Arctic Ocean Predicted To Be Ice Free By 2013 — Oops!
Junk Science: Earth has gained 19,000 Manhattans of sea ice since this date last year, the largest increase on record. There is more sea ice now than there was in mid-September 1990. Al Gore, move away from the dinner table and call your office.
A 2007 prediction that summer in the North Pole could be "ice-free by 2013" that was cited by former Vice President Al Gore in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech has proven to be off . .. by 920,000 square miles. But then Democrats have never been good at math — or climate science. In his Dec. 10, 2007, "Earth has a fever" speech, Gore referred to a prediction by U.S. climate scientist Wieslaw Maslowski that the Arctic's summer ice could "completely disappear" by 2013 due to global warming caused by carbon emissions as the seas rose to swallow up places like the island of Manhattan.
The inconvenient truth is that planet Earth now has the equivalent of 330,000 Manhattans of Arctic ice, Steve Goddard notes in the blog Real Science. Even before the annual autumn re-freeze was scheduled to begin, he says, NASA satellite images showed an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretched from the Canadian islands to Russia's northern shores. No polar bears were seen drowning.
As the Daily Mail reports, "A chilly Arctic summer has left nearly a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year — an increase of 60%." The much-touted Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific froze up and has remained blocked by pack ice all year. More than 20 yachts that had planned to sail it have been left ice-bound and a cruise ship attempting the route was forced to turn back.
This is a far cry from those iconic pictures, taken at a low point one particularly balmy Arctic summer, of polar bears clinging to slivers of pack ice lest they drown. The bears, who can swim up to 200 miles, and whose numbers are increasing, are doing fine, much better than a U.S. economy, which is under relentless assault by a needless war on fossil fuels, particularly coal, all in a futile effort to head off nonexistent climate change.
This summer was supposed to bring an ice-free Arctic with not so much as an ice cube for Santa to land on. Oh, and the Himalayan glaciers were supposed to disappear, according to computer models that have so far been unable to forecast either the past or the weather for the weekend barbecue.
"We are already in a cooling trend, which I think will continue for the next 15 years at least. There is no doubt the warming of the 1980s and 1990s has stopped," Professor Anastasios Tsonis of the University of Wisconsin told the Daily Mail.
A recent study by German researchers Hans von Storch, Armineh Barkhordarian, Klaus Hasselmann and Eduardo Zorita of the Institute for Coastal Research and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology found that claims of all 65 climate-model computers used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to predict the future impact of carbon dioxide on climate had failed to foresee this lack of temperature rise.
Climate is affected by an infinite number of variables. Their relative importance and the complexity of their interactions are not fully understood. Put too much weight on one and not enough on the other, and you have the computer phenomenon known as GIGO — garbage in, garbage out.
U.S. climate expert Judith Curry suggests computer models place too much emphasis on current CO2 levels and not enough on long-term cycles in ocean temperature that have a huge influence on climate and suggest we may be approaching a period similar to 1965 to 1975, when there was a clear cooling trend.
Warm-mongers such as Gore still say it's a question of when and not if. They may be walking on thin ice, but the polar bears are not. Maybe it’s time to bring Al Gore back to the deliberation table, but then maybe that’s not such a good idea after all. We all know what happens when Al Gore sits down at a table - any table.