Sea ice around Antarctica has “slowly increased” since the start of continuous satellite recordings in 1979 with any changes caused by natural climate variation. In a paper published earlier this year, four environmental scientists further state that any sign that humans are responsible for any change is “inconclusive”. Not of course for mainstream media that have been crying wolf about the sea ice in Antarctica for decades to promote the Net Zero fantasy. Last year there was a reduced level of winter sea ice and this caused the Financial Times Science Editor Clive Cookson to exclaim that the entire area “faces a catastrophic cascade of extreme environmental events… that will affect climate around the world”.
Over the satellite record, the scientists note there was a “prolonged and gradual” expansion of sea ice to around 2014 followed by a short period of sudden decline from 2014-19. Growth was then resumed, although there was a temporary downturn around 2022. These variations, which can also be observed before 1979, were caused by a number of natural atmospheric and oceanic factors. All of this is known of course, with the EU weather service Copernicus admitting recently that sea ice extent as a whole “shows large year-to-year variability and no clear long-term trend since 1979”. At the other end of the Earth, Copernicus correctly states that the cyclical decline in Arctic sea ice “has levelled off since 2007”.
It must all be very bewildering for narrative-following journalists. Confusion no doubt reigned supreme in their unquestioning ranks when they chanced upon the comments last year of Dr. Walter Meier of the U.S.-based National Snow and Ice Data Centre. He was in full activist mode when he claimed the 2023 winter sea ice dip was “so far outside anything we’ve seen, it’s almost mind blowing”. But not perhaps as confused as Dr. Meier himself who 10 years earlier was part of a scientific team that cracked open the secrets of early Nimbus photographic data. These revealed significant Antarctica sea ice variability in the 1960s, including a high in 1964, not seen again until 2014, and a low in 1966, similar to the recent dip. At the time, Dr. Meier commented that extreme ice highs and lows “are not that unusual”.
During the Great 2023 Antarctica Ice Scare, the BBC said that it showed a worrying new benchmark for the region “that once seemed resistant to global warming”. Still does, those striving for accuracy might note. Antarctica has hardly warmed in the last 70 years.
One by one the appalling scares that have been used by Net Zero fanatics to promote mass climate psychosis in human populations are being exposed as wishful junk thinking. Over the last few decades, alarmists have taken their cue from the ozone hole scare that started in 1974. At this time, two scientists claimed that the widespread industrial use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) was destroying the protective ozone layer in the atmosphere. Subsequently, an annual appearance of an ozone hole was discovered over Antarctica and CFCs were banned by international agreement in 1995. The two scientists received the Nobel prize for their work, and activists claimed it was all a great triumph showing what could be achieved when humans acted in concert to protect the planet. The Nobels were accepted and the activists moved onto other scares and proposed bans. What happened to the ozone hole, you ask? Well that kept on expanding and contracting as it has always done, and this year the hole is as large as it has been for the last 30 years. Whisper it quietly – natural variation seems to be at work here.
As readers will no doubt be aware, there is gathering excitement about the prospect of another ‘hottest year evah’ for 2024. There has been a little extra warmth recently following a near nine-year temperature pause with scientists looking at a number of natural variations seen often in the past.
Hottest year claims are produced from woefully incomplete temperature records that are barely 100 years old. In the case of sea temperatures, accurate and complete global records stretch back less than 20 years. The temperature data itself, as we have seen in many Daily Sceptic articles, have been homogenised/reanalysed/invented/adjusted on an almost constant basis. Most individual temperature recordings around the world have been corrupted by urban heat, while in the U.K. the Met Office seems inordinately proud of a national high set in 2022 as three Typhoon jets were landing at a RAF airbase. If we consider the proxy record, it seems likely that temperatures were as high in Roman and medieval times, while 8,000 years ago the great northern ice sheets started to melt helped by temperatures at least 3°C higher than those experienced today. Again it is difficult not to conclude that natural variation plays the dominant role in controlling the climate thermostat.
Thoughts and prayers are also the order of the day for those who set great store in all the coral disappearing. Three years of record growth on the huge Great Barrier Reef put an end to that headliner. Polar bears are just as bad and keep breeding to top up new Arctic highs. Satellites keep discovering vast colonies of penguins in Antarctica, and mainstream media seem shocked into complete silence to report that the eyes in the sky have detected a vast recent plant greening of the Earth. There is a growing trend to debunk any ‘extreme’ weather claim – the great citizen journalist Paul Homewood even writes a book about the BBC’s more egregious climate howlers, every year no less, such is the volume to process.
The Net Zero project is starting to crumble around the world as citizens make their feelings known with votes, and sometimes with rocks. Nobody can or wants to live in a world without hydrocarbons. Crucial to this trend is an emerging understanding that the scientific process when it comes to climate has been trashed for decades and replaced with an increasingly laughable junk ‘settled’ science narrative.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Sounds like a good idea in theory.
In practice rhe only way parents can know what their children are being taught in school is going to school with them.
In any case, the solution as almost always is freeing the school market. Give parents vouchers and let then chose the school for their children.
Indeed
I know I will probably irritate the redoubtable RW but I would make the national curriculum advisory or abolish it, privatise or disband Ofsted and allow anyone to set up a school with no legal constraints on what can be taught and who can be a teacher*
*I can see a problem here though because now we have a multicultural society there would be ghetto schools where people are taught to hate us
That would condemn some children to be failures in life, the ones that can’t pass GCSE and other exams, even if they emerge with enhanced life skills.
No I don’t think so. Apparently 80% of secondary schools in England are academies with some freedom in the matter of curriculum the main reason for the important rise in academic standards in recent years.
That simply needs to be extended with the use of vouchers, then the whole department of education can be shut.
All schools completely independent.
Why?
Hasn’t our Toby set up some free schools? Does that mean they don’t teach this indictrinating, toxic bilge? I actually don’t know much about free schools…
He has indeed (he is sometimes maligned but gets off his arse and does stuff instead of just moaning) and I think they are still going and I am sure they don’t teach the bilge. However the parents who (presumably) pay for those schools don’t get a discount on their tax money, and the schools still get inspected by Ofsted and have to employ “qualified” teachers – so they could get pushed to cover things in the national curriculum that they would rather not.
I think the upcoming education bill intends to remove that freedom.
Katherine Birbalsingh, who we’ve encountered here in the past and who gets excellent results from a non-selective intake, is making a lot of noise about this on various podcasts and has apparently been invited to visit Bridget Phillipson.
Whether or not they change their plans remains to be seen.
Centrally planned education is a terrible Idea.
I see climan beat me to it
How depressing.
Yes you need somebody like this lady as Education Secretary really, as she knows what’s what and her success speaks for itself. Pigs will fly first, of course.
They don’t select for competence unfortunately.
Tories Demand Right for Parents to Know What Children Are Taught in Schools
The Tory wing of the Uniparty could have enshrined this in law, while they were in power, with a Parental Right to Know Act. Then the current marxo-fascist anti-white government would have been forced to repeal it, and the Anti-white Party (aka The Labour Party) would be forced to explain why they think the government should own the nation’s children.
Yes, they are having all sorts of good ideas that they didn’t have while they were in power. I don’t believe a word of it. They will say anything to get back in to government, but if they get there it will be the same old fake Tories.
Too true.
Why would we trust a Tory Party led by Olukemi Adegoke and is full of the equivalents of RINOs?
Here is how it is done by the excellent Katharine Birbalsingh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-hHSDseWDo
But the devil is in the detail, it would be very difficult to provide parents with full transparency, even giving them textbooks and exercises would not deter devious activist teachers.
You know she has done great for her school when the New Statesman writes this:
“The school is only marginally less hated than Eton, …”
What a great badge of honour!
I heard her on planet normal last week – the basic common sense she spoke was very refreshing. Schools are meritocracy’s, aiming high raises kids standards, and their expectations. Success breeds success… all positive, ‘let’s strive to improve ourselves by working hard’ thinking vs let’s do as little as possible
Any teacher propagating marxo-fascist claptrap is either deluded or evil and contributes to the ongoing disintegration of society.
When will they realise they had 14 years to do this but failed.
I was lucky I came to this country at primary school age and even then in the early 1980s they started pushing this progressive crap. The headmaster called my mother in and asked if I had lived in countries where women were subjugated. Honestly if I had a son of school age I would have to intervene to save him. I would find other traditional parents and make a go of it. |I am glad that they never beat the traditional ways out of me now given the morbid state of British culture.
Gwendolene is rushing to try to deal with an overload of pupils for schools this month as a result of Rachel from Accounts driving private schools out of business and forcing parents to pull children out on cost grounds. Who could possibly have seen this coming? Oh, yes, most people.
Parents having the right to know what their children are being taught in school is pretty meaningless unless they also have the right to change what’s taught e.g. via the curriculum in each school being voted on by the parents of that school’s pupils similar to the US system of local/district school boards being directly elected.
I fully support parents who home school their children to reduce the chance of them being indoctrinated but for a lot of parents this isn’t practical.
Come on ….. they only had 14 years to do this. It obviously wasn’t a priority …. unlike “gay marriage”.