The Climate Scaremongers: The Great Arctic Sea Ice Scam

For years the ‘experts’ have been telling us that the Arctic would soon be ice-free in summer.

Al Gore notoriously warned us in 2009 that ‘there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.’

He was, of course, just a politician. But a whole host of supposed Arctic scientists were all busy issuing similar warnings at the time. [bold, links added]

In 2007, for instance, Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told us that northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just five to six years.

In December of that year, Jay Zwally of Nasa agreed, giving the ice till 2012. A year later, in 2008 Professor David Barber went one step further, saying the ice would all be gone that very summer.

For sheer persistence in getting it wrong, however, the prize must go to Peter Wadhams, professor and head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge:

• In 2012, he predicted that the Arctic would be ice-free by 2015/16.

• In 2014, he thought it might last till 2020.

• In 2016, he confidently predicted the Arctic would be ice-free that summer (though curiously he now defined ‘ice-free’ as less than 1 million square kilometers).

All these pronouncements were designed for political propaganda purposes, not for scientific reasons, and were widely propagated by the gullible media.

For instance, in an article in the Independent in June 2016 (complete with photos of a cute polar bear on a melting piece of ice), Wadhams confidently asserted:

‘My prediction remains that the Arctic ice may well disappear, that is, have an area of less than one million square kilometers for September of this year. Even if the ice doesn’t completely disappear, it is very likely that this will be a record-low year. I think there’s a reasonable chance it could get down to a million this year and if it doesn’t do it this year, it will do it next year.’

Unfortunately for Professor Wadhams, the sea ice has not been melting away as ordained. On the contrary, it has been remarkably resilient.

Arctic sea ice has just reached its minimum extent this week, just as it always does in September, and the provisional data shows that there is still 4.7 million sq km of the stuff.

As can be seen from the chart below, this year and last had the largest extents since 2013 and 2014, and there is considerably more ice around this year than in 2007 and 2008.

There was a climate shift in the Arctic in 2007, when warm Atlantic waters entered the Arctic basin and ocean currents pushed a lot of the thicker multi-year ice out through the Fram Strait, which lies between Greenland and Svalbard, into the open Atlantic Ocean, where unsurprisingly it melted.

Since 2007, much of the ice has consequently been thinner, new ice, which naturally tends to melt in summer.

Climate scientists with an agenda to peddle jumped on the bandwagon and predicted that the ice would just carry on melting. However, they ignored the lesson of history.

The Atlantic Ocean regularly goes through such cyclical events, with cold and warm phases lasting about 50 to 60 years. The cycle is called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, or AMO, and it is known to have been occurring for at least the last 1,000 years.

In the 1970s, climate scientists were extremely concerned about the increase in sea ice in the Arctic, which occurred during the cold phase of the AMO. The leading climatologist of his day, H H Lamb, wrote in 1982:

‘A greatly increased flow of the cold East Greenland Current has in several years (especially 1968 and 1969, but also 1965, 1975 and 1979) brought more Arctic sea ice to the coasts of Iceland than for 50 years. In April-May 1968 and 1969, the island was half surrounded by ice, as had not occurred since 1888.’

Satellite monitoring of Arctic sea ice began in 1979, at the depth of the cold period. The climate mafia always uses this period as the baseline, pretending it was the ‘norm’.

That way they can attempt to fool the public that the warming in the Arctic and loss of ice since then is due to man-made global warming.

What is astonishing is that these buffoons are still in a job and living off the taxpayer. In any other field of science, to be so consistently wrong for so long would have quickly led to well-earned oblivion.

Read full post at Conservative Woman