The Arctic has been a happy hunting ground for the climate scaremonger Sir David Attenborough. Two years ago he made the fanciful claim that polar bears could die out in the 2030s.
It is now generally accepted that polar bears have been thriving and increasing in numbers, and in his latest BBC documentary Frozen Planet II, Attenborough makes no mention of his previous claim. [bold, links added]
But he does make the astonishing suggestion that all the summer sea ice in the Arctic could be gone within 12 years.
Unfortunately, such predictions are now out of date. Summer sea ice hit a low in 2012 and has been steadily recovering ever since.
According to the latest data from the US-based National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) for the end of August, “Sea ice extent is likely to remain higher than in recent years.”
The evidence is shown in the graph below.
As can be clearly seen, the 2022 blue line is well above the 2012 low point. According to the NSIDC, the average sea ice extent for August ranked 13th lowest in the recent satellite record.
The growth of Arctic sea ice has been confirmed by a number of sources. The EU weather service Copernicus reported that the coverage of Arctic sea ice is now very close to the 1991-2020 average.
Attenborough’s script may well have been written for him sometime before this latest data started to cast real doubt on further Arctic sea ice decline, at least in the short term.
His claim that it could all suddenly vanish seems to have been taken from a paper written in 2020 by a group of academics working with the Met Office’s Hadley Centre. As with all climate forecasts, the claim is the product of a computer model.
It is said that the latest model – HadGEM3 – simulates a more accurate interglacial climate. This seems to have led the academics to think they can now confidently predict all the summer sea ice in the Arctic will disappear within 12 years.
Lead author Dr. Maria-Vittoria Guarino explains: “The advances made in climate modeling means that we can create a more accurate simulation of the Earth’s past climate, which, in turn, gives us greater confidence in model predictions for the future.”
Climate models suffer from at least one big flaw. Despite decades of research, scientists are no nearer to discovering how much temperatures will rise if carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is doubled. The current range is from around 0.5°C to 6°C.
Climate models mostly land in the higher range, one of the reasons they haven’t produced an accurate forecast of future temperature for more than 40 years.
In the absence of building an accurate assumption about this important temperature/gas relationship, climate models and their predictions must always be treated with extreme caution.
The World Climate Declaration, signed by around 250 professors including a Nobel physics laureate, noted that models had many shortcomings “and are not remotely plausible as global policy tools.”
h/t Rúnar O.
Read rest at Daily Sceptic
He probibly also beleives this Darwinists load of Malarkey as well
As usual, climate fear mongers base their projections on CO2 driven climate models. They ignore the fact that EVERYONE OF THE OVER 100 CO2 DRIVEN CLIMATE MODELS FAIL! They ALL exaggerate warming over actual weather balloon and satellite data. While in our current nearly three million year ongoing Pleistocene/Quaternary Ice Age, the climate remains well within both its 12 degree C normal, natural temperature range. It is the coldest range of temperature since multicellular life began nearly 600 million years ago. And during our current Holocene interglacial normal, natural four degree C, nine hundred year cycle, as it has done about five hundred times before during the past three million years of intermittent interglacials. Our carbon based environment – all life – is composed entirely of little carbon sacks of water we call cells. Oxygen (from water) is the most abundant element in life. And carbon (from CO2) is the second most abundant element. While water continues to cover about 70% of the earth’s surface, CO2 has been dangerously and inexorably declining from more than twenty times today’s levels at life’s birth to today’s 0.04% of the atmosphere STARVATION LEVEL LOWS. As any greenhouse grower knows, any level of CO2 below 2,000ppm is a starvation level. Because adding CO2 makes life greener, stronger, more drought tolerant, and abundant. Making, as our dangerously naive media and far too many poorly educated grade school teachers who have no clue about climate or CO2 biology, fossil fuels THE ONLY GREEN ENERGY. Because when we use them to make us the best fed, longest living, most prosperous human beings in history, we recycle the two most important ingredients of life on earth – CO2 and H2O. That is the science. Leave the fear and ignorance to those that push children to believe more CO2 will cut their lives short. Their disgusting imaginary crisis from more of life’s basic ingredient is shameful. Barry Bateman, farmer and B.Sc. Advanced (biology)
And yet technologies to remove CO2 from the atmosphere (don’t plants do this?) are being pursued. What a waste.