(ME77)

Climate Cools But Arctic Ice Scares Continue

 

My badge of honor is an attack by Phil Jones, disgraced and displaced Director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) whose leaked emails showed how they falsified climate science. On May 22, 2009 Jones wrote to Mann, “Our web server has found this piece of garbage - so wrong it is unbelievable that Tim Ball wrote a decent paper in Climate Since AD 1500. I sometimes wish I’d never said this about the land stations in an email. Referring to Alex von Storch just shows how up to date he is.” The article in CanadaFreePress was one of eleven in a series written before the CRU exposé. The first two were written with Tom Harris, the rest are mine.

They’re a history of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and indirectly control by the CRU gang.

“Climate Since AD 1500” is a collection of articles edited by Jones and Bradley (J&B) published by Routledge in 1992. My chapter is titled, “Historical and instrumental evidence of climate: western Hudson Bay, Canada, 1714 ‚—1850”. Articles show the degree to which climate changes in short periods. Despite this J&B are already setting the focus on human causes. In a summary they claim two positions emerge from the evidence, but both “perspectives provide fuel for arguments over the veracity of anthropogenic greenhouse-gas-induced climatic change.” They argue, “To resolve this controversy, further modeling and paleoclimate studies are needed” (page 674). Their summary, analysis, and recommendation are distortions of the evidence.

A.E.J. Ogilvie’s article examined climate change in Iceland from AD 1500 to 1800. It notes, “Iceland’s position within the range of the Arctic drift ice is also of major importance to the country’s climate.” Modern data defines “normal” when the drift ice spreading from Greenland is 90 to 150 kilometers from the northwest coast, “mild” when it is 200 to 240 kms. Severe is closer than 90 kms.

Figure 1: Polar view of Ice conditions, January 15, 2010.
Source: iup.physik.uni-bremen.de

This year the edge of the ice is very close to Iceland and may connect with Greenland. Arctic ice formation began earlier than average for the period since 1980. On January 14 it covered 12,944,844 square kilometers with a peak anticipated at the end of March of 15 million square kilometers. (Figure 1)

False Scare After False Scare

We’ve heard many claims of Arctic ice collapse. In August 2000, the New York Times reported ships at the North Pole in open water and claimed it was the first open ice in 50 million years. A picture of a submarine in open water at the Pole in March of 1959 quickly proved it wrong. (Figure 2) Worse, was NY Time’s reporter Revkin’s book for children “The North Pole Was Here”, which is full of factual errors. The title shows ignorance, the Pole is still there because it’s a geographic location.

Figure 2; USS Skate at the Pole March 1959
Source: wattsupwiththat.com

In the 1990s, the scare was ice thinning based on comparison of data obtained by under ice submarine measures. Trouble is they were done with different equipment in different months, one in a cool decade the other warm. A more complete study published in Geophysical Research Letters 2001, found, “Combining the present results with those of an earlier study, I conclude that the mean ice thickness has remained on a near-constant level around the North Pole from 1986 to 1997.”

A September 2006 headline warned, “Winter Arctic sea ice in drastic decline.”

Josefino Comiso of NASA’s Cryospheric Sciences Branch said about the decline of winter ice by 6% in 2005 and 2006, “It is the strongest evidence yet in the Arctic of global warming.” Mark Serreze, a senior research scientist for the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, agreed; “What we see in the Arctic is a [dead] canary in the coal mine.” Sereze then truculently said, “of predictions on global warming from the past five years, “I hate to say we told you so, but, we told you so.” No comment.

In 2009 there was the publicity stunt by Pen Hadlow, a British Explorer trekking to the pole. He claimed Arctic summer ice would be all gone by 2020. He was forced to quit by the extreme cold that also caused ice measuring equipment to fail in the first few days.

Others made silly comments. Walt Meier, senior scientist at the National Snow and Ice data Center (NSIDC) said, “I would say that 10 years is particularly overly aggressive, to my mind,” “The best estimate that we’ve seen from climate models is 20 to 30 years.”

Arctic climate models are useless because models are built on data and there is none for the Ocean area and most of the surrounding land. (Figure 3)

Figure 3: The lack of weather stations is apparent.
Source: Arctic Climate Impact Assessment. (ACIA)

Hadlow got extensive media coverage while a report from the Wegener Institute received little attention when they reported. “Multiple flights northwards from various stations showed an ice thickness between 2.5 (two years old ice in the vicinity of the North Pole) and 4 metres (perennial ice in Canadian offshore regions). All in all, the ice was somewhat thicker than during the last years in the same regions, which leads to the conclusion that Arctic ice cover recovers temporarily.”

New Ice; Old Ice.

Hysteria continues despite the evidence, but they move the goalposts as usual. Now it’s the nature of the ice. “Studies suggesting the Arctic sea ice has made a modest recovery following its record-setting retreat in 2007 are misleading and underestimate the severity of the polar meltdown, says one of Canada’s top ice scientists.” He is David Barber, Canada Research Chair in Arctic System Science. He claims, “satellite images used to track the overall extent of Arctic ice don’t adequately perceive how weak and “rotten” the region’s older, thicker, multi-year ice cover has become.”

Every year 65% of the ice melts and reforms, so there is always new ice. The ice cap also circulates around the Arctic driven by the prevailing winds so the areas melting are constantly changing.

Barber says melting, “is accelerating and that safe shipping in polar waters during the summer and fall will begin much sooner than many experts predict.” I have heard that song before. Here’s a letter to the Admiralty in 1817 from the President of the Royal Society wrote. “It will no 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 inclosed (sic) the seas in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been during the last two years greatly abated.” “This with information of a similar nature derived from other sources; the unusual abundance of ice islands that have during the last two summers been brought by currents from Davies Streights (sic) into the Atlantic. The ice which has this year surrounded the northern coast of Ireland in unusual quantity and remained there unthawed till the middle of August, with the floods which have during the whole summer inundated those parts of Germany where rivers have their sources in snowy mountains, afford ample proof that the new source 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 for centuries past, and that discoveries may now be made in them not only interesting to the advancement of science but also to the future intercourse of mankind and the commerce of distant nations.” 200 years on there is still easy passage through the “Arctic Seas”. 1817 followed the “Year with No Summer”, when global temperatures plummeted caused by the eruption of Tambora in 1815. The impact was superimposed on a cooling world as solar activity declined from 1790 (Dalton Minimum). This triggered the changing currents and ice conditions the Royal Society report. Similar changes occurred in the current decade so conditions reported are due to natural changes.

NASA identified this for the pattern in 2007. “At the same time, climate-driven shifts in Arctic wind patterns have redirected ocean currents.”

Fear now is among those who have made careers out of scaring people. Cold weather is changing political winds, which will stop government funding and stop the flow of false scares.

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Tim Ball, Senior Fellow