Over the last month, it’s been whack-a-mole time as alarmists pop no less than three poster scares of climate collapse back into the mainstream headlines. The Guardian dusted down the old ‘scientists say’ favourite that there will be ice-free summers in the Arctic “possibly” within the next decade; billionaire foundation-rewarded BBC activist Matt McGrath gave us the ever-popular “Climate change: Polar bears face starvation threat as ice melts” story, while Peter Hess for the Daily Mail and Reuters filed a pack of nonsense reporting that the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) was in grave danger of disappearing due to the Earth being on the “cusp of the worst bleaching event in history”. All very confusing given that Arctic sea ice has been recovering for over a decade and on January 8th recorded its highest level for 21 years, polar bears are thriving across the Arctic and numbers are probably at record levels, while coral on the GBR has bounced back from numerous recent natural bleaching events to hit a two-year period of record high cover.
Details, details. It seems the ice, the polar bears and the corals are far too valuable poster scares to be let go that easily. The mainstream media has been captured by a false catastrophist climate narrative that is programmed to report every click-bait doomsday science paper, every bad weather event and every biased report based on incomplete statistics and data that are open to less sensationalist interpretations. In the process, citizens are left in a state of fear about global ‘heating’ and climate ‘collapse’ – more easily pushed it would seem to accept the madness of the collectivist Net Zero project.
The latest Arctic ice scare is based on a paper published in Nature where the activist scientists used “high emissions” climate model scenarios to predict ice-free conditions in September within six years. Gullible Guardian writer Helena Horton suggests that the home of polar bears, seals and walruses could be mostly water for months as early as 2035 “due to fossil fuel emissions”. In fact, summer sea ice has shown no significant decline since 2007, as the graph below shows.
Compiled by the Danish scientist Allan Astrup Jensen, the red bar shows the monthly average for the lowest extent of summer sea ice invariably reached in September. The author notes that there has been no significant downward movement during the last 17 years. In fact, it seems that for about a decade, overall Arctic sea ice has been slowly recovering from a previous fall. A line showing a decline is often drawn showing a linear trend downwards from a high point of 1979, when satellites first stared recording comprehensive data. However, records going back to the 1950s suggest much lower ice levels, and in the historical data, cycles of waxing and waning over 70-80 years can be clearly observed.
The year 1979 is a convenient starting point for Arctic hysterics since it marks the end of a four decade-long cooling period as the graph below demonstrates. The recent warming seen in the Arctic has taken temperatures back to those observed in the 1930s and 1940s.
Inexplicably missing from the Guardian’s doom-laden prose is a note that high emission scenarios suggest a fanciful rise in global temperature of around 4°C in less than 80 years. The scenario called RCP8.5 is ubiquitous in attention-seeking climate model papers, but it is regarded by the International Panel on Climate Change as “low likelihood”. Also missing from the copy is a note that ‘ice-free’ is not actually free of ice since an allowance is made for one million square kilometres of the stuff remaining. Sadly, this would appear to rule out the much anticipated summer swimming galas across the North Pole.
February 27th was ‘International Polar Bear Day’, so Matt McGrath of the BBC extended himself during this important fund-raising period with both the summer ice melting and the polar bears starving. Ring seals give birth to pups in the spring and the bears go hunting for the seals and their new-born who live on the ice for a few weeks before taking to the sea. Early sea ice melt means less pups for the bears, goes the long-running scare. “As the ice disappears in a warming world, many bears are spending greater amounts of time on shore eating bird’s eggs, berries and grass”, states McGrath.
Except of course, as we have seen, the ice is not disappearing on cue. The March ice maximum extent graph above, compiled by the National Snow and Ice Data Centre, shows the recent significant recovery going back nearly a decade. With hunting banned from the 1950s, polar bear numbers have soared with suggestions that they have grown to a record recent high of 32,000. There is still plenty of sea ice around in the spring and early summer when the bear gorge on seals, and can consume around two thirds of their annual food intake. As noted, there has been a decrease in overall ice cover since the 1979 high point and this has opened up a little more of the Arctic to sunlight. This appears to have benefited the overall aquatic food chain leading to an increase in the number of fatter ring seals – happy days for all the plump polar bears seen waddling around the far North.
In 1999, the budding Guardian doomsday prophet George Monbiot noted that marine biologists had reported that 70-90% of the coral reefs they had surveyed in the Indian Ocean had just died. From this Monbiot concluded that “at least one of the world’s great eco systems is now on the point of total collapse”. In October 2020, the BBC said that the Great Barrier Reef had lost more than half of its corals since 1995, “due to warmer seas driven by climate change”. Move barely a year on from the BBC report and coral at the GBR was at a 37-year high. What alarmists do, of course, is chance upon natural bleaching events caused by localised spikes in water temperature. With El Nino currently causing such spikes around the oceans, the corals have shown some bleaching, and the Daily Mail goes into full Monbiot mode.
Tropical coral grows in waters between 24°C-32°C and will be unaffected by any gradual warming of the oceans. In fact, many varieties grow faster in the warmer waters near the equator. It is known however that they expel algae when temperatures move suddenly, but quickly recover when conditions stabilise. All of this is known, but apparently ignored by click-bait climate hucksters.
The distinguished scientist Peter Ridd has studied coral on the GBR for 40 years, and he recently published a paper stating that the reporting of coral raised “serious questions” about “integrity in science institutions and in the media”. He added: “An uncharitable observer might conclude that periodic mass coral mortality events, which are completely natural, are exploited by some organisations with an ideological agenda and a financial interest”. The full recovery is rarely reported, he observed.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor
Stop Press: Our recent article on the clearing of up to 120,000 trees in the ancient German forest of Reinhardswald, setting for mythical stories by the Brothers Grimm, to make way for a wind turbine park, attracted a wide social media readership. It was reposted on the Watts Up With That? science site where the cartoonist Josh was inspired to observe…
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