of the discussion seems based on drawing a straight line through the entire dataset and reducing it to single scalar value: the “trend”, which is instantly, and spuriously, attributed to the monotonic rise in atmospheric CO2. This is lazy and convenient but not scientific. The rich granularity of 45y of daily data shows the variation is anything but monotonic and that other factors and feedbacks are at play.
More serious analysis is necessary to determine the extent that long term temperature rise is contributing to change, what feedbacks ( both positive and negative ) are at play and what this tells us about long term change. Trivial “trend” fitting is clearly grossly inadequate to understand the cryosphere and inform energy policy consequences and adaptation measures.
More honest reporting is required from media outlets, climate scientists and government bodies about the true nature of change, good news as well as bad, instead of highly selective reporting or misreporting to build an alarmist narrative.
We already know that sea ice extent today is higher than for much of the past 6 or 7 thousand years and, coincidentally, sea level is lower. Just about everything is within natural variation.
Yes, all the climate alarmist computer models except one predict that increasing CO2 will cause a hot spot in the Earth’s troposphere, but there is no evidence for its existence, even after all these years, therefore all the climate change computer models, with the possible exception of one, are wrong.
The one exception, the benign Russian model, has the lowest ECS of the bunch.
There is a slightly warmer “hot spot” but it’s not that hot. That is where the models fail. BTW it’s tropical troposphere hotspot. Before declaring “no evidence for ” try checking. There is a mild warming. Saying otherwise shows you’ve never looks and are just parroting what you thing you are supposed to say on WUWT.
Very nice. The silence is predictable, the CAGW crowd are liars and cheats. They will use anything to push their agenda, when something no longer works they simply move on, no big deal. They are loathsome.
I am starting to wonder whether Greta has decided that she has no further mileage in climate protest. She has moved on to Just Stop Oil (which is pleading for instant poverty) and supporting the Palestinians.
With her as with many such young people, it’s mainly a matter of “what’s the flavour of the month” for the latest protest. Why is their opinion taken notice of by so many?
Our younsters’ minds are currently under assault from numerous harmful, destructive forces.
I sometimes wonder if my skeptical/contrarian view would be different if, when I was young, my mind was filled with the amount of garbage that young people get today on a daily basis.
It’s got to be very hard to be a kid today. Harder than when I was a kid.
Let’s pray they can filter out the BS and live in the real world. Otherwise, we are all going down the tubes.
Makes you wonder just what it will take to wipe that scowl from her face. Apart from staged “arrests” of course, she does seem to smile when they occur..
I think she is in her element there. That’s why she is smiling. She is publicly sacrificing herself for humanity’s sake. That’s the way she wants to be seen.
As for the melting of Arctic sea ice before 2007, I’ve always thought that it was the old, dirty ice being “recycled”. As for a good canary in a coal mine, the glaciers in the Colorado Rockies are a good analogy. They only formed rather recently, during the Negotiation of the LIA, and as long as we have permanent ice here in Colorado, I’m not going to sweat much…
See below how the IPCC displayed Arctic Sea Ice Extent over all six assessment reports. It’s instructive to note how the data was obviously changed in the FAR, SAR & TAR and how AR6 Fig 9.13 is rather difficult to compare to the previous iterations, perhaps by design.
Thanks. That AR6 graphic is TOTAL and deliberate OBFUSCATION. Also note that in TAR they had invented some pre-satellite data which was added in without any indication it was NOT the same dataset. More scientific fraud like “Mike’s Nature Trick” ™.
If they had used a clearly legible graph as they had done in AR4 and AR5 someone may have noticed “the pause” was not fitting the agenda.
If they wanted to present all months of the year it could have been done clearly , like here where I do that for CPOM’s ice volume from Cryosat2.
Thanks, Steve. You again show how the IPCC lies about the climate.
It looks criminal to me,considering the amount of money that has been wasted over this unwarranted fear of CO2.
The people ringing the climate alarm bell the loudest, the IPCC have to lie about the climate in order to justify their jobs, and they do, over and over and over again.
The worlds oceans are *not* boiling. Arctic sea ice is not disappearing, and even if it did, then we could sail from the Atlantic ocean to the Pacific ocean, just like was done in the Twentieth Century.
Arctic and Antarctic sea ice extent is more sensitive to certain WIND directions and durations than it is to a degree or two average air temperature change.
climategrog
October 22, 2023 1:28 am
Thanks to our host for posting this article. I invited him to copy from Judith’s Climate Etc. but did not notice the refs section had been lost. Here’s my original, I won’t post the refs directly because the multiple URLs will probably trigger a moderation delay.
Given that 80-90% of the Arctic never experiences temperatures above the freezing point of water, what little ‘warming’ they do get in temperature fluctuations has, obviously, very little to do with sea ice extent directly. Again, with the below freezing temperatures, sea ice formation happens all year round but warmer temperatures will slow this process down somewhat. The key driver of sea ice loss is weather – high winds and storm surge will break up sea ice which will then (often) drift away from the Arctic into warmer waters. One point might be that the higher temperature fluctuations may drive storm formation in the Arctic, leading to the sea ice loss as a consequence but I haven’t looked too closely at that.
The study looked at heat flow into the arctic ( ocean currents ). That has far more to do with the ice record I looked at than air temperatures or AGW.
Since 1997 heat flow into Arctic rose by about 10% are remained there. The 17y of no net change indicates that sea ice cover has adapted to this new input of heat and now has more heat flowing out to space due to lower ice cover (not the naive assume albedo feedback).
But can you please explain to me how the hell sea ice melts when the ambient temperature is around -20°C or below?
I get that water temperatures being ever so slightly less freezing might affect sea ice formation, contribute to storm activity even but melt ice?
I would probably suggest that the Arctic currents carrying this water are quite likely aiding in the breakup of sea ice but I keep coming back to that one major sticking point – what mechanism allows ice to melt way below the freezing point of water?
“But can you please explain to me how the hell sea ice melts when the ambient temperature is around -20°C or below?”
It’s called sublimation, the ice directly transfers from the solid phase into the vapor phase, cold dry air passing over the ice will lead to a reduction of ice volume.
Very good reply Phil , that does apply below freezing point and doubtless something Richard had never heard of.
However, the main flaw in his thinking it that everywhere where there is ice is at least -20deg C all year round.
Ice is 90% below water and water has a much higher heat capacity than air. All water in which the ice is floating is at or above freezing point, by definition. Not -20 C.
Not buying it. If the sea ice extent showed an increase and slight decrease then rapid and sudden drop in june/july I might agree but it doesn’t – sea ice starts reducing in february/march which, according to your chart is below -20°C, an impossibility. What significance does feb/march have? It’s usually the time when storms hit the Arctic and start to break up and disperse sea ice, nothing to do with temperature (even if you persist in inflammatory terms like ‘heat’) but everything to do with other factors.
Did you miss the title of that “chart” ? The description says:
“Daily mean temperatures for the Arctic area north of the 80th northern parallel”
You may find there is ice outside of 80 N . Sea temperature will affect floating ice more than air temperature. Obviously the sea water is -4 deg C or above. Check it out and see whether it becomes less impossible.
You did read the bit in my post where I mention the breakup and dispersal of sea ice into warmer water, didn’t you? I’m not questioning that sea ice melts, what I’m saying is that sea ice loss is not due primarily to melting in place. It is broken up and dispersed by storms, drifts away and then melts far away in warmer water. To say that the only mechanism driving sea ice loss is heat; ie sea ice simply melting, is disingenuous and unscientific.
“Given that 80-90% of the Arctic never experiences temperatures above the freezing point of water,”
Never ? DMI disagrees …..
Tom_Morrow
October 22, 2023 11:08 am
It never fails to amaze me that people are gullible enough to believe a 20 year trend has any real meaning when we have natural oscillations and variations that occur over centuries or millennia.
Climate has been redefined to mean only around 30 years now instead of the thousands to millions of years most people learned in school and I haven’t heard that mentioned in the news.
They also don’t mention in the news that the Earth is in a 2.56 million-year ice age named the Quaternary Glaciation.
30y averages define the basis for “anomaly ” calculations or averaging out weather, that is not intended to imply there is not change over longer time scales.
trsimonson
October 22, 2023 12:59 pm
“More honest reporting is required from media outlets, climate scientists and government bodies about the true nature of change, good news as well as bad, instead of highly selective reporting or misreporting to build an alarmist narrative.”
If current trends continue, the credibility of media outlets, climate scientists, and government bodies could reach zero by 2024. Children will not know what truth is!
I remember a major front page article in the NYTimes several years ago about the Polar Ice Cap was disappearing. Apparently there were several “climate scientists” on a ship observing cracks in the ice. They said something about this hasn’t happened in millions of years. The NYTimes quietly retracted the story in their Saturday issue (they used to correct their reporting errors/lies in the Saturday issue hidden in the obituary section). Unknown to these “climate scientists” the polar ice experiences cracks called leads every summer. Submarines have surfaced through these leads. If a submarine tried to surface through the normally thicker ice it would be severely damaged.
So did the New York Times have observers in the Arctic “millions of years” ago reporting that there were no cracks in the ice back then? Did they write down their findings in hieroglyphics, or was it Paul Krugman all along?
Heh. No, the NYTimes assumed the “climate scientists’ were experts. It turned out that those “experts” had never been to the North Pole before and really weren’t experts–at least not with the polar ice cap.
We already know that sea ice extent today is higher than for much of the past 6 or 7 thousand years and, coincidentally, sea level is lower. Just about everything is within natural variation.
In a similar vein, how’s that tropical troposphere “hot spot” prediction going?
What troposphere hot spot? 🙂
Yes, all the climate alarmist computer models except one predict that increasing CO2 will cause a hot spot in the Earth’s troposphere, but there is no evidence for its existence, even after all these years, therefore all the climate change computer models, with the possible exception of one, are wrong.
The one exception, the benign Russian model, has the lowest ECS of the bunch.
I think that was his point !
There is a slightly warmer “hot spot” but it’s not that hot. That is where the models fail. BTW it’s tropical troposphere hotspot. Before declaring “no evidence for ” try checking. There is a mild warming. Saying otherwise shows you’ve never looks and are just parroting what you thing you are supposed to say on WUWT.
“There is a slightly warmer “hot spot” but it’s not that hot. That is where the models fail.”
The models, other than the Russian model, fail. Which was my point. Thanks for the confirmation.
Should “Figure 1. Arctic sea ice extent ( areas with less than 15% ice coverage ).” be ‘15% or more’?
Oops. Good catch. Sadly I don’t have edit rights here. Good to see someone’s awake !
Based on data that goes much further back than satellite data, the ice cycles are probably longer than 30 years. https://www.drroyspencer.com/2012/03/could-arctic-sea-ice-decline-be-caused-by-the-arctic-oscillation/
Very nice. The silence is predictable, the CAGW crowd are liars and cheats. They will use anything to push their agenda, when something no longer works they simply move on, no big deal. They are loathsome.
I am starting to wonder whether Greta has decided that she has no further mileage in climate protest. She has moved on to Just Stop Oil (which is pleading for instant poverty) and supporting the Palestinians.
With her as with many such young people, it’s mainly a matter of “what’s the flavour of the month” for the latest protest. Why is their opinion taken notice of by so many?
Yes, young minds are easily influenced.
Our younsters’ minds are currently under assault from numerous harmful, destructive forces.
I sometimes wonder if my skeptical/contrarian view would be different if, when I was young, my mind was filled with the amount of garbage that young people get today on a daily basis.
It’s got to be very hard to be a kid today. Harder than when I was a kid.
Let’s pray they can filter out the BS and live in the real world. Otherwise, we are all going down the tubes.
Teach the Children Well.
And beyond. The doom pixie now doesn’t approve of wind farms:
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/10/17/why-is-greta-protesting-against-a-wind-farm/
Makes you wonder just what it will take to wipe that scowl from her face. Apart from staged “arrests” of course, she does seem to smile when they occur..
I’ve noticed that she seems happiest when being escorted by men in uniform
I think she is in her element there. That’s why she is smiling. She is publicly sacrificing herself for humanity’s sake. That’s the way she wants to be seen.
Greta supports murdering babies in their cribs now?
She should stick to climate change.
I see where Greta is having second thoughts about climbing on the terrorist bandwagon.
As for the melting of Arctic sea ice before 2007, I’ve always thought that it was the old, dirty ice being “recycled”. As for a good canary in a coal mine, the glaciers in the Colorado Rockies are a good analogy. They only formed rather recently, during the Negotiation of the LIA, and as long as we have permanent ice here in Colorado, I’m not going to sweat much…
Historic Snow/Ice in Greenland + Signs of increased glaciation in Sierra Nevada
Historic Snow/Ice Gains On Greenland; + Researchers “Surprised” To Find “Re-Glaciating Snow Field” In California’s Sierra Nevada – Electroverse
You call THAT a canary? THIS is a canary!!
Flattest winter of swell since records began in 1988 takes mental toll on NSW far south coast surfers (msn.com)
The Gummint has to do sumpink lest surfers follow polar bears off skyscrapers!
See below how the IPCC displayed Arctic Sea Ice Extent over all six assessment reports. It’s instructive to note how the data was obviously changed in the FAR, SAR & TAR and how AR6 Fig 9.13 is rather difficult to compare to the previous iterations, perhaps by design.
Thanks. That AR6 graphic is TOTAL and deliberate OBFUSCATION. Also note that in TAR they had invented some pre-satellite data which was added in without any indication it was NOT the same dataset. More scientific fraud like “Mike’s Nature Trick” ™.
If they had used a clearly legible graph as they had done in AR4 and AR5 someone may have noticed “the pause” was not fitting the agenda.
If they wanted to present all months of the year it could have been done clearly , like here where I do that for CPOM’s ice volume from Cryosat2.
Thanks, Steve. You again show how the IPCC lies about the climate.
It looks criminal to me,considering the amount of money that has been wasted over this unwarranted fear of CO2.
The people ringing the climate alarm bell the loudest, the IPCC have to lie about the climate in order to justify their jobs, and they do, over and over and over again.
The worlds oceans are *not* boiling. Arctic sea ice is not disappearing, and even if it did, then we could sail from the Atlantic ocean to the Pacific ocean, just like was done in the Twentieth Century.
Arctic and Antarctic sea ice extent is more sensitive to certain WIND directions and durations than it is to a degree or two average air temperature change.
Thanks to our host for posting this article. I invited him to copy from Judith’s Climate Etc. but did not notice the refs section had been lost. Here’s my original, I won’t post the refs directly because the multiple URLs will probably trigger a moderation delay.
https://climategrog.wordpress.com/2023/10/21/arctic-sea-ice-the-canary-in-the-coal-mine/
Given that 80-90% of the Arctic never experiences temperatures above the freezing point of water, what little ‘warming’ they do get in temperature fluctuations has, obviously, very little to do with sea ice extent directly. Again, with the below freezing temperatures, sea ice formation happens all year round but warmer temperatures will slow this process down somewhat. The key driver of sea ice loss is weather – high winds and storm surge will break up sea ice which will then (often) drift away from the Arctic into warmer waters. One point might be that the higher temperature fluctuations may drive storm formation in the Arctic, leading to the sea ice loss as a consequence but I haven’t looked too closely at that.
Ice melts faster from below than from above. A recent study looked at
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/10/10/testing-a-constructal-climate-model/#comment-3798573
The study looked at heat flow into the arctic ( ocean currents ). That has far more to do with the ice record I looked at than air temperatures or AGW.
Since 1997 heat flow into Arctic rose by about 10% are remained there. The 17y of no net change indicates that sea ice cover has adapted to this new input of heat and now has more heat flowing out to space due to lower ice cover (not the naive assume albedo feedback).
But can you please explain to me how the hell sea ice melts when the ambient temperature is around -20°C or below?
I get that water temperatures being ever so slightly less freezing might affect sea ice formation, contribute to storm activity even but melt ice?
I would probably suggest that the Arctic currents carrying this water are quite likely aiding in the breakup of sea ice but I keep coming back to that one major sticking point – what mechanism allows ice to melt way below the freezing point of water?
Where does your claim of “ambient temperature ” come from? Is that the entire arctic down through Fram staights? Is that ambient air or ambient water?
If you tone down the “how the hell” language you maybe able to think more clearly.
“But can you please explain to me how the hell sea ice melts when the ambient temperature is around -20°C or below?”
It’s called sublimation, the ice directly transfers from the solid phase into the vapor phase, cold dry air passing over the ice will lead to a reduction of ice volume.
Very good reply Phil , that does apply below freezing point and doubtless something Richard had never heard of.
However, the main flaw in his thinking it that everywhere where there is ice is at least -20deg C all year round.
Ice is 90% below water and water has a much higher heat capacity than air. All water in which the ice is floating is at or above freezing point, by definition. Not -20 C.
https://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
Not buying it. If the sea ice extent showed an increase and slight decrease then rapid and sudden drop in june/july I might agree but it doesn’t – sea ice starts reducing in february/march which, according to your chart is below -20°C, an impossibility. What significance does feb/march have? It’s usually the time when storms hit the Arctic and start to break up and disperse sea ice, nothing to do with temperature (even if you persist in inflammatory terms like ‘heat’) but everything to do with other factors.
Sorry, I meant to say that, as the chart shows temperatures below -20°C, it would be simply impossible to explain sea ice loss by melting.
Did you miss the title of that “chart” ? The description says:
“Daily mean temperatures for the Arctic area north of the 80th northern parallel”
You may find there is ice outside of 80 N . Sea temperature will affect floating ice more than air temperature. Obviously the sea water is -4 deg C or above. Check it out and see whether it becomes less impossible.
You did read the bit in my post where I mention the breakup and dispersal of sea ice into warmer water, didn’t you? I’m not questioning that sea ice melts, what I’m saying is that sea ice loss is not due primarily to melting in place. It is broken up and dispersed by storms, drifts away and then melts far away in warmer water. To say that the only mechanism driving sea ice loss is heat; ie sea ice simply melting, is disingenuous and unscientific.
“Given that 80-90% of the Arctic never experiences temperatures above the freezing point of water,”
Never ? DMI disagrees …..
It never fails to amaze me that people are gullible enough to believe a 20 year trend has any real meaning when we have natural oscillations and variations that occur over centuries or millennia.
Climate has been redefined to mean only around 30 years now instead of the thousands to millions of years most people learned in school and I haven’t heard that mentioned in the news.
They also don’t mention in the news that the Earth is in a 2.56 million-year ice age named the Quaternary Glaciation.
30y averages define the basis for “anomaly ” calculations or averaging out weather, that is not intended to imply there is not change over longer time scales.
“More honest reporting is required from media outlets, climate scientists and government bodies about the true nature of change, good news as well as bad, instead of highly selective reporting or misreporting to build an alarmist narrative.”
If current trends continue, the credibility of media outlets, climate scientists, and government bodies could reach zero by 2024. Children will not know what truth is!
Too true, sadly.
I remember a major front page article in the NYTimes several years ago about the Polar Ice Cap was disappearing. Apparently there were several “climate scientists” on a ship observing cracks in the ice. They said something about this hasn’t happened in millions of years. The NYTimes quietly retracted the story in their Saturday issue (they used to correct their reporting errors/lies in the Saturday issue hidden in the obituary section). Unknown to these “climate scientists” the polar ice experiences cracks called leads every summer. Submarines have surfaced through these leads. If a submarine tried to surface through the normally thicker ice it would be severely damaged.
So did the New York Times have observers in the Arctic “millions of years” ago reporting that there were no cracks in the ice back then? Did they write down their findings in hieroglyphics, or was it Paul Krugman all along?
Heh. No, the NYTimes assumed the “climate scientists’ were experts. It turned out that those “experts” had never been to the North Pole before and really weren’t experts–at least not with the polar ice cap.
“More honest reporting is required from media outlets, climate scientists and government bodies about the true nature of change”
Where do we find some of these “climate scientists”?
we are paying them to lie to us , while calling them “climate scientists” in an attempt to pretend it is objective science and thus beyond question.