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Are the ice caps melting?
Steven Goddard
The
Register
Friday, July 4, 2008
The headlines last week brought us terrifying news: The North
Pole will be ice-free this summer "for the first time in
human history," wrote Steve Connor in The Independent. Or
so the experts at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC)
in Boulder, Colorado predict. This sounds very frightening, so
let's look at the facts about polar sea ice.
As usual, there are a couple of huge problems with the reports.
Firstly, the story is neither alarming nor unique.
In the August 29, 2000 edition of the New York Times, the same
NSIDC expert, Mark Serreze, said:
"There's nothing to be necessarily alarmed about. There's
been open water at the pole before. We have no clear evidence
at this point that this is related to global climate change."
(Article continues below)
During the summer of 2000 there was "a large body of ice-free
water about 10 miles long and 3 miles wide near the pole".
Also in 2000, Dr Claire Parkinson at NASA's Goddard Space Flight
Center was quoted as saying: "The fact of having no ice at
the pole is not so stunning."
Secondly, the likelihood of the North Pole being ice free this
summer is actually quite slim. There are only a few weeks left
where the sun is high enough to melt ice at the North Pole. The
sun is less than 23 degrees above the horizon, and by mid-August
will be less than 15 degrees above it. Temperatures in Greenland
have been cold this summer, and winds are not favorable for a
repeat. Currently, there is about one million km2 more ice than
there was on this date last summer.
So what is really going on at the poles?
The Tipping Point that wouldn't tip
Satellite records have been kept for polar sea ice over the last
thirty years by the University Of Illinois. In 2007 2008, two
very different records were set. The Arctic broke the previous
record for the least sea ice area ever recorded, while the Antarctic
broke the record for the most sea ice area ever recorded. Summed
up over the entire earth, polar ice has remained constant. As
seen below, there has been no net gain or loss of polar sea ice
since records began.
Last week, Dr James Hansen from NASA spoke about how CO2 is affecting
the polar ice caps.
"We see a tipping point occurring right before our eyes...
The Arctic is the first tipping point and it's occurring exactly
the way we said it would," he said.
Well, not exactly.
Hansen is only telling half the story. In the 1980s the same
Dr Hansen wrote a paper titled Climate Sensitivity to Increasing
Greenhouse Gases, in which he explained how CO2 causes "polar
amplification." He predicted nearly symmetrical warming at
both poles. As shown in Figure 2-2 from the article, Hansen calculated
that both the Arctic and Antarctic would warm by 5-6 degrees Centigrade.
His predictions were largely incorrect, as most of Antarctica
has cooled and sea ice has rapidly expanded. The evidence does
not support the theory.
Full
article here.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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