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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I salute Chris for keeping going in the face of such dishonesty, his work is one of the major reasons I make a small contribution to the DS.
I agree and thank Chris Morrison and others on here and in some other places for doing something that 90% or more of journalist don’t do, and that is question something that is supposed to be about “science”. ——-In science you question everything. When you don’t question it, you are indulging in politics not science, and nothing today is more highly politicised than energy/climate.
I see the red thumbs down person disagrees with me and thinks that in science you should not question anything. ——Notice how they don’t say why. Probably because they are aware how silly that would be.
I’m firmly of the opinion that “the red thumbs down person” / people is/are probably attention-seeking, insecure vitiates. Ergo, the red thumbs down gesture.
I try to ignore them.
Could it be a cry for help?
Also, please visit https://wattsupwiththat.com/
There you will find a wealth of information about the environments, actual science, weather, the climates and also links to numerous agencies that provide data on ice, sea temperatures, atmospheric temperatures etc.
Likewise. An excellent chap, it was a pleasure to meet him at the DS Christmas Party.
Yesterday I flicked over to SKY NEWS (a rare event). ——On it was the “Climate Show”. They were doing a piece about coastal erosion and painting a picture of rising sea levels threatening coastal villages with lots of images of houses very close to the edge and footage of bits of cliff falling down to the beach etc. ——The whole idea was to give this picture of sea level rise that was all caused by our emissions of CO2 and as a result of “climate change”. There is only one thing wrong with this. Sea levels have been rising throughout this Interglacial period for the last 12,000 years or so but crucially there is no evidence of an increase in the rate of sea level rise as would be expected if humans were adding to natural rises with our CO2 emissions. Any honest reporting would surely therefore conclude that coastal erosion was caused by rising sea levels that are occurring naturally. But on a “Climate Show” that is like a hammer that sees everything as a nail, absolutely everything that occurs is because of humans and that is POLITICS not SCIENCE.
You may know this, but 20,000 years ago temperatures started rise marking the end of the last glacial expansion cycle. Huge quantities of ice melted and the seas started to rise (see the graphic below). Today we are told that humans are responsible for an 8cm rise in seas since the 1800s. Using the same scale and beginning 20,000 years ago nature was responsible for 123,000cm rise in seas. Lets compare that.
Nature – – 123,000cm
Humans – 000,008cm
I struggle to see how nature has stopped suddenly and only since the Industrial Revolution. During the Holocene the seas have continued to rise although much slower and with the occasional drop. We have perhaps 500 years before the next glacial cycle gets into it’s stride and unless the Earth loses all it’s orbital and rotational eccentricities I cannot see what will stop the descent into another 80,000 to 100,000 years of a much much colder, drier planet .
I am aware a lot of this stuff as I have been looking into it since about 2007, but I thankyou for your reply…….All information and knowledge is GOOD.—– It is no knowledge that is bad, and that is why people end up gluing themselves to buildings and throwing tomato soup at works of art.—-Because they know NOTHING
Agreed. I run the risk of writing what people like yourself already know but I consider it better to do that as others that don’t know may be reading.
I went with my son to visit Keele University as part of their open day. We were greeted at Stoke station by one of the students acting as a guide. I asked him what he was studying? As he answered Environmental Studies I thought he would know about the Ice Age we are currently in, particularly the extent and duration of the last glacial expansion. He confessed to not knowing much about it at all. I naively thought that anyone in higher education would be thirsty for knowledge especially everything around the subject they have chosen?
Yes I often post stuff that others may already know as well. But so what? There will always be some people who don’t know or are unaware. The more that we all attack this hijacked environmentalism that is really just politics masquerading as science the better.
I think you’re out by a factor of 10. 120m is 12,000cm, not 120,000 (which would be mm)
Otherwise, thanks for the graph.
Oh yes and thanks for pointing out, but unfortunately I cannot correct and hide my error, so there it is. Either way even 12,300cm is a considerable rise compared to 8cm.
Sky subscription? Cancelled.
BBC TV, Radio 4 Today programme? Do these still exist?
Watts Up With That is all the news that you need:
First three WUWT articles today?
‘……the EU may be realizing that banning internal combustion engines, and replacing them with e-cars, is going to cause a lot more damage than good.’
‘….the models that formerly used WH (Western Hudson) bears as a proxy to predict the survival of all other subpopulations, including the one published last year, are not worth the paper they were printed on. What a surprise!’
‘The subsequent Great Dying or end Permian Extinction 252 million years ago was simply the culmination of “dead clades walking” that began with CO2 starvation, the rain forest collapse, and phytoplankton blackout. The end Permian saw 81% of the remaining marine species and 70% of remaining terrestrial vertebrate species go extinct……….if history teaches us anything, we must ensure that attempts to reduce CO2 concentrations do not result in devastating CO2 starvation ever again.’
Yep. There are also many many books on the issue of energy and climate. —-One of the best is “Hubris, The Troubling Science, Economics and Politics of Climate Change”. by Michael Hart ————-I also like the works of energy experts like Robert Bryce and Michael J Economides who wrote “Energy and Climate Wars”. ——–Good luck with your reading and thanks for your comments on here.
“Watts Up With That is all the news that you need”
Don’t fall into that trap, as true as the statement may be.
Tom Nelson’s YouTube channel is worth a watch. This is a good listen, if you can cope with 1 hr and 40 mins:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIrOsjS6_GU
Luckily there is a chapter list so you can find the various most interesting points.
And let’s not forget that humans were vastly vegetarian!
All those thousands of flint arrow heads, fish barbs and knives were all used to hunt apples and wild tomatoes!
https://www.newsweek.com/diets-almost-exclusively-vegetarian-first-european-cities-1856648
If food scarcity is an issue for polar bears (very common for these large carnivorous predators), then why not turn up to their habitat every month or so and feed them? Problem solved. We’ve got an abundance of food, we stuff our faces all day long, many of us are obese, and yet we give almost nothing to the animal kingdom. They live like scavengers, how utterly selfish of us.
Instead these magnificent animals have become the unwitting poster boy for the deranged leftist deindustrialisation plan, where white people (only white people of course) must: decommission our existing power stations and buy Chinese wind turbines; dump all our cars on the scrap heap and buy Chinese EVs; dump all our gas boilers on the scrap heap and buy Chinese heat pumps…in order ‘to save the polar bears’. Mass hysteria.
If the leftists really cared about polar bears, then they would do as above. But it’s clear that they don’t think twice about them, know nothing about them, nor do they care.
I can think of a few people I’d like to send to the arctic to feed polar bears.
Hänsel and Gretel get lost in the turbine forests until they arrive at a ramshackle shed where the evil climate alarmist Claudia Roth lies in hiding who seeks to capture children to use their dead bodies as mushroom beds for yeast and mould fungi she then turns into the vegan meat replacement products which exclusively make up her diet. She captures Hänsel by cunningly luring him into her home under the pretext of wanting to give him a sausage roll but Gretel luckily escapes. Having locked up the boy to let him compassionately starve to death, the Green politician (for that she is in her public life) then goes hunting for the girl through the desolate wasteland of concrete, dripping chemicals and turbine blades whoosing through the air.
The chase goes on an on and Gretel, having tripped numerous times over thick cables laid out all over the ground, is near the end of her endurance when they finally reach the outskirts of the ghastly mechanical forest and approach a huge solar installation composed many highly reflecting mirrors for bundling the sunlight and sending it to water heating chamber in the center of it. Roth stumbles over a concrete ridge while trying to grab the girl who, with a final exertion, pushes here into the circle of reflectors where – with a shriek of absolute terror – the evil Green is incinerated in a bright flash, turning into flocks of grey ash blown away by the wind. Panting, the girl makes are way back to the shed step by step where she finds releases her unfortuntate brother.
What is that? ——–Is it from your imagination or from some book or other? ——-It is very funny and quite appropriate parody.
Thanks. I just wrote that on the spot at that time. I only wish the English was less atrocious.
The politician.
Oooh, she’s lovely!
RW, it works. Freud may ask to see you after class, but you said it well. Your English is way better than my stale, high-school/GCSE German.
If I wrote auf Deutsch, I would feel as humble as you do. Not a problem.
Brilliant! Now it needs to be made into a ‘Blockbuster Movie’. ‘Based on real events.’
Models prove nothing! Why is that so hard for people to understand?
It’s not science, it’s pure bunkum.
I’ve been leading teams of Data Scientists for years. The whole team understands we’re just making sophisticated guesses and that’s how we communicate any results to management. We actively seek to falsify and refine. It’s the only responsible thing to do.
The minute you see “scientists used ‘high emissions’ climate model scenarios to predict ice-free conditions” then it’s clear that the model was designed with embedded assumptions which led to the intended conclusion.
The same crappy thinking led us into lockdown. Big scary numbers produced by fancy models were enough to rob us of our freedoms.
Modelling sounds sexy and mysterious, but it’s just a complex calculation. If I said “my spreadsheet calculations predict thermageddon is imminent”, more people would question my conclusions.
If I said “my AI/ML model has predicted…” then suddenly it sounds all scientific. Snake Oil.
Correct. ——-But when most people tune into their 6 O’Clock news to be lectured about the unfolding “climate crisis” they only hear things like “all scientists agree”. They never hear “All Modellers agree”. ——-A model is NOT science and it is not evidence of anything. Mainstream news has simply become climate activism pretending it is reporting on science.
Chris, why use that silly graph of declining sea ice from 1979?? It starts at 14m/sqKM so it is only the ‘tops’ and exaggerates the decline, this is EXACTLY what the game that alarmists play. Am I missing something?
Yes, it’s exactly their game but “when in Rome,…”
Shrinking the axes is a common ploy for exaggerating data. We saw that late ’20 / early “21 when our wonderful media were pontificating whether us peons deserved freedom.
When things were bottoming out, despite several months prior data, the Beeb zoomed into the previous 4 weeks which showed a ‘spike’ and quizzed ‘The Right Honourless W*nksock MP’ on that slice of the data. Something like ‘given the recent increase in cases [lol, ffs!], why should we let the peons leave their houses?’ – yes, I exaggerated but it’s certainly no more egregious than the panic-whipping tactics of our media over that wonderfully ‘educational’ (i.e. the lying that led to my becoming red-pilled) couple of years.
This myopia ignored the huge decline over the previous months. Instead they focused on the blip, thus exaggerating the severity of our non-crisis.
I think it was then, in response to an impertinent question, Mr W*nksock claimed the ‘journslist’ had ‘got the science wrong’
I wish, at exactly this moment, the inquisitor had asked him to ‘explain the science’ – it would have shown him for the igno-ty-rant he really is.
Instead, I’m fairly sure the general population (gen-pop being prison terminology) were duly scared into clamouring for ‘our’ freedoms [unsurprisingly, not the suspension of the freedoms of the laptop class, which somehow seemed enhanced in those dark days.] to remain suspended for a few more months.
Yeah, even after all this time, I’m still really salty. Cold hard rage.
It’ll take a long while and some humility/repentance from our ‘betters’ to bring me back down.
Why does the Average Monthly Arctic Sea Ice Extent graph for 1979-2023 shown above match such a nice neat straight trend line [shown in blue]?
That seems a little unusual. It suggests a linear relationship of the form y = mx + c.
Of course the trend over a much longer period than 24 years might not match s straight trend line.
Taking it at face value, what other single variable might match that straight trend line? Is there some other process responsible for this that is not ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’?
Does the sea ice extent for Antarctica match this or is it different?
What of changing ocean currents? Are they different now? If so is the change linear?
Any thoughts?