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. 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Unfortunately, such predictions are now out of date.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 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, 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 some time 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 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 seem 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 modelling 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 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 on 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 in 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”.
Attenborough also repeated the claim that the Greenland ice sheet is melting six times faster than 30 years ago. To back up this scare, extensive footage was shown of running water and ice shelving from the main sheet. All of these events of course would occur naturally, especially in the summer months. As we recently reported, the U.S. meteorologist Anthony Watts pointed out that when recent actual Greenland ice loss is compared to the full ice sheet, the loss is so small “it is almost undetectable”. Recent claims of alarming rises in sea levels were said to be “just modelled hokum”. The claim that Greenland is melting six times faster than before is often repeated, but Watts noted that 30 years ago the ice sheet was barely melting. “Six times almost no ice loss is hardly an example of a climate change crisis,” he said.
At the start of his programme, Attenborough stood God-like looking down on Planet Earth. By the end he was intoning that animals needed one thing more than any other, and that was for the planet to stop warming. It was up to humans to make that happen, he said. Such a wish seems to be a denial of natural climate change – and the assumption of more divine powers than humans actually possess! What temperature or level of CO2 would Attenborough and his ilk like? Indeed, what is the correct temperature of the Earth? Records going back 600 million years give us no guidance since temperatures have often been much hotter and much colder, while CO2 has been 15 times higher than it is now. As the late Professor Bob Carter noted, a warmer or cooler planet than today’s is far from unusual: “Nature recognises nothing ‘ideal’ about mid-20th century temperatures.”
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Of course they don’t exclude the possibility of a much earlier event.
At the risk of driving Steve Kirsch nuts: To me, it’s either man-made and escaped from the lab or was set free deliberately (more likely), or, it doesn’t exist.
I think the short answer is NO. A long way back, there were stories about the identity of the allegedly novel infection in different parts of the world – e.g. Brazil, Italy and others. As to whether there was actually a single source at all, or more than one that happened to be identified in a similar timeframe, we just don’t know for sure. Maybe the (SARS) Cov-2 viruses was around for rather longer before it was identified – after all, who looks for something novel at sufficient level of detail?
Remember that most of us do not report onto the records that we have suffered from most minor respiratory infections, such as the Common Cold, many of which are thought to be caused by other coronaviruses.
I dare not read BBC articles at the risk of puking
Short of confessions from multiple participants (as there must have been) in any leak cover-up, I doubt we will ever know. The evidence, if there is any, has probably been destroyed. It’s possible that those pulling the strings don’t know either – they just suspected it was a leak. At least some of those working at the lab must know what viruses they had in the fridge – was c19 one of them? Has that question been definitively asked and answered?
So why hasn’t the animal host been found after 3 years? one of many unanswered questions on COVID.
Lab leak is at least as likely as natural origin and any scientist who thinks otherwise has a COI, like this Covid God Fauci.
What’s been proven decisively is that there was a cover up to suppress lab leak theory and only that should make one very suspicious.
Everything points to a lab leak. Occam’s Razor: there’s enough evidence from the structure of the virus, which includes proteins that could could not have got in there naturally, that it came from a lab.
Maybe someone at the lab sold some infected bats to the Wuhan market – it happens in China, apparently – who knows? Maybe the virus emerged in several places at the same time because the Chinese unleashed it from facilities in S America and Africa as well as the Wuhan lab. It doesn’t change the facts that the virus bears all the hallmarks of being created in a lab and the Wuhan lab was doing the exact research that created this virus.
The amount of panicked covering up by the likes of Daczak and Fauci is deeply suspicious. Ultimately, the scientific establishment knows that if it doesn’t cover things up or at least obfuscate, the vast amounts of money it’s acquired (without questions being asked for decades) will dry up and all public trust in scientists will be annihilated.
These are people who have gleefully destroyed the West. This is no exaggeration: our liberty and future expectation of liberty has been obliterated. The possibility of new lockdowns, of our formerly free nations turning into police states overnight for any reason a government dreams up or – should the mooted pandemic treaty happen – if the WHO decrees it, is a Sword of Damocles hanging over out lives.
Virology labs – which are really bioweapons facilities using gain-of-function research under the auspices of researching cures for viruses that aren’t even in circulation – need shutting down and burning to the ground. The WHO needs criminal investigation and all Chinese and communist influence removed. The UN needs ground-up reform.
The BBC needs to be privatised. Its authority is in tatters and its report is Chinese propaganda.
I still fail to understand why this matters. Sars-CoV2 is there. Absent a confession, it’s origin can’t be determined with certainty.
That said, so-called gain of function research is no research at all as it doesn’t contribute anything to our knowledge about the real world. It’s just otherwise unoccupied people playing with really expensive lego bricks. At best, the outcome is completely uninteresting. At worst, these genome fiddlers might end up creating something really dangerous, say, a variant of Yersinia Pestis which spreads via aerosols and is immune to all known antibiotics.
Considering that so-called research biologists have – in the past – tried to grow bacteria which are resistant enough to alcohol that they surive common antiseptic procedures, there can be no doubt that people calling themselves scientists exist who are be mad enough to try that. And they’d doubtlessly also get funding for this from same the people who already fund semi-random genome fiddling for killing the time.
All of these so-called research labs need to be razed to the ground. And everybody ever involved with channeling money to them needs to be removed from any position of influence on the grounds that he’s an irresponsible twit of the kind who’d detonate a nuclear warhead in a shopping mall just to find out what happens.
And on a related topic, did you see the latest reports that rather than originating in the Soviet Union’s chemical research lab, Novichok actually occurred spontaneously in an orchard just next door, and was found to be growing on the trees?
BBC journalism is basically advocay for establishment panicky preoccupations, leavened by woke duplicity. Today on BBC 24 supercillious “science” special correspondent Roger Harrabin used a positive story on print technology to launch a specious jeremiad about “us all using too much stuff”. He sounded mire like Neil from the Young Ones with his “we’re all doomed man” schtick than a balanced reporter.
Apparently the BBC overlooked to place both the Wuhan Institute of Infectious Diseases and the Wuhan institute of Virology on their helpful map.
They obviously didn’t realise that both labs might actually be located IN Wuhan, although their names do give a sort of clue .
In the interests of objectivity, Igor Chudov has done it for them :-
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/lie-exposed-bbc-says-covid-19-came?utm_source=email