Whisper it quietly, but Arctic ice is making a comeback. The coverage is now very close to the 1991-2020 average, well above a 2012 low point and higher than 2020. According to the latest report from Copernicus, the EU’s Earth observation programme, the 2021 March sea ice extent was just 3% below the 30 year average. March is the annual maximum extent of sea ice in the Arctic.
The red line on the graph on the left plots the 2021 record and it can be seen that it is an improvement on recent years. Deviations from the average in March and September shown on the right have both eased in recent years. Of course in historical and geological terms these changes are insignificant, but they are likely to put a dampener on the generally hysterical tone about polar weather encountered in most climate change debate. This tone was set back in 2009 when former US vice president Al Gore reported there was a high chance that the North Pole would be summer ice free by 2013. So far as climate catastrophism is concerned, the Arctic is the gift that keeps on giving. Discussing a crackpot scheme to ‘save the Arctic ice’ by sprinkling it with glass, the BBC Future Planet site noted in 2020 that the area was in a “self-destructive feedback loop”. Much of the ice was said to be “rapidly vanishing”.
Back in less feverish times, the president of the British Royal Society reported to the Admiralty in November 1817 as follows:
It will without doubt have come to your Lordship’s knowledge that a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been during the last two years, greatly abated … This affords ample proof that new sources of warmth have been opened and give us leave to hope that the Arctic Seas may at this time be more accessible than they have been for centuries past.
The geological record shows that the Earth has often been ice free, but present day alarmists concentrate on the rate of change. However, the historical record suggests similar rates of change were not unknown in the near past. The Royal Society president went on to report:
Mr Scoresby, a very intelligent young man who commands a whaling vessel from Whitby observed last year that 2,000 square leagues [a league is three miles] of ice with which the Greenland Seas between latitudes of 74° and 80°N have been hitherto covered, has in the last two years entirely disappeared.
Around the turn of the 19th century there was a great deal of trade, fishing and scientific observation around the Arctic. Britain’s expanding empire was looking for new sea routes. Attempts were started to find a Northwest Arctic passage. As a result of all this activity, we have evidence of substantial melting of Arctic ice before and after 1817. There are suggestions that the ice returned in later years, only to retreat again.
This pattern seems to have been confirmed by a group of Canadian scientists who complied over 25,000 records from the early 1800s for east Newfoundland and the Gulf of St Lawrence.
The graph above shows the low extent of sea ice in the early 1800s, suggesting that the observations reported at the time to the Admiralty in London represented conditions in the wider Arctic area. The subsequent increases are also confirmed by the graph. Lighter amounts of ice seem to have been a feature since the 1930s, a process that started before the onset of mass industrialisation and increased use of fossil fuel.
In February, the Daily Sceptic published an article entitled “The climate fairytales Boris was told at his Net Zero re-education briefing“. The schooling was headed by the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance and took place in January 2020. It featured a number of extreme weather scares and junk science cherry picking, while a short record of Arctic sea ice was headed a “tipping point”. The meeting seems to have converted the Prime Minister to the green activist Net Zero agenda. By the end of 2021, he was telling the COP26 meeting that there was just “one minute to midnight” on the doomsday clock.
Back in the real world, Emeritus Professor Ole Humlum in his recent GWPF climate report noted: “The trend towards stable or higher ice extent at both poles probably began in 2018 and has since strengthened”. GWPF director Dr. Benny Peiser added that it was extraordinary that anyone should think there is a climate crisis. Little has changed over the last 30 years. “The habitual climate alarmism is mainly driven by scientists’ computer modelling rather than observational evidence,” he added.
Make that 200 years for Arctic ice. Sometimes there is a lot of it, sometimes much less. About 20,000 years ago, thick ice covered much of Europe. It’s called coming out of an Ice Age.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
Postscript: This article has been fact-checked by Reuters, who quote several climate scientists disputing its claims. You can read that fact check here and Chris Morrison’s response here.
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Apologise? Er, I think all the British people historically involved in slavery back in the day are dead. So who is meant to apologise? How can you apologise on behalf of dead people? What a load of nonsense. What possible meaning can that have?
Let’s be honest, isn’t “apologising for slavery” more like “apologising for the relative success of European civilisation compared to Africa”?
What’s needed more often and more loudly is for someone with a brain to cut through the crap and spell it out for the hard-of-thinking.
Congratulations, keep it up.
I do not apologise.
I have never enslaved anyone.
If I had enslaved someone inadvertently I would probably apologise. As I have not, I won’t.
If I had enslaved someone deliberately then any apology would be hollow.
.
I firmly agree with your full stop.——–Just kidding
At least it is not a pointless comment.
Wish I had thought of that —-funny
You are too kind.
It is the sort of comment that I have to come here to make as Mrs Faffor had a humour bypass at birth.
There is a great deal of nonsense talked regarding the slave trade.
‘….military enslavement was by far the most significant method is important, for it means that rulers were not, for the most part, selling their own subjects but people whom they, at least, regarded as aliens. The fact that many exported slaves were recent captives means that they were drawn from those captured in the course of warfare who had not yet been given an alternative employment within Africa. In these cases, rulers were deciding to forgo the potential future use of these slaves. Some of the exports were slaves whom local masters wished to dispose of for one reason or another and those who had been captured locally by brigands or judicially enslaved.
This is exactly the situation described by da Mosto in his account of Jolof in 1455. After a description of the use of the slaves in the domestic economy, da Mosto noted that most slaves were captured in wars with neighboring countries and the civil wars. Many of these captives were integrated into the domestic economy, but the rest were sold to the “Moors” for horses.’
The Process of Enslavement and the Slave Trade
John K. Thornton
‘Military enslavement’ was as old as the hills. Once the apologies start, we will all have to apologise to each other and to ourselves.
At least Britain abolished the wretched trade……so could we ask the entire world to give us a round of applause, please, while we all give ourselves a big pat on the back…..
Or, alternatively, could the ‘apology’ blighters, whoever they may be, just drop the venality and stop being so silly?
White Slaves were 40% of the Roman empire’s population. A similar amount within the various Greek empires. Celts, Saxons, Teutons, the Vikings were all focused in large part on White slaving.
Then we have the Musulmans. 25 million White Slaves. 50 million Black Slaves. Don’t hear a god damn thing about it. One reason for the Viking invasions of this country was to provide White slaves to the Caliphs in North Africa and the Middle East.
Today right now in Africa some 5 million Blacks are enslaved by Arabs, Muslims and other Blacks. Zero whites involved.
This year and every year some 5000 Black Christian Nigerians will be killed by Black Muslims and if female, likely raped beforehand. Hundreds, probably thousands are sex enslaved by Black Muslims every single year, some are young school girls. But they are Black Christians so who gives a shyte – no one, not even the useless Churches.
I also hear there are no black people running around in Arab countries because the Arabs castrated their slaves. ——-Forgotten slavery: The Arab-Muslim slave trade | FairPlanet
No one today should apologise for the actions of anyone who was alive 100, 200, 300 years ago etc. Otherwise the Germans would never be done apologising. But how many people today blame Germans for what Germans did in the last 2 wars? It is well understood that those Germans back then were to blame for their actions and this has nothing to do with Germans alive today. —–Should Joachim von Heisenberg working as a butcher in Mannheim have anything to apologise for because his grandfather was in the SD or SS? ——Ah but the butcher in Mannheim is not the government I hear people say. —–But todays governments were elected by people alive today not by dead people who might have committed atrocities in the past and those current politicians cannot be held responsible for the actions of previous generations of politicians. ——-This “apologising” nonsense is like many other things in todays world political. Political agenda’s are behind all of the apologising, just as the wealthy western world is now apologising for having “appropriated” the earths atmosphere by it’s use of fossil fuels and must now pay the price for that by fobbing its citizens off with inferior energy solutions at great expense by way of “Apology”.
Indeed but as I said above it’s nothing to do with actions hundreds of years ago. It’s about the “success gap” now.
And the Arab persecution and enslavement of black Africans is still happening to this day, but because whites or Jews aren’t the so-called ”oppressors” in these examples, the West turns a hypocritical blind eye. Once more the Muslims seemingly have protected status, because ‘Islamophobia’. The Western ‘powers that be’ prefer to talk about and scapegoat the phantom menace that is the ‘far-right extremists’ but a quick look at any crime figures on terrorism easily contradicts their hollow assertions;
”Since Arabs first invaded Africa in the seventh century, murderous raids targeting innocent civilians have been a common feature of the spread of Islam in Africa. Today, in Mauritania, Black Mauritanians whose ancestors were taken into captivity centuries ago and whose status as chattel has been passed down through the generations, live in bondage, serving as slaves to their Arab Berber masters. Even though indigenous Africans in Mauritania were converted to Islam after the Arab conquest, race has trumped religion, and the Arab Berber rulers have treated the Black Mauritanians as they would infidels.
Modern-day Mauritania is essentially a racist caste system ruled by the 30% Arab Berber minority, called beydanes (“whites”). The Arab-controlled government has “banned” slavery five times since independence from France—in 1961, 1980, 1981, 2007, and 2015—yet today, absurdly, denies that it exists. According to the Global Slavery Index, approximately 149,000 Black Mauritanians still live there as slaves. These slaves remain in chains. They’re bred and are known to have been horrifically tortured in ways that rival and may even surpass Hamas’ torments. Yet these Black Muslim slaves who are passed down like the family furniture from the masters to their sons have no serious champions in the West.
Why are these horrors of real-world slavery, with women raped and men kept in chains, based on the color of their skin or their religion, not better understood and publicized in the West? Because the reigning progressive ideology taught in almost all American educational institutions divides the world into “oppressors” and “oppressed,” bestowing on the latter protected status. With the Arab and Muslim communities in America having been granted this new form of immunity, casting light on evil conduct committed by Arab colonial conquerers who enslave and murder Black Africans, is simply not allowed.”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/arab-enslavement-black-africans
Great ——Cheers.
Excellent history article by former Royal Navy Officer Lewis Page.
Ethnic Europeans must strongly reject all attempts to impose a false “White Guilt” upon our whole ethnic group. There is no such thing as communal guilt, or ancestral guilt, or national guilt, or racial guilt.
These false concepts have been forced upon the German people, the Japanese people, the Spanish people, the English people (Welsh, Scots & Irish deemed to be ancestral victims of the English), the American people, Australian people, and all Ethnic Europeans around the world. It’s time to say “No!”, and teach our children to say “No! We are proud of our race, our history, and the western civilisation our ancestors worked so hard to build. And we will not apologise for any of it.”
Britain was not a slaving society in the era in question. It was not a Government policy. Slaves were not used in Britain. That some individuals and private companies – like the East India Company – were involved in slavery, does not mean Britain as a social, or political entity was involved.
The trans-Atlantic slave trade was started by Spain, mostly, but Portugal too. African slave taking was Government sanctioned and African slaves were initially brought to work in Spain.
Spain and Portugal shipped more than six times the number of slaves to their South American colonies, than were shipped to the British Colonies/USA in North America and West Indies. Oddly, neither are in the frame for reparations or opprobrium.
But the real significant point is, those slaves were bought – not captured – by European traders, at first from Arab traders but later from the Chiefs and Kings of powerful African tribes that had traded slaves for more than 1 000 years prior to Europeans setting foot in Africa.
Those idiots who want reparation need to go to the head of the supply chain, in Africa… or better still, just get lost.