The dramatic, if largely unpublicised, recovery in Arctic sea ice is continuing into the New Year. Despite the contestable claims of the ‘hottest year ever’ (and even hotter in 2024), Arctic sea ice on January 8th stood at its highest level in 21 years. Last December, the U.S.-based National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) revealed that sea ice recorded its third highest monthly gain in the modern 45-year record. According to the science blog No Tricks Zone, the reading up to January 8th has now far exceeded the average for the years 2011-2020. It also exceeds the average for the years 2001-2010, and points directly upwards with regard to the average for the years 1991-2000.
The graph below shows the scale of the recovery compared to all the years tracked in the modern satellite record.
Of course this is only about half a winter’s worth of data, and we must be careful not to follow alarmists down their chosen political path of cherry picking and warning of climate collapse on the basis of individual events. But as we have seen in recent Daily Sceptic articles, the current recovery in Arctic sea ice is a climate trend that can be taken back to around 2007. In a recent paper, the Danish scientist Allan Astrup Jensen provided data showing a fall in the sea ice between 1997 and 2007 but minimal losses in the 45-year record both before and after this period. The investigative journalist Tony Heller draws a four-year moving average to show a small recovery in the lowest ice extent in September from around 2012. He also notes that 1979 was a recent high point, with lower ice levels in the 1970s going back to the 1950s.
Where does all this leave the alarmists promoting their insane collectivist Net Zero project? Stuck up a frozen creek without an ice pick, it might be suggested. In 2022, Sir David Attenborough told BBC viewers that the summer sea ice could all be gone within 12 years. Climate models fed with opinions and wishful thinking seem to have guided him in his lamentations rather than the actual data. But if the ice continues to roar back, it is likely that the sea ice scare will have to be retired, along with all the disappearing coral popping up in record amounts on the Great Barrier Reef.
Cyclical natural climate variations, observed in the past record going back to the early 1800s, appear to offer a better explanation of trends in the polar sea ice extent. Little understood effects of ocean currents and atmospheric heat exchanges are obvious drivers of the climate in the far north. Taking the view that humans, and only humans, control the climate temperature would appear to be a dead end in understanding Arctic glaciology.
Ditto Antarctica, where the cherry pickings for catastrophists seemed to offer good prospects of late. Last year the BBC reported on lower levels of winter sea ice than those recorded in the recent past. The BBC said it showed a new benchmark for a region “that once seemed resistant to global warming”. This inconvenient resistance of course refers to the fact that Antarctica has shown “nearly non-existent” warming over the last 70 years. Dr. Walter Meier from the NSIDC helpfully added: “It’s so far outside anything we’re seen, it’s almost mind-blowing.” The “mind-blowing” quote made headlines around mainstream media. Alas, Dr. Meier seemed to forget that barely a decade ago he was part of a science team that cracked the secrets of early Nimbus satellite data that showed even lower winter levels of sea ice in 1966
At the time, the Nimbus team won awards and the Daily Sceptic has been able to jog Dr. Meier’s memory on what he said at the time.
Even in the passive microwave record [available since 1979] for the Antarctic you see these seesaws where the ice concentrations go up and down, so extreme high or extreme low are not that unusual. What the Nimbus data tells us is that there’s variability in the Antarctica sea ice that’s larger than any we had seen from the passive microwave data. Nimbus helps put this in a longer term context and extends the record.
Three cheers for the longer record. It doesn’t seem to get much of a look-in these days as the Earth starts to boil. Below, Professor Ole Humlum maps the sea ice extent in Antarctica going back to 1979.
Allan Jensen looks at the same data and notes that any downward trend in the period was very small. The only discernible trend is a rise from around July 2013 followed by a small fall. Jensen points to a recent decline in 2022 and 2023. But, of late, any decline has been slowed with the NSIDC-recorded extent at the end of the last month only the sixth lowest in the record.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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I don’t know how Chris keeps going in the face of the msm lie machine and the dishonest scientists on the other side. Well done though I do notice climate scepticism becoming more mainstream especially on the right.
Scepticism in science is essential. Otherwise it isn’t science, it is activism.
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
Richard P. Feynman
“It does not matter who you are, or how smart you are, or what title you have, or how many of you there are, and certainly not how many papers your side has published, if your prediction is wrong then your hypothesis is wrong. Period.”
Richard P. Feynman
An incredibly smart man, he knew that he didn’t know. This is how scientists should think.
$cientists on the other hand…
nod———-Or “Ah yes, science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture from such a trifling investment of fact”——Mark Twain.
Scepticism = science; consensus = religion.
One of the main controllers of climate is El Nino and El Nina events. But data regarding these huge weather changing oscillations only goes back to 1989. ——It is worth pointing out to people who have already decided what is true about climate that there is actually nothing unusual about current temperatures or climate. To those people who are always saying things like “Climate Change is real and is happening now” what are you talking about? These kind of statements are about as scientific as a monkey with a test tube.
I’d say that climate change is normal; the climate is not normally stable at all. The real scam is manipulating the language, and perhaps the lack of understanding, so as to promote a campaign.
Remember when you say that “climate change is normal”, that the term “climate change” has come to mean changes allegedly caused by humans. It does not mean changes that occur naturally.
And Malenkevich cycles. The wobbles and orbits of the earth are not stable and affect hownclose we are to the sun.
And sunspot activity. Climate change and global warming are lies by green communists
I still worry about the polar bears.
“When Al Gore was born there were about 5,000 polar bears, today only 25,000 remain.”
Someone forgot to tell them bears they are supposed to be in deep sh.t
“The arctic will be ice free by 2015”
– John Kerry 2009
A true visionary.
It must be catastrophic. There are no penguins left in the Arctic and the polar bears obviously can’t cope with the lack of ice in Antarctica.
I was about to politely correct you and then saw what you did there, faffor
…and the fish population of Mt Everest has been utterly devastated.
I don’t see anything soaring. What I see is an incredibly stable pattern which confirms to me the absolutely staggering and amazing predictability of our weather.
The seasons come and go almost like clockwork. Temperatures move within the narrowest of bands.
How something so vast and complex works so elegantly is really a thing of beauty. Much like the human body or any living organism.
Which is what makes the idea that you can just control the weather by fiddling with CO2 so comical and preposterous.
Thanks beautifully expressed post.
Played for Fools
Great article, as ever. It seems to me that the western world are being played for a bunch of fools on climate change;
China has announced its new climate envoy;
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202401/1305432.shtml
Whilst at the same time China continues to burn coal as if butter would not melt in their mouths!
”There are a total of 3,092 operating coal-fired power plant units in China. As of January 2023, the province of Shandong, which lies to the south of Beijing, houses the greatest number of coal power plants, at over 400 units.3 Jan 2024”
As I say, it seems to me that we are being played for a bunch of fools, while China, Russia etc. plan the demise of the western world.
We are being played for fools? ——-But the western world is complaint with this. To understand why, you need to realise what the politics are all about. Then to realise that the Sustainable Development Politics isn’t really about the climate. The climate is simply the excuse given to the public for the politics.
Western world is compliant. Exactly. Fat, lazy and stupid we have become.
Lucky you realised I meant compliant rather than complaint.
Club of Rome 1972.
China and Russia don’t have to play us for fools we are doing OK just destroying ourselves.
nod——–Then you have to figure out why. Once you do, it will explain why there really isn’t a climate crisis and why a crisis is essential for putting political agenda’s in place and government never want to let a good crisis go to waste.
Excellent article as always, Chris. I wish there was some mechanism within the DS software to give articles ‘likes’ (as on FB) or…stars? (As on Off Guardian.)
There used to be, but what works better for ranking is activity, i.e. comments BTL.
Seconded 👍
There was a large increase but November was rather low so it doesn’t take the level to anything extraordinary. As you can see from this chart, if you look at the whole of 2023 ice extents followed the the 2010-20 average pretty closely.
Tony Heller you are emphatically not; is there no end to the Diversity of your Expertise?
Yeah I saw this story on the BBC