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.
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.
It must be reacting to the increase in wind turbines and Teslas.
Don’t forget Lockdowns, my sceptical friend. We have Lockdowns to thank. A much needed climate reset. There’ll be another one when all our badness requires it.
You’re both wrong! It was the masks, stopping our deadly CO2 from escaping!
By Jove, jeepy, I do believe you’ve got it!
When I first read that I thought it said “baldness” and I was (not) about to complain to the editor about being persecuted.
I considered baddity
Me too
They want to steal our money and tell us how to live to “save the planet.”
People are so gullible they disserve what they get I suppose.
And while reading this, the BBC news has an item on measuring CO2 emissions from “nodding donkey oil facilities – minor in the extreme, but hey, it keeps them all scared.
Find me a weather forecaster who will put his house on it raining or not raining a week on Tuesday.
An article from 2013.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/09/12/remember-all-those-breathy-predictions-about-an-ice-free-arctic-by-2015-nevermind/?sh=7a1822f9aa19
Embedded in there: Catastrophical ice-free summer in the artic will have happened by 2016. Tipping point! Loads of frozen methane going to be released!
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/sep/17/arctic-collapse-sea-ice
Turns out we’re dead, Jim! Why haven’t we noticed?
Is it time to re-run the 1960s scare stories about us all freezing to death? It would be fun if someone more IT literate than me couyld research and put up a series of images and recordings of those times. Ho ho ho for Christmas!
Indeed. Search for “1963 winter freeze” in YouTube; no shortage of footage there. It was only my fourth winter, and can’r remember much about it – perhaps it did not seem unusual then!
It was unusual enough to allow a friend and I to ride our bikes across the frozen River Thames at Hampton Court!
Try Tony Heller’s realclimatescience.com
https://realclimatescience.com/1970s-global-cooling-scare/
I heard earlier on the radio news that we have to declare the Great Barrier Reef as an ecological red zone due to the desperate state of everything around the area.
But don’t I remember hearing about how the reef has bounced back from bleaching as part of its natural cycle? It’s all good, so how come we’re being told it’s a catastrophe?
Just like the Corona pandemic, climate change is a series of localized events freely jumping all around the globe in order to exploit whatever look as it could be exploited. As soon as a geographical area ceases to be useful for the narrative, it silently vanishes again.
The Pseudo Scientific Fraud, that demands compliance. But we do not live in a scientific dictatorship. Science is not decided by a show of hands form a bunch of government funded data adjusters that progressives like to call “climate scientists”. If something cannot be falsified, then it is NOT science. If a theory does not fit with observations then it is WRONG, and that is what we see. Rising levels of CO2 but not much in the way of warming. Fortunately for the pretend to save the planet people they can still pull the wool over most eyes because most people are busy with work and family life and have no time to investigate every issue. They depend on investigative journalists for that, but there are very few of those left and most News is simply activism ———But if there is one issue they should investigate it is this one, as it is about to steal all freedoms and prosperity for political purposes masquerading as science and “saving the planet”
Antarctica 80% or so of the world’s ice by volume – increasing, above the 20 year average (cue Attenfraud et al to drop charges in crevices, remote detonate them to get the ‘calving’ money shot for the sheeple on the BBC).
Arctic 1% world ice volume by weight, way above past yearly means, but was to disappear in 2014, 2016, 2020, now 2030….don’t forget that in 1972-4 US ‘scientists’ wrote furious letters to Dick Nixon to carpet bomb the Arctic with ash or nuke parts of it and save us from the coming ice age.
Greenland, roughly 15% of world’s ice volume by mass, also increasing, contrary to the doom reports issued during every single summer when there is indeed some melting ice faithfully reported by the Fake News. I guess melting ice in a summer season due to many factors including wave and current motion is deemed ‘the science’.
Fail, fail, fail. Climate bullshit and Pharma. The only $2 Trillion plus industries where you can lie, kill, deceive, and be applauded for saving the world and hang plaques and prizes on your wall.
“It’s a mystery. Why has Arctic sea ice cover roared back so quickly over the last few years?”. Isn’t one answer: as climate is essentially cyclic in nature, why wouldn’t it? The mystery would surely be if it didn’t.