Dire forecasts of a summertime, ice-free Arctic have been abundant, from Al Gore to the BBC to Sierra Club Canada.
The reality? Big fail!
Blogger Steven Goddard at Real Science is citing information from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, showing the Arctic ice mass, as of Sept. 7, is substantially bigger than it was in September 2012.
“Nobel Prize winning climate experts and journalists tell us that the Arctic is ice-free, because they are propagandists pushing an agenda, not actual scientists or journalists,” he writes.
In the past three years, he points out, the Arctic ice mass “has gained hundreds of miles … much of which is thick, multi-year ice.”
WND long has reported the predictions of an ice-free Arctic by scientists who believe mankind is causing global warming.
But in just last few winters, Cairo saw its first snow in 100 years. And Oregon, like several other states, reached its coldest temperature in 40 years. Chicago saw the coldest days ever recorded, and – as if to add finality to the trend – Antarctica reached the coldest temperature ever recorded anywhere on earth.
The holes in the theories that form the basis of ice-free Arctic forecasts are evident.
For example, London’s Independent newspaper declared at the turn of the millennium “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.” The report quoted David Viner, senior research scientist at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, long considered an authoritative resource for global warming research, saying snow would soon be “a very rare and exciting event” in Britain.
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“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he claimed at the time.
Former vice president and current carbon-credit entrepreneur Al Gore told an audience in a 2009 speech that “the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.” And his 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” famously predicted increasing temperatures would cause earth’s oceans to rise by 20 feet, a claim many scientists say is utterly without rational basis.
See Gore:
[jwplayer DHOeV8Bx]\
Goddard pulled together a series of images on the same theme.
For example, a 2013 column at Mark Hertsgaard was headlined: “The End of the Arctic? Ocean Could be Ice Free by 2015.”
He wrote: “Say goodbye to polar bears and a whole lot of ice. New research suggests the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free by 2015, with devastating consequences for the world. Can it be stopped?”
Goddard also cited another of Gore’s predictions, that the “polar ice cap may disappear by 2014.”
Taking one more step back in time, the BBC said the Arctic summers would be ice-free by 2013.
Sierra Club Canada also said in 2013 that the Arctic sea ice would vanish that year.
WND reported just days ago, following President Obama’s trip to Alaska, that the facts don’t support Obama’s claim of a catastrophic future if no action is taken on climate.
Tim Ball, a former University of Winnipeg climatology professor, said the “premise you set for your debate sets the stage, and when you set it falsely, then you can say whatever you want.”
He notes that global temperatures have been dropping since the turn of the century, prompting the change in terminology from “global warming” to “climate change.”
Activists are also spending less time discussing temperatures and more time pointing to more extreme events such as tornadoes, droughts, cold snaps and heat waves. Ball said there’s a shred of truth there, but it’s being badly distorted.
“Yes, there’s been slightly more extremes,” he said in an interview with WND and Radio America. “That’s because the jet stream patterns are changing, because the earth is cooling down. All the arguments about sea-level rise, about Arctic ice disappearing, if you recall it’s not that long ago that our friend Al Gore was saying that there would be no summer ice in the Arctic. I think the year he set for it was 2014. That proved to be completely wrong.”
Listen to the WND/Radio America interview with Tim Ball:
[jwplayer mO0MJQ5h]
Far from the “melting glaciers” and “crumbling permafrost,” Ball confirmed ice is growing in both polar regions.
“They had record Antarctic ice the last two years,” he said. “Everybody thinks [measuring ice] is very simple: ‘Oh, you take a satellite image and measure the area.’ It doesn’t work that way. You can have water on top of the ice, and the satellite doesn’t see that as ice. It sees it as water. You also get the ice breaking up and the satellite systems that they use can’t distinguish between broken ice. Is it 90 percent covered? Is it 80 percent covered?
“They don’t make those kinds of distinctions,” he explained. “One of the things that causes change is changing wind patterns. That’s what I mentioned earlier. The jet stream patterns have been changing, and that’s been causing shifts in the way the ice forms and the way the ice breaks up.”
Ball said reliable climate models suggest a cooling period that may deepen over the next 25 years. He said it’s all predicated on a noticeable decrease in solar activity.
In fact, WND reported when scientists and others on a team assembled by the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, which focuses on free-market solutions to problems, said the “scare” of global warming from the use of carbon fuels and other human activities “is over.”
It’s “past time” for the world to realize that and “stop the madness of wasting great sums of money on EPA’s imaginary threat,” contends Kenneth Haapala, the executive vice president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project in Virginia.
Institute experts said the Remote Sensing Systems, which provide data to NASA, NOAA and the National Science Foundation, have confirmed “the global mean surface temperature has not risen for 18 consecutive years.”
“This extends the so-called ‘pause’ in global warming to a new record, one not predicted by the climate models of the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change,” the organization said.
Craig Idso, senior fellow in environment for the Heartland Institute and co-editor of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, a counterpart to the IPCC, said that to “the world’s climate alarmists, atmospheric carbon dioxide is a dangerous trace gas, and for years, they have been insisting its increase will raise global temperatures and wreak havoc upon Earth’s climate and biosphere.”
“Yet, despite a 9 percent increase in CO2 over the past 18 years, there has been no rise in global temperature,” he said.
“Think about that. Over this time period the air’s CO2 content has risen some 40 parts per million, which represents fully one-third the total global CO2 increase since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, yet contrary to model projections, planetary temperatures have failed to rise,” Idso said.
Idso said it’s “time for global warming diehards to face the facts.”
“Climategate” exposes the global warming scam. Get it now at the WND Superstore.
Well-known scientist Art Robinson has spearheaded The Petition Project, which to date has gathered the signatures of 31,487 scientists who agree that there is “no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”
They say, “Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plan and animal environments of the Earth.”
Robinson, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry from Cal Tech, where he served on the faculty, co-founded the Linus Pauling Institute with Nobel-recipient Linus Pauling, where he was president and research professor. He later founded the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.
