In the climate alarmist creed one passage reads “We believe in the melting Arctic ice, and the rising sea that proceedeth from it” or words to that effect. Along with more and fiercer storms, wildfires and droughts, crop failures and such. We have tackled all these claims repeatedly and apparently will have to again. Including, this week, that vexed ice whose disappearance is an article of faith. Also known as “the evidence of things not seen.” Because while they have been quietly backing away from Antarctica which seems to have cooled dramatically over a period of decades, they’re still on about vanishing Arctic ice that, well, isn’t. Perhaps because compared to a 1979-2000 baseline, current Arctic temperatures are actually down slightly.
One commentor attempting to educate us about vanishing Arctic ice referred us to the Danish Meteorological Institute’s Arctic Sea Ice data. But their chart shows that there’s more of it at this point than in any of the past five years. It also includes a nebulous grey line indicating, apparently, the average for 1981-2010 which is well above this year’s figure. But anyone who is not deliberately misleading people knows that there was a dramatic buildup in Arctic ice from around 1940 to the beginning of the satellite era in 1979 (it’s one of the things Leonard Nimoy used in his 1978 special to warn that a new Ice Age was coming), and that to use the peak of a natural cycle as a baseline is cheating.
The real question is why, if the planet is warming relentlessly and the ice is melting, the ice isn’t melting. To quote the U.S. National Snow & Ice Data Center’s August 18 newsletter, “The Northern Sea Route appears closed off in 2021, despite being open each summer since 2008.” And while total volume of Arctic sea ice is probably a more fundamental measure than extent, the extent is fast approaching the highest it’s been in 15 years.
It’s a real puzzler. And while sea ice is supposedly just a canary in the coal mine, because it is already displacing almost all the water it would release if it melted, the land-based Greenland ice cap is meant to be a major threat because if it melted sea levels would rise about 6 metres. However, for some reason Greenland’s “Surface Mass Balance” is rising this year with strong snow accumulation and a melt rate in summer so low that meteorologist Joe Bastardi (known to Wikipedia as “a professional meteorologist and weather forecaster… a frequent guest on TV news shows” and “an outspoken denier of human-induced global warming whose public statements frequently contradict the scientific consensus on climate change”) said “I had to do a double take”. Still, the press claims Greenland is melting, melting even though three of the last five years showed above-average ice gain compared to the 1981-2010 average. (Tony Heller also notes that the Peterman Glacier there is growing significantly and not even Wikipedia disagrees.)
As noted, Antarctica is not currently popular with alarmists because it seems to be cooling quite a bit. In fact one major meteorological agency omits trend lines for the annual average and minimum there lest, perhaps, they should cause talk. And they’re not very keen on the entire Southern Hemisphere, really, because it shows no warming at all since 2000. But we’re going to talk about it anyway, especially a new study of the meticulous temperature readings taken by Australian government scientists way back in November and December 1871 and modern data sets showing that the water around the Great Barrier Reef has since warmed by an astounding no degrees at all. As David Mason-Jones observes drily on Watt’s Up With That, “If the sea surface temperature of the Great Barrier Reef has been trending upwards – and if this trend could be characterised as ‘rapid’ – then a 150-year comparison should be sufficient to confirm it.”
If the ice continues to recover in the Arctic, whatever will they do or say?