It’s a mystery. Why has Arctic sea ice cover roared back so quickly over the last few years? Nobody knows – not one scientist on the planet can tell you, writes Willis Eschenbach in a short essay on the climate site Watts Up With That? It might be noted, of course, that there was no shortage of explanations when there was a cyclical downturn, mostly to do with humans having something to do with it. Ice melting at the Poles is still one of the crucial supports for the entire command-and-control Net Zero political agenda.
The above graph shows changes in Arctic sea ice cover during the satellite era. Values are anomalies from the 1991-2020 average. Eschenbach notes that since around 1990, people have been talking about how human-emitted carbon dioxide is reducing the amount of Arctic sea ice. When it started dropping very fast, there was talk we’d passed a ‘tipping’ point from which the ice would never recover. Over this time, noted Eschenbach, predictions of an ice-free Arctic ocean abounded.
Old habits die hard. Despite the impressive recent ice recovery, talk of these tipping points – mostly an invention of so-called ‘attribution’ computer models – are ubiquitous. In his recent Frozen Planet II agitprop series for the BBC, Sir David Attenborough made a number of model-produced references to the Arctic being free of summer sea ice by 2035.
According to Eschenbach, there are more mysteries down in Antarctica.
Here Eschenbach poses the question – why did the Antarctic ice pack, unlike the Arctic pack, start increasing quite rapidly around 2008? Nobody knows, he says. Why did it differ from the Arctic by plateauing from 2010 to 2015, but then mirror the Arctic by dropping rapidly, and then turn around and start rebounding? You guessed it – nobody knows.
Finally the global situation.
Why has global sea ice followed this pattern, while CO2 continues to rise in the atmosphere, he asks. The politically-motivated alarmists constantly tell us the ice will soon all disappear. According to Eschenbach, not one climate scientist on the planet predicted these large changes in sea ice.
The author concludes:
Here’s the strangest part. Despite the failure of the many predictions of an ‘ice-free Arctic’, despite the falsified claims that we’ve passed a ‘tipping point’, despite the fact that the reasons for the curious and unexpected changes in the polar sea ice cannot be explained by anyone and the changes weren’t predicted by anyone – climate change scientists still insist that they can tell us what the global temperature will be like in the year 2100.
Of course, there are many sceptical scientists who seek answers to the cyclical nature of global ice outside the restrictive confines of ‘settled’ climate science. As the Daily Sceptic has often reported, short-term movements of ice are affected by often incalculable atmospheric heat exchanges, ocean currents and many other natural climatic variations.
The geologist Professor Ian Plimer recently noted in an essay published by Quadrant, there have been six major ice ages and each started when there was far more CO2 in the atmosphere than now. Taking the longer view, Plimer said that we are currently in an ice age initiated 34 million years ago, the current interglacial started 14,400 years ago in the Northern Hemisphere, and we were at the peak of this interglacial 4,000-7,000 years ago in the Holocene Optimum.
Two American geologists recently found that over half of the Arctic’s glaciers and ice caps that exist today did not exist or were smaller 3,400 to 10,000 years ago. At the time, atmospheric CO2 ranged between 260 to 270 parts per million, compared to the current 410 ppm. At the peak of this interglacial Arctic warming, temperatures were noted to be several degrees warmer than today. Change in the size of glaciers and ice caps over the last few centuries “is but a partial return to a former period of much greater warmth”, the geologists suggest.
Political tactics designed to scare entire populations into following an anti-growth Net Zero future pay little attention to such trends. Global warming ran out of steam a couple of decades ago, and the latest satellite data for November is almost certain to extend the current eight year, one month pause. Instead a ‘highway to hell’ message is broadcast, based almost solely on invented stories attributing bad or ‘extreme’ weather to the activities of humans. Despite the overwhelming evidence from the past that global temperatures can rise and fall rapidly, an entire climate industry, backed by almost unlimited transfers of wealth from often poor to rich people, has sprung up forecasting Armageddon if there is a rise of a few parts of a degree centigrade.
It’s definitely all a bit of a mystery.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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I have never fallen for the climate scam even when I knew little of the science to me the story just didn’t add up. Now the fear-mongering is laughable.
Global boiling!
😀 😀 😀
Last week I attended a talk by an eminent astronomer on the origins of life, both pro- and eucariotic, on this planet. His theme was the probabilities of finding signs of it elsewhere in the Universe, using the James Webb telescope. After a detailed presentation, he advised us that the world will indeed inevitably warm up as our ageing Sun becomes hotter. So it seems that eventually the predicted boiling of Earths oceans will indeed occur, as so Sagely (sic) predicted by United Nations Chief, António Guterres.
Only one small thing he (Guterres, that is) got wrong. He warned us that “the era of global boiling has arrived”. Well – not quite yet, it seems. Our guest Lecturer paused for a moment in his talk, then noted as an aside, “I estimate that the oceans will boil away – in approximately one thousand million years time.”
A slight temporal error seems to have crept in to the Guterrean prediction, it seems. Such temporal indeterminacy seems to have become a cornerstone of political utterances of late. Events seem to have a habit of ignoring their proper place and time, or at least, those defined by our scientifically illiterate Autocracy and its sycophantic Minions. That next Parliamentary restructuring predicted to be in just under five years time, for instance – just another slip of the mind, perhaps? It may seem like a billion years, but people seem to have become quite impatient of late. Time to set your watches going?
The used car salesman knows more about cars than me, but I don’t always buy one from him. I use my own judgement. Just as I don’t fall for the sales techniques of government funded data adjusters and mainstream media.
According to Git erres (global boiling, global drowning) we’re all going to drown in boiling water!
They are spouting out the mantra, though! I recently watched some footage on Al Jazeera about the floods in various central Europe countries, and even they used the term – wait for it – “climate change”. Nasty weather events, though, even if they are natural ones that happen independently of our input (which is probably true, most of the time).
Don’t forget El Nino and Hunga Tonga, MASSIVE amounts of water thrown into the upper atmosphere from totally natural events
Interestingly, all reports I have read clearly mention that these are the worst since the mid 1990s. Therefore, something similar has happened in living memory so is clearly not “excessive” nor “unprecedented”.
I do remember hearing about the devastating floods in Prague I think this was about 2006 – no mention of global warming/climate change(insert any crappy term you like) then.
Climate scare stories sell newspapers bring in academic grants, and “keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety)” by way of taxation and control. What’s not to like? (Except for the massive global wealth transfer from West to East, from poor to rich, and massively increased heating and transport costs.)
Try a little experiment—-The next time you are in the company of friends or family and the subject of climate change comes up, tell them that none of the climate projections about Polar Bears etc have come true and that there is no increase in the frequency or intensity of any type of weather event, and I guarantee you that everyone in the room will look at you as if you are from Mars. —-That is the Power of Propaganda. IT WORKS
A number of people I know of my generation (in their 70s) think this whole climate change business is over-blown if not to say a total scam. After 70+ years on this good Earth we have seen the scorching Summer of 1959 the Arctic winter of 1962/63, we have been back to the seaside haunts of our childhood and seen that the tide goes up and down much the same as it did 70 years ago. And we conclude that as Joni Mitchell sang back in the days of our youth;
Then the child moved ten times round the seasons
Skated over ten clear frozen streams
Words like, when you’re older, must appease him
And promises of someday make his dreams
And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game
What is more we do not like Electric Cars and will not buy them. Maybe all this crabby old climate scepticism is one reason this Government seems determined to chastise the pensioners
I still believe the climate scam goes back to the Club of Rome meeting 1972.
Indeed, when it was identified as a perfect storm to whip up. Reinforced on several occasions, including ‘The First Global Revolution’ publ. 1991 (available on @rch1ve. com) by The Council of the Club of Rome cabal.
These quotes from Club Members in the said issue:
1) “No generation has ever liked its prophets, least of all those who point out the consequences of bad judgment and lack of foresight.
The Club of Rome can take pride in the fact that it has been unpopular for the last twenty years. I hope it will continue for many years to come to spell out the unpalatable facts and to unsettle the conscience of the smug and the apathetic.”
2) “We’ve always thought of climate as an act of God It requires an enormous shift in the way we think of the world and our place in it to understand that we have already moved into an era in which we are actually responsible for managing climatic parameters.
Finally, after years of mistakes, we are coming to recognize that continued economic prosperity is tied to ecological stewardship. There is responsible profit to be made in caring for the planet.”
Philip: a member of a family not renowned for its brains.
Robert Redford: a member of a trade renowned for (in fact based upon) its fakery.
You don’t need to “believe” stuff that is true. Global Government has always been to the forefront of the Liberal Progressive Mind—–But in modern times The Club of Rome is a good place to start where we had that famous uttering, “In searching for the new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.”—–But since then ofcourse the UN and WEF have taken that ball and ran with it so that this ideology has filtered down through all western governments with wealth redistribution on their minds, and all developing nations holding out their hands for that wealth —-Eco Socialist Scam
It was global cooling they were frothing about then . Ice age iminent. The cause? Why man of course . Particulates in the atmosphere blocking the sun
Yet another reason for the liars to get rid of the crumblies ASAP.
Willis Eschenbach wrote a post about “the drowning coral atoll islands” nearly 15 years ago. It’s a straightforward and shortish “read” – and has stood the test of time far better than any of the dross the Catastrophists have claimed.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/27/floating-islands/
Good read. Thanks for that.
I did a degree in Geology and it’s pretty clear from that that a mere 200 yrs of climate “data” is just a nonsense way to view the worlds climate.
It isn’t just 200 years of climate data. —-It is 200 years of sparse climate data. 200 years of unreliable temperature data, where we never had thermometers all over the planet. They were mostly in prosperous western countries, very few in the third world, none at the poles and none in the oceans that is 70% of the globe. From all of this clutter we are expected to believe that “scientists” know what year was warmer than some other year by sometimes only hundredths of a degree when the thermometers were never designed for such accuracy and the area around where they sit has changed considerably over time so that at one time the thermometer might have been in a field but is now surrounded by concrete buildings and tarmac.
Climate Scare Stories Always False
There is a climate scare story that is real which no one talks about and it is infinitely more scary than a wee bit of warming – global cooling. We also have a magnetic pole shift going on which is weakening the Earth’s protective shield. The uber rich ‘elites’ like Musk and Bezos know this and that it why they are digging bunkers to hide in.
The president is guilty of misinformation .( Or is it disinformation ?) It is a brazen lie anyway