Possibly one of the dumbest and most scientifically illiterate climate scare stories ever written has been published by the fast-fading UK Sky News. Climate reporter Victoria Seabrook notes that the sea ice on the Arctic “continent” is melting at 12% every decade but she backs it up by publishing a graph clearly showing it has been stable since 2007. She goes on to claim that the Arctic melt will push up sea levels around Britain and fuel worse coastal flooding, seemingly unaware that melting ice in liquid does not raise its level (suggested educational tip, check out ice in a gin and tonic glass). Just for good measure, her silly story throws in the wobbling jet stream and a “shocking” prediction that global temperature could rise by nearly 1°C in just five years.
This story is a classic of its kind – late climate psychosis folderol to back up the collapsing Net Zero fantasy. After decades of relentless mainstream gaslighting, mass audiences are still vaguely concerned that the climate is in some kind of ‘emergency’. Net Zero is retreating around the world, partly because it is increasingly understood that human civilisation cannot abolish the use of hydrocarbons without returning to the dark ages, and partly because nobody is prepared to pay for it when given a choice. But the great climate science con that is the foundation of the collectivist Net Zero lunacy continues, and, if Seabrook’s latest work is an example, it is getting more desperate by the day.
So she publishes the graph below with the misleading 12% decline every decade heading.
There is no attribution but the graph is broadly similar to others showing the September minimum sea ice extent plotted back to 1979 and the start of continuous satellite data. It clearly shows that a short-term decline from the middle of the 1990s was stopped in its tracks from around 2007. Seabrook is not alone in running a linear line down from 1979 and ignoring the individual trends over nearly 40 years of the five decade time period. Countless scare stories feature the declining sea ice and countless accounts fail to note that 1979 was also a cyclical ice high point. There is plenty of evidence to show the combined extent across the seas of the Arctic region was much lower back to the 1950s.
These cherry-picking stories are ubiquitous despite recent work from Dr Mark England of the University of Exeter which noted that the ice had been stable over every month in the year since 2007. In addition, the illustration below from Arctic scientist Allan Astrup Jensen displays the progression of the September sea ice since 1979.
The actual data clearly show a different story to that relayed to the general public by a mainstream media struggling to retain credibility in an information world they no longer control. As Jensen observes, the summer ice plateaued from 1979-97 and then fell for 10 years. Either side of the drop there have been minimal losses, while the last near decade has seen some possible gains.
As well as all this melting sea ice pushing up imaginary sea levels, Seabrook also states it will “shift the jet stream” and disrupt the UK weather system “in ways not fully understood”. Alas, no ‘scientists say’ evidence is provided for this claim, which may not even be relevant given the ice has been on pause for nearly 20 years. A working knowledge of the jet stream high in the northern hemisphere atmosphere is not yet available due to limited observations over relevant time periods. Not yet “fully understood” sums it all up, even though Seabrook claims the UK weather will be disrupted. Of course it will.
Temperature data are always good for a laugh in climate alarmist circles, particularly when they arise from the UK Met Office. When it is not making up temperatures from 103 non-existent sites, the Met Office is promoting figures taken from its largely unnatural heat-ravaged nationwide weather network. Other state-funded meteorological operations, packed full of climate activists, produce similarly corrupted figures and when they are combined to give a global temperature, extreme scepticism is the order of the day. Further homogenisation and convenient retrospective adjustments mean that these datasets have more fiddles in them than the music cupboard at the Royal Philharmonic.
Seabrook picks up on a recent report from the World Meteorological Organisation that is said to forecast a rise in warming from around 1.2°C to 2°C within the next five years. Or, as Seabrook noted in a later X post, “finds” a rise in the warming.
The chance of this rise is said to be “exceptionally unlikely” says Professor Adam Scaife of the Met Office Hadley Centre who worked on the report. But that’s the way you do it – invent a ridiculous clickbait figure to attract attention but then go on to note the “forecast” would have been “effectively impossible” just a few years ago. This is then said in Seabrook’s report to be a sign of how quickly the climate is changing. In the bizarre world of ‘settled’ climate science, an opinion, however improbable, is promoted as a sign of physical change. Professor Scaife is reported to add: “It is shocking in that sense that two degrees is possible. However, it’s not shocking [because] … we thought it might be plausible at this stage, and indeed it is”.
Confected word salad, indicative perhaps of how most climate science has long departed from the traditional scientific process.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor
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