Is The Arctic Really Melting Away?
Between 2017 and 2020 I reckon I spent more time analysing all things Arctic than all other climate topics put together.
The reason for this is simple: the Arctic is the poster child of alarmism and a place where globalist-funded journalists can take sensational photographs to prove to the world that things are really bad and getting badder.
By way of example, here is a smashing photo of a bay in Greenland that was taken by a journalist in June 2019, who swore the same area was chock-a-block full of thick sea ice the year before:
This is meant to shock us into despair and a good many folk will no doubt have fallen for the powerful graphical narrative.
Now the interesting thing here is that the journalist’s claim was entirely truthful, but what they omitted to tell their readers is the fact that sea ice completely disappears in this bay each and every year in the summer, and returns again in the winter.
In fact, if they were doing their job properly, they’d go on to inform readers that 60 – 70 percent of all Arctic sea ice melts during the warm season every year only to return the next – a topic that I shall be chewing over in the New Year.
The Great Calving Swindle
Another Arctic antic that ardent alarmists like to air is to show astonishing footage of great walls of ice crashing into the sea as proof of rapid melting of the ice sheets. This is called ‘calving’ and it shows the exact opposite; it is visual proof of ice sheet expansion.
When millions of tons of snow fall onto land-locked ice sheets each winter the sheer weight compacts the snow into ice, which then slowly flows downward and outward in plastic fashion toward the coast until it calves into the sea.
What we’re looking at when we see dramatic footage of ice cliff collapse is not evidence of Arctic warming and ice melt but the aftermath of heavy snowfall over the interior inducing ice sheet growth. We may conclude that alarmists are very good at inverting reality.
How Hot Is Santa?
As a precursor to a forthcoming mini study I thus accessed KNMI Climate Explorer to provide mean annual temperature anomalies (TAVE) for all 280 GHCNd weather stations located within the Arctic circle with at least 30 years of contiguous data. What dropped out onto the screen caught me completely by surprise. Take a look at this:
It should be abundantly clear that the Arctic (in terms of average land surface temperature) was far warmer way back than we have been led to believe. Quite a shocker, innit? In fact, according to this graph, mean land temperatures are only just beginning to reach those recorded 100 years ago!
This being the case we should expect to see stories of a melting Arctic in the press of yesteryear, and we indeed do so. In this regard I highly recommend folk scour Tony Heller’s magnificent YouTube channel for press clippings confirming dramatic loss of sea ice, glaciers and ice sheets back then. Herewith an example:
Back in the pre-pandemic halcyon days of 2019 I worked through old reports and historic data to cobble together a picture of what Arctic sea ice has been doing over a decent length of time (as opposed to the limited NSIDC satellite data series that starts in 1979). I slapped together the following composite slide, which has remained one of my favourites ever since.
The trick here was to utilize two Russian sea ice studies that have thoughtfully been translated into English (an uncommon event), thence to combine charts using a vector graphics package to eke out a common scaling:
Yes it’s rough but it is rather tasty and there’s a great deal more I shall say about this in forthcoming articles, but for now I trust that it will suffice as a colourful yet informative tapestry. Our take home festive message is that Arctic sea ice has been coming and going in cyclical fashion for decades, and so we discover that the current melt phase is nothing new.
All that alarmists are doing (and this includes some very serious scientist who ought to know better) is to focus on the downward phase of the current cycle and conveniently claim all is due to fossil fuel consumption. Obviously this cannot be the case – something other than atmospheric CO2 is driving glacial and sea ice melt phases in the Arctic.
We may conclude that Santa alternates between being hot and cold every few decades and that the Arctic steadily loses then gains ice mass, much like his belly that shakes like a bowlful of jelly. This pattern will continue regardless of political shenanigans, ostentatious virtue signalling from the woke, and academic posturing from the grant-laden undead.
There’s No Business Like Snow Business
When we think of Santa at the North Pole we are likely to also think of reindeer and lots of snow. According to the very best alarmism snow is now supposed to be a thing of the past, with no children getting to enjoy the stuff. In our neck of the woods down in the cosy South West of England snow isn’t normally a big deal but it certainly was back in 2009, 2017, 2018 and 2019.
So what about snowfall in the Arctic? Well, we can once again turn to the rather handy KNMI climate explorer and weed out data for the 57 GHCNd Arctic stations that have kept contiguous snowfall records for a minimum of 30 years.
Here’s a screenshot of the mean annual anomaly for snowfall at those stations:
We may deduce that some very expert alarmists are talking out of one of their orifices and I don’t think it is their mouth.
Arctic snow is on the up folks, which will mean steady expansion of ice sheets and glaciers, but don’t hold your breath – this process will take a few decades to show!
See more here substack.com
Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend The Scientific Method
PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company 
incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX.
Trackback from your site.
Koen Vogel
| #
Hi John, an interesting summary; I’m looking forward to the future posts. Some comments:
1) Your Arctic temperature graph seems to be out of sync with the ice cover. The low ice cover between 1935-1945 is more consistent with NASA’s GMST curve than with TAVE anomalies.
2) The IPCC have also noted this 1900-1945 Arctic temperature rise, and mention it in their report: the Arctic temperatures seem to increase 3-4 times faster than the rest of the Earth, and this heat anomaly is a main part of the “global” temperature increases
3) My ideas on the subject are here: https://principia-scientific.com/saturns-climate-change-and-its-lessons-for-earth/ ; which describes how polar heat anomalies are not unique to Earth: all planets with magnetic fields have them.
Reply
Andy Rowlands
| #
Hi Koen, John Dee has asked me to put this reply to your comment – “John Dee is happy to answer queries and respond to comments over on his substack channel”.
Reply
VOWG
| #
In a word NO.
Reply
Jerry Krause
| #
Hi John Dee, Andy, Koen, and PSI Readers,
I ask you all to look at the “smashing photo of a bay in Greenland that was taken by a journalist in June 2019” and study what you actually can see. To help you see, I will ask two questions. What is the depth of water in which the dogs are standing? What is the object in the foreground of the photo?
Please answer these questions by writing comments. Because if one doesn’t make a comment, I have to assume that one does NOT .know (see) the answers to these two simple questions.
Have a good day, Jerry
Reply
Tom O
| #
Hi Jerry. Don’t know what to say, really, but my first impression of the picture is there are two dogsleds crossing on ice that has a couple inches of water on it, What did you see?
Reply
Jerry Krause
| #
Hi Tom O,
If you are considering the second dogsled to the in the far background, I see exactly what you see.
And I asked myself: What is the depth of the ice? And: Why is the ice not floating on the water? Did you ask yourself these questions?
Have a good day, Jerry
Reply
Jerry Krause
| #
Hi Tom O,
Another question for you. Were you previously TomOMason?
Have a good day, Jerry
Reply
Tom O
| #
Answer to the first question, i never gave the thickness of the ice a thought, really, since I figured it had to be a foot or more thick or they wouldn’t have been crazy enough to be that far out on it. I’ve seen pictures of vast ponds on the surface of the ice before – I think it was on Sunshine’s Swansong, back when he was showing pictures from the floating buoys that used to be dropped off in the Arctic to study the flow of ice out of the Arctic. i think they happened on clear days when the surface of the ice or recent snow would melt in the summer Sun, but would freeze back over if it was cloudy.
Answer to the second question is no – I believe I used to read his stuff and scratch my head from time to time, but I do that with everyone. I used to love science until it became “consensus science” or “mathematical science,” and stopped being inquisitive science. I then just grew older and grumpier and looked for other things to irritate me.