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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What a good job I didn’t need to visit a hospital during the 3 minutes in which masks weren’t required. Those moments, hazardous as they were, must have been golden, as healthcare professionals across the country briefly (and dangerously) reminded themselves what their colleagues looked like. Glad to hear they’re safe again now. Let’s have no more of this reckless face exposure in healthcare settings please, it’s just not worth the risk.
Just checking this is satire…
Nobody seems to be asking why a respiratory condition is supposedly surging in the middle of summer?
Something very wrong here.
Because this isn’t just any old respiratory virus, but SARS-COV2 (TM) virus, the Armageddon virus that will outwit us all (actually, it clearly has outwitted the so-called scientists and medical community who should know better).
COVID-19 is really a condition affecting the brain, somewhat like Alzheimer. It starts with people wrapping random stuff around their heads to get rid of that irksome feeling of being constantly visible to others and ends with them crunching phantasy numbers in a basement of Imperial college they mistakenly believe to be representable of anything other than their own, sorry madness.
Not to mention injecting themselves with a concoction with no safety data to mention, and fraudulent claims of efficacy. Worse than snake oil.
I should have added an intermediate step here
: Then, they start self-harming by constantly pricking their upper arms with needles and injecting whatever happens to be at hand because they believe it’ll vaccinate them and only thus can they avoid eternal damnation.
Because there’s nothing surging. We had the same theater last summer, just on a larger scale, because these people were still allowed to do forced mass testing of healthy pupils at the taxpayer’s expense. ONS guesstimates are continously manufactured. Whenever the outcome matches what it’s supposed to be, they’re magically making headlines.
For as long as NHS trusts have plenty of money for face coverings and routine mass testing of everyone who stays too close to a hospital for too long a time, they’re obviously flush with money and under enormous pressure of getting bored. A solution could be a law dictating that all the extra funds which have been made available to the NHS must be spend on clinical care and not on political stunts certain people in NHS management consider more important.
Corona’s witnesses will always corona when this can be excused somehow.
Are summer colds, flus that strange?
I have yet to see figures comparing this year’s respiratory virus hospital admissions versus years prior to 2020.
I actually think not. In normal times I would typically get 2 colds a year: one in the autumn (usually Nov) and one in spring summer (May/June). In fact I have repeated that pattern over the past 12 months. Means I can’t run for a week or so, and spend money on tissues and lockets. No other impacts to mention. Much like the covid.
Same here. Always been susceptible to colds. My birthday is late May – I recall having a bad cold at least twice on my birthday.
Oh joy.My last visit to my local Mid Norfolk Doctors to pick up a prescription was wonderful as all the must wear masks notices of previous visit were gone.
I guess they will be back soon .Let battle commence again..
Seriously, isn’t it time we try a different approach? This one clearly isn’t working.
I say that we take anyone we suspect of being positive for the lurgy, tie weights to their ankles and throw them in the water. If they sink and stay down for 10 minutes, they don’t have the lurgy. If they float, they have the lurgy and need to be given injections of AZ/J&J/pfisser/murderna (yes, all 4) every day for 2 weeks, in alternating orders and in varying doses. As we now know with the lurgy, after 2 weeks you will either have died or be recovered. It’s time we start using real SCIENCE rather than this hocus pocus we’ve been trying up to now.
Or we could just carry on as normal, as we do with all the other viruses floating around.
That’s a bit complicated. Can’t we just see if they weigh the same as a duck?
No, JD, that is malinfornation. They must be given the opportunity to renounce their transgressions and swear fealty to Moloch. Then and only then can they be burned to disperse their ill humours safely.
Rochelle Walensky tweeted this advice a few days ago, please keep up.
>Seriously, isn’t it time we try a different approach? This one clearly isn’t working.
It’s all so draining as well. Just fed up of all the crap. Didn’t something like 5 people died of COVID in England last week?
Maybe challenge the mask stasi with this image of the cultures grown from a mask worn for just 20 minutes…. Nice & healthy to be breathing in….
“Many medical and scientific experts agree that bacteria, not influenza viruses, were the most significant cause of death during the 1918 flu pandemic.
“We agree completely that bacterial pneumonia played a major role in the mortality of the 1918 pandemic,” says Anthony Fauci (https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14458-bacteria-were-the-real-killers-in-1918-flu-pandemic/#ixzz7Tk7UEA3j).
A study from 2014 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4202234/) indicates why this might have been the case. Masks serve as incubators for bacteria, fungi and other pathogens. Apart from the fact that masks do not affect the spread of the disease, they would need to be replaced every 20 minutes not to harm the wearer (attached pic: petri-dish after 20 min mask wearing).
So we are talking about an ineffective tool imposed on billions of people while not being effective. Instead, it pollutes the world’s oceans and requires oil/gas to be produced.
It is a kind of hypocrisy that those who pretend to be “pro-science” and “pro-environment” are strongest proponents of making wearing face masks obligatory.”
@Goddek
My initial scan of the image lead me to believe it was a small tray of seashells. I think, given the appalling reality, I’m going to continue to see it as that. Lovely whelks.
I’m posting this on FB & asking folk to guess what it is cultured from. May make folk think before sticking their nose back into the petri dish of whelks!
Indeed, the rank hypocrisy is so thick you could cut it with a knife! It is an ecological disaster at this point. There are more plastic “jellyfish” in the ocean than actual jellyfish, and that was nearly two years ago. Now there are many times more. Jacques Cousteau must be spinning in his grave right now….
And that’s before we even get into the Foegen Effect, whereby masks actually concentrate and incubate the virus further and make it MORE deadly. Google it.
I’ve read that Foegen Effect info. Yet the cut through to the main stream is so low.
Spoke yesterday with a new resident of the village. Not fully awake but open to listening, discussing & questioning. She is now fully aware of the harms to children from a developmental perspective of seeing adults fully masked up, already aware of the increase in CO2 breathed in & now aware that she can self exempt just by saying that she’s exempt.
Masks and antisocial distancing didn’t work every other time, everywhere so why do these idiots think it will work this time?
Why is a Winter season virus ‘surging’ in the Summer? mRNA ‘vaccines’ could it be, or is definitely not the ‘vaccines’ like it’s definitely not them causing sudden unexplained deaths, heart attacks, myocarditis, neurological problems, reduced fertility and increase in failed pregnancies?
Time to dig this out:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eq1TpRKW8AEkEmi?format=jpg&name=small
So it looks like the perverted mask fetishists are trying to impose a mask mandate on the whole of society again by starting with hospitals.
I suppose it will be schools next as we’ve got to ensure that we cause as much psychological damage as possible to the next generation of brainwashed proles.
Soon, we can all wonder around Tesco pretending that we are taking part in some sort of satanic initiation ceremony again (except me and about 3 other people)
I suppose the only way out of this is to try the same thing we’ve tried already and rush out an experimental barely tested 100% safe and effective mRNA injection. It’ll work this time and won’t kill or injure anyone – but only if everyone is
forcedinvited to take it.Or declare “exemption” and TTFO.
I’m not declaring an exemption as that constitutes participation. If I am challenged the response will be “NO.” And then we can have an argument.
I have been a non-participant since the start. That ain’t changing now especially given the wealth of evidence in our favour.
That’s how it starts, people. Don’t give them an inch, or they will take a mile.
Wife just had her yearly consultation by phone regarding cancer she had some years ago. Told she would be speaking to a professor. Turned out he didn’t speak much English and couldn’t understand my wife’s questions.
Well done NHS on ticking the box that an appointment had been met
I was in an NHS hospital last week and sat in a restaurant used by staff at lunchtime.
I was fascinated to watch a constant stream of no doubt highly qualified healthcare professionals walk in donning masks, sit down at tables with their colleagues, take their masks off, eat their lunch for 30 minutes while chatting to everyone, then stand up, put their masks back on and head back to work.
They of all people must know it’s all a nonsense?
I was in Spain in June, where a fair number of elderly people were still wearing the rags. An elderly couple were sitting near us having tapas and saw a couple they knew walking by, wearing face rags. The lady jumped up, embraced the other lady, who lowered her face rag to kiss her friend on the cheek, then put the face rag back over her mouth… The lurgy is well kind, it won’t get you when you eat or drink or greet friends. But go for a walk in the woods on your own…
The problem I see is that the fantasy that masks are helpful in some way is not only not going away, but reinforced with every company and institution that reintroduced it as a response to “rising infextions”. As if masks do something to stop that.
It’s just not healthy to indulge these crazy delusions. It’s going to make us all madder than we already are.
Brainwashing by the mainstream media will have that effect.
Add University Hospitals Leicester NHS trust to list.
It’s clear now that the zealots and the Covidphobic are going to keep this running and running. Especially depressing in the middle of summer.
How many times did they all listen to Chicken Licken before they started ignoring him, I can’t remember?
Shedding.
Rense – always entertaining. Just use discretion LOL!
https://mediaarchives.gsradio.net/rense/special/rense_070122_hr2.mp3
@ 35’24 plays clip of some dr regarding the hazards of shedding -vs- coronavirus.
So tell me, how successful were hospitals in preventing the spread of Covid the last time they all put on face masks?
Weren’t 2/3rd of COVID cases caught in hospital after admission?
Do not comply.
Have we learned nothing over the past three years? Nhs ruined, economy on its knees, families driven into poverty, children’s education destroyed and the idiots running this show want to repeat the horrific mistakes we now know destroyed this country. Why? Masks simply do not work. Social distancing was a manufactured decision pulled from the air. Boy oh boy if you people fold on this you deserve everything that will follow.