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.
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.
‘Renewables’? How are rare metals (some not so rare, but lithium certainly is), renewable? Cui bono from the mining and usage of such minerals? Does little Gaia magically manufacture these elements and minerals? How is bird chopping and eco devastation from panels and turbines ‘renewable’? How are they manufactured, transported and setup on site? How are they maintained? How much oil needs to grease the bird slicers? How often is it changed? How do you charge your EV? What happens when it dies? etc etc. etc
The stupid of the modern age, really f*ing hurts.
Not to mention that the windmills must keep turning, even when there is no wind (i.e. they use electricity to rotate). If they are stationary for too long, the bearings become unbalanced.
There is the bigger broader agenda of Social Justice and Sustainable Development, for which Climate Change is just a tool. Or as George Chirac pointed out some years ago that Kyoto was a “genuine component of world governance”. Global treaty’s like Kyoto, Copenhagen and Paris enable progressives to work around National Interests, because national interests have no place in their World order. We now have the “International Community” and under the guise of stabilising the climate, infact climate is really just the means by which activists as part of this “Community” can achieve world governance based on progressivism. But because temperatures are not rising as climate models projected, extreme weather has become the new means to insist humans are interfering in climate. Every storm, food or drought is because of our greenhouse gasses, with zero evidence for that., but when you have a compliant media telling the whole of the western world on the 6 o’clock news that we have a “climate emergency” who needs evidence? When no one can falsify any of this “crisis” stuff (1) It isn’t science, and (2) It isn’t evidence of anything, it is just the language of politics. or as Richard Lindzen pointed out —————“Climate alarm belongs to a class of issues for which there is no evidence and is characterised as immorality pretending to virtue”.
It’s not just fear and panic. It’s a marketing tactic, with a profit to make, from equipment manufacturing, and maintenance, disposing of scrap, and so on.
A statement like
Climate change isn’t solely to blame for extreme weather, but… it stacks the deck against us… it’s baked in with our weather and often a key ingredient in the outcome… it supercharges normal weather patterns, like steroids.
is content-free fear-mongering. It’s actually even worse than that: Literally, this is complete nonsense. Climate change isn’t a rational actor trying to get us by cheating (stacking the deck), life isn’t a poker play with possibly stacked decks, nobody knows exactly what a weather pattern is supposed to be, let alone a normal one, as opposed to an unnormal one (how can one tell one from the other?) and there’s certainly not way to charge or even supercharge patterns.
The only meaning of this sentence is someting like An inhuman, shady entity with magic superpowers is seeking to ensnare and ruin you! Beware! Be afraid! Be very afraid! Sounds awfully like the traditional Puritan story of Satan lurking in the wilderness to corrupt and destroy the good people (of Salem, to wit). In more rational times, people making such statements would have been laughed out of of house (or put into a sanatorium).
Another neat take down of how climate emergency journalism works from the pen of Mr Morrison. Keep it up.
I am a sensible environmentalist but these extremist climate activists and policies are destroying true environmentalism. Their policies and actions are so politicized and impractical and not based on any engineering, they are destroying the environment themselves. Wind turbines and electric cars are not environmentally friendly nor sustainable. They direct funds away from real environmental problems such as garbage management, sewage disposal and over use of pesticides, to name just a few issues.
I don’t think anyone truly knows how much human activity affects weather and climate, there are too many variables, but surely the huge change to forest cover especially across the equator has an impact? Trouble is politicians and globalists have latched onto CO2 theories as a way to gain leverage and impose their command and control agendas on us, even though those theories now seem to be wrong.