Aren’t those polar ice caps a rotten lot? As politicians are busily trying to save them from melting, they’ve gone and stopped disappearing all on their own. Despite the best efforts of climate change fanatics at producing a lot of hot air, NASA have quietly noted that Antarctic sea ice reached a new maximum extent last year. That wasn’t supposed to happen. As everyone knows the ice is melting because of all the carbon we’re emitting, so how do we explain that it actually isn’t?
It isn’t actually that difficult to explain, but it would involve making the crucial admission that we don’t actually know why the ice is doing what it’s doing. We have absolutely no idea, and a terrible record at predicting it. Al Gore thought it would all be gone by 2014.
What’s actually happened here is a classic case of mistaking correlation for causation, by using a hopelessly small set of data. Arctic ice has only been measured with any accuracy since 1979 when NASA started using satellite images to monitor it. This was great news for those who wanted to find a big problem, because as old people will remember the mid 20th century was a mini ice age and global cooling was more of a concern than global warming. Average temperatures rose slightly and the ice caps retreated in the years following and the global warming scam began.
Thirty-six years is a hopelessly small period of time over which to discern any meaningful information about changes in the climate of the planet. Something which evolves slowly, changes constantly and something of which we have only a very limited understanding.
