Global warming paused, polar bears thriving, more coral on the Great Barrier Reef than you can shake a stick at – it’s been a difficult gig for climate alarmists of late. But there is always the melting Arctic ice, and the prospect of the Greenland ice sheet slipping off its perch and ending up in your front room. Alas, even that old standby is looking shaky, with evidence gathering that the ice is no longer melting as fast as in the recent past. On August 16th, summer sea ice in the Arctic was at its third highest extent since 2007.
According to the U.S.-based National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC), the northern sea route along Eurasia “may not become ice free” this year for the first time since 2007. Preliminary estimates by NSIDC suggest a 30% chance that sea ice will cover five million square kilometres, something that has not happened for eight years.
The cooling trend has been apparent for some time. Earlier this year, the Daily Sceptic reported that the coverage of Arctic sea ice was now very close to the 1991-2020 average, well above the 2012 low point and higher in 2021 than the previous year. According to Copernicus, the EU’s weather service, the 2021 March sea ice extent was just 3% below the 30-year average. March is the maximum extent of sea ice in the Arctic. Recent figures show March 2022 was slightly higher. In his recent Global Warming Policy Foundation climate report, Emeritus Professor Ole Humlum noted: “The trend towards stable or higher ice extent at both poles probably began in 2018 and has since strengthened.” Observational records of Arctic ice go back to the start of the 1800s, and display moving cycles of both temperature and ice extent.
As if on cue – how much longer can we run this stuff? – the Guardian and the Washington Post ran stories about the Greenland ice sheet melting and causing major sea level rises. Research published in Nature Climate Change journal was said to have shown that “global heating to date” will cause sea levels to rise by 27 cms, as a claimed 110 trillion tonnes of ice will melt. Extra helpings of alarmism were also available. Cherry-picking the one-off record melt year of 2012, and assuming it will become a “regular occurrence”, delivers a “staggering” 78 cms sea level rise. And as if this was not enough, the Guardian also reported that “other scientists” had warned that a significant part of the Greenland ice sheet “was on the brink of a tipping point”.
Back on Planet Sanity, the U.S. meteorologist Anthony Watts noted that the claims of Greenland ice melt raising sea levels “are just modelled hokum”. The assertion that sea levels would rise by 27 cms was “false and easily disproven”. In his view, it is the “same old scare story” we were told by the UN in 1989, in which a senior UN environmental official warned that entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend wasn’t reversed by 2000.
Watts notes that there is no time frame for the 27 cm of claimed rise (although the authors of the paper suggest it could happen between now and 2100). How can peer reviewed climate science be so imprecise? He notes that 110 trillion tonnes is ”scary” for most people, but when actual recent ice loss is compared to the full Greenland ice sheet, the loss is said to be so small “that it is almost undetectable”.
In a related article, Watts says that climate activists, including government bureaucrats, claimed that the ice sheet was melting six times faster than it was 30 years ago. This claim, improved to seven times, was recently repeated by Matt McGrath and the BBC. But 30 years ago, the Greenland ice sheet was barely melting at all. “Six times almost no ice loss is hardly an example of a climate change crisis,” observes Watts. Over the last couple of decades, claims of Greenland ice melting have been used to bolster fears of runaway sea level rises, says Watts. He adds that satellite images and recordings going back to 1993 show sea levels rising at a mere 1.2 inches per decade, and this is not significantly different to typical rises recorded since the mid-1800s.
Of course, all these scare stories are politicised science pushing the command-and-control Net Zero agenda. Let us put it in a wider paleoclimatic frame to see how dramatic effects are sometimes produced by natural variation. An interesting paper has just been published by two glaciologists in America, Laura Larocca and Yarrow Axford, that found that over half of the Arctic’s glaciers and ice caps (GICs) that exist today did not exist or were smaller 10,000 to 3,400 years ago. At the time, atmospheric carbon dioxide ranged between 260 to 270 parts per million, compared to the current 410 ppm.
The paper is summarised by the No Tricks Zone science site, which notes that 80% or more GICs were smaller than today, or absent from 7,900 to 4,500 years ago. This was noted to be the peak of the interglacial Arctic warmth, when temperatures were many degrees warmer than they are today.
The Arctic’s modern ice extent is “among the largest of the last 10,000 years”, it is reported. The largest GIC extent of the Holocene has been seen in the last millennium. This is said to suggest that any reduction in GICs in the last few centuries “is but a partial return to a former period of much greater warmth”.
Hold the front page: Treble tipping points all round.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
I dislike your headline “The Real….”.
“Yet another real….”
would read a lot better.
Thank you Chris for your time putting this informative item together. Every piece of pushback against the madness is important.
Accurate satellite data measuring sea ice extent was gathered throughout the 1970’s as it was critical for managing the nuclear deterrent. It clearly shows that the ice extent reached a peak in 1979 – the year, strangely enough that records used for climate propaganda begin. Including this data would show there has been nothing remotely unusual going on with Arctic sea ice extent.
Raise this point and you’re met with handwaving and muttering about incompatible datasets. Funny how this hasn’t stopped alarmist academics stitching together datasets from ocean buoys and ship intakes, or tree rings and thermometers (Mike’s ‘Nature’ trick), or satellite Microwave Sounding Units and surface thermometers, or weather balloons and computer models.
Something with mentioning here: The definition of ice age is a time during which permanent surface ice sheets exist. Consequently, we’re currently living in an ice age that’s possibly receding.
Additional fun fact: One of the reason why people believe in antrophogenic climate change is that – according to some mathematical models of ice ages – the current interglacial period (the holocene) should have ended already. Ie, weren’t it for terrible influence humans have on the climate, we’d all be again hunting mammoths on glaciers by now.
Obviously, the idea that these models could be wrong never crossed anybody’s mind.
The earth has been in an ice age for at least 2 million years, we just happen to be in a relatively short lived interglacial period and what most people call an ice age is a glacial period. Taking a long term view (thousands of years) we seem to be heading into the next glacial period all be it with ups and downs along the way. The paleoclimate record shows various warm periods over at least the last 4,000 years e.g. Medieval Warm Period, Roman Warm Period etc. Our current warm period is simply the latest in a long succession of warm and cool periods, however it appears that each warm period is slightly less warm than the previous one, so the temperature trend over the last 5-6,000 years is slightly downwards.
“He adds that satellite images and recordings going back to 1993 show sea levels rising at a mere 1.2 inches per decade, and this is not significantly different to typical rises recorded since the mid-1800s.”
Chris, interesting but 1.2 inches between now & 2100 is about 27cm which earlier in the article you state was “false & easily disproven”, which is it?
Assuming the 1,2 inches per decade is correct, it would be 23.37cm by 2100, ie, 3.36cm less than 27cm. That should count as disproven.
We have tide information from e.g. Newlyn, going back several hundred years, showing little growth in sea levels. 1993 is just the blink of an eye. There are far too many conclusions being drawn from data that doesn’t cover anything like a truly representative period of time.
Climate has nothing to do with the ‘Climate Emergency’. It is just a convenient group of stuff you can’t measure and which never seems to happen where I live, used as a tool to make us feel guilty for our lives of affluence and abundance.
Once we are both anxious and guilty, as many are, then it becomes easy to sell us any old snake oil of wholesale societal change to some romanticised version of 12th century feudalism. A world where, for no particular reason, other that it is the ideology of the WEF and the Club of Rome and others, our economies and societies have to be completely trashed in order that they can be replaced with something ‘better’.
Unfortunately, the ‘something better’ sounds considerably worse to me, yet our governments plough on implementing this treason, without reference to the citizens or gaining their approval. Just ‘here’s the next step’, necessary because of the crisis we just caused. These people are dangerously insane.
Feudalism is still a Marxist term referring to an economic system where the primary means of production is land and not capital but where land is no longer worked by slaves but either by free labourers for a wage or by serfs bound to it. Whatever the usual shady entities are suspected to be really about, it’s certainly not going to be that.
The Climate Change propaganda originates with the UN and is their chosen method of forcing down the living standards of affluent western countries and transferring taxpayers’ money to the 2nd and 3rd world.
It’s a form of “levelling down” on a global scale – with a Global Elite running everything. A Global Animal Farm.
Any National Leader who doesn’t support the Climate Change propaganda will never be allowed to join the Global Elite Club and (if possible) will be removed from Office.
Quote “the jab wasn’t a vaccine, it was an intelligence test” and the same applies to climate change and EV vehicles.
Would like to see this headlined on all msm.
We’ll know we’re winning when stories such as this make it into the MSM.