About That Vanishing Arctic Ice
The Arctic sea ice should have melted away years ago, according to the “experts”
In 2007, for instance, Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told us that northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.
In December that year, Jay Zwally of NASA agreed, giving the ice till 2012.
A year later, Professor David Barber went one step further, saying the ice would all be gone that very summer.
Then we had Al Gore confidently predicting it would all disappear by 2016.
For sheer persistence in getting it wrong, however, first prize must go to Professor Peter Wadhams, Professor of Ocean Physics, and Head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge:
· In 2012, he predicted that the Arctic would be ice free by 2015/16
· In 2014, he thought it might last till 2020
· In 2016, he confidently predicted the Arctic would be ice free that summer (though curiously he now defined “ice free” as less than 1 million square kilometers!)
Strangely, all these “experts” have been pretty quiet lately. Little wonder, because Arctic sea ice extent is just as large now as it was when all of those fatuous claims were made.
To be fair, they were only talking about summer sea ice. Even they were not daft enough to think that there would be no ice in winter either.
As is always the case in mid-September, the sea ice has just provisionally hit its minimum extent for the year, at 4.574 million sq km. Much of it is still over a meter thick.
Source: nsidc.org
There was a decline in ice cover during the 1990s and early 2000s, which led to the fears expressed above. However, real Arctic experts have known for years that the Arctic climate is cyclical.
For instance, the Arctic underwent a warming phase in the 1920s and 30s. According to a US Weather Bureau report in 2022:
There followed a much colder period in the 1960s and 70s, when sea ice extent grew substantially, a time known as the Sea Ice Years in Iceland with half the island surrounded by ice.
As a result, attempts at grain growing in Iceland, which had been resumed in the warmer decades of this century after a lapse of some hundreds of years, were abandoned.
With the advent of full satellite coverage, official data for sea ice became available in 1979, the very time when the ice was at its fullest extent.
On a longer time scale, of course, scientists know that sea ice has been far less extensive for most of the last 10,000 years.
But where global warming is concerned, real science goes out the window!
See more here notalotofpeopleknowthat
Some bold emphasis added