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Unfortunately, such predictions are now out of date.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.
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.
Attenborough the worst of the worst. His most egregious lie was when he claimed birds were feasting on plastic, all the while whilst keeping his ignorant audience in the dark about the fact birds use gizzard to grind their food. He’s also happy to buzz walruses on cliff with a drone, startling them and leading them to fall to their deaths whilst filming, which naturally he blames on “climate change”.
And also making sure the polar bears stalking the walruses (walri?!) were out of shot. But he’s a great friend of King Charles III so that’s fine.
I’m glad you watched it; I didn’t want to. Years ago I used to like Attenborough’s programmes, but I’m not quite sure where he is now. Presumably he believes in what he’s doing, but he could be sucked into today’s extremist group, perhaps. After all, he’s been around for a while, so perhaps they are exploiting his reputation. He doesn’t say things like: “I had a good time on this trip. Spent a fair bit of your cash, and burnt a lot of aviation fuel etc, and look what I found – but look at the photos!”. (I’m in cynical mood this evening).
There is a whole book on his misinformation by Patrick Moore!
And the ‘walrus scam’ is taken apart, quite forensically, by Susan Crockford in her book ‘Fallen Icon’
I remind the climate anxious all the time of the prediction about artic sea ice and how it has been a complete failure of a prediction. That one and the Maldives under water by 2020 prediction.
I get almost no reaction.
Humans aren’t convinced by data, or facts or by rational arguments. The battle for the human mind is best seen as a scrum – a game of brute strength.
Generally, if people hear something 10 times and the opposite once, they believe the thing that is said 10 times. It’s really that simple and unsophisticated for most people.
Getting people to change their minds is a long arduous battle.
The mechanism is slightly more subtle: Most people don’t really pay a lot of attention to what’s happening around them. But their brains record it to turn it into memorie and the more important something appears, ie, by constant repetition, the more readily accessible such a memory will become. That’s why propaganda based on repetition of something simple simply can’t be beaten: Everyone you’re talking to will remember what he’s suppose to believe about something and this will keep colouring how they think about it.
Id go along with this completely. I was just reading a football forum where they were discussing the proposed move to early kick-offs so floodlights wouldn’t be needed,. Almost to a man, everyone was totally onboard the Emergency/Carbon Reduction/Greta bandwagon, like it was a real thing. Not one of them has seemingly joined any of the dots and wondered why it doesn’t seem to be what we were told it would be, or how the rest of it fits in.
And rather predictably and as we feared, it would seem the King is planning to leverage his position of influence to increase the bandwagon’s momentum even further. Granted he was already outspoken on the subject but surely as King requires him to be mindful of the monarch’s limitations on political affairs. Of course the argument will be it’s not a political matter, which in itself is partially true but the policies proposed certainly are – it will be interesting to see how he manages that balance. The BBC now running an article suggesting ‘Charles will not cool on climate action, say friends’. Rather lame attempt at droll from the BBC – is it supposed to be taken seriously?
Never liked the sanctimonious tone of his voice. A typical globalist stooge.
Attenborough and the Climate Liars really don’t understand the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, do they.