Well another Arctic ice-melting season has come and gone and once again, there still is ice, lots of it. Al Gore absolutely promised us it would all be gone by 2013, then 2014, 2015–you get the picture. I believe his latest is that it will sometime around the year 5067. Arctic, and Antarctic, ice melting is one of the biggest fear-mongering tools of the climate hysterics. The truth this year is that the minimum ice extent was right around the average for the last decade. The ice isn’t going away. Neither is the ice on Greenland or Antarctica. You won’t read or see that in the traditional media.
Even worse for the hysterics is a new study, published in Nature Communications, finding that Arctic ice variability is tied to the North Atlantic Oscillation, a current change that is itself variable, even cyclical. That is also affected by the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. In other words, changes in ice extent are due to natural variability. The researchers as usual hew to the climate hysteria line, even though it is obviously contradicted by their own data. Satellites have taken photos of the Arctic for decades, the very earliest ones, from the late 1970’s, are never shown because they show an extremely low ice extent, before CO2 levels really took off. So there actually has been no change in Arctic ice extent for 50 years. (Nature Study)
As a side note, we are having a very warm early fall in Minnesota and the upper Midwest. That must be due to climate change. Interestingly, as usual, other parts of the world are seeing unseasonable cold–the Balkan countries have had large amounts of snow already and are very cold. But that isn’t climate change, just random natural variability that you should ignore in the interest of not hurting the climate hysterics’ feelings.
Kevin comments – “Satellites have taken photos of the Arctic for decades, the very earliest ones, from the late 1970’s, are never shown because they show an extremely low ice extent,”
Likewise – When depicting glacier melt, the activists will show pictures of glaciers in the very late 1800’s (1880-1900), then show glacier pictures starting again in the 1990’s forward to demonstrate how far the glaciers have melted which gives the impression the glaciers are receding due to the “co2 cause global warming”. Yet the rarely if ever are pictures shown of glaciers taken in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Why – because they would show the significant glacier melt that occurred before CO2 increase became a factor.
Below is a link to satellite image from dec 1972 and dec 2022. The decrease is in the range of 5% (via my eyeball estimate).
https://nsidc.org/news-analyses/news-stories/what-we-can-learn-half-century-sea-ice-data
that conflicts with this link which shows nearly a 50% decline from 1979.
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5395/
Much of climate science depends on the use of cherrypicked data / cherrypicked start dates.
As Kevin noted, there is a reason the activists use 1979 as the start date, its not because that is the start of the satellite era.