I’m going to take a Sunday break from presidential politics. Not because there’s nothing happening – very much the opposite – but because it’s moving too fast and too unpredictably for me to follow. I’ll take stock again on Monday.

Instead I offer you this from the Telegraph:

Dire predictions that the Arctic would be devoid of sea ice by September this year have proven to be unfounded after latest satellite images showed there is far more now than in 2012.

Scientists such as Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University and Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, have regularly forecast the loss of ice by 2016, which has been widely reported by the BBC and other media outlets.

Professor Wadhams, a leading expert on Arctic sea ice loss, has recently published a book entitled ‘A Farewell To Ice’ in which he repeats the assertion that the polar region would free of ice in the middle of this decade.

As late as this summer, he was still predicting an ice-free September.

Yet, when figures were released for the yearly minimum on 10 September, they showed that there was still 1.6 million square miles of sea ice (4.14 square kilometers), which was 21% more than the lowest point in 2012.

For the month of September overall, there was 31% more ice than in 2012, figures released this week from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, or NSIDC show. This amounts to an extra 421,000 (1.09 million square kilometers) of sea ice, making the month only the fifth lowest since records began.

“Since records began…” More precisely, this is since continuous, synoptic satellite imagery of the Arctic began. There is some older non-electro-optic satellite imagery, aerial photography, and records made by ground and seaborne observers. We can probably extend much farther into the past using inference from proxies. Warmists, who in other areas like the paleotemperature record are eager to stitch together heterogeneous data sets, abstain when it comes to sea ice. Why’s that? Because 35 years ago was a period of very high sea ice extent. Starting their trend line at that point provides the desired downward slope to charts.

Although a quick glance at NSIDC satellite data going back to 1981 shows an undeniable downward trend in sea ice [in the Arctic – not Antarctic where there is no such trend] over the past 35 years, scientists have accused Professor Wadhams and others of “crying wolf” and harming the message of climate change through “dramatic”, “incorrect” and “confusing” predictions.

Dr Ed Hawkins, associate professor in the Department of Meterology at the University of Reading, said: “There has been one prominent scientist who has regularly made more dramatic, and incorrect, in my view predictions suggesting that we would by now be in ice-free conditions. “There are very serious risks from continued climatic changes and a melting Arctic, but we do not serve the public and policy-makers well by exaggerating those risks…

It is the latest example of experts making alarming predictions which do not come to pass. Earlier this week environmentalists were accused of misleading the public about the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” after aerial shots proved there was no “island of rubbish” in the middle of the ocean. Likewise, warnings that the hole in the ozone layer would never close were debunked in June…

To say nothing of the just-past hurricane hyperbole.

Speaking to The Telegraph, Professor Wadhams admitted that sea ice decline had not happened as quickly as he had predicted. However, he still believes that an ice-free Arctic is still only a “very small number of years” away. “My view is that the trend of summer sea ice volume is relentlessly downward, such that the volume (and thus area) will come to a low value very soon – in a very small number of years,” he said…

I am reminded of the savants who predicted the end of the world would occur at the millennium of Christ’s birth in 1000 AD. Tom Holland’s history of that period, ‘The Forge of Christendom,’ details their claims. When the year 1000 passed without incident some of these people touted new, later dates for the Second Coming. Which were wrong too. But, you know: Soon. “Very soon.” It’s “a very small number of years away.”

Wadhams is by no means the only false prophet when it comes to disappearing Arctic sea ice. I believe Al Gore has made a fool of himself on this topic. Mark Serreze, Pontifex Maximus at the NSIDC, hasn’t been so unwary as to pick a specific date but he likes to speak about a sea ice “deal spiral” and is on record saying “the Arctic is screaming.” Nice precise scientific language, that.

The foundational logical flaw here is the presumption that Earth’s climate is linear and human-controlled vice cyclic and naturally-controlled. This is the hubris which underlies all climate alarmism.

And what does this decline in sea ice look like anyway? Like this:

Pretty minor changes, aren’t they?

When it comes right down to it less sea ice is better than more. Warm years are good years, but that can’t be counted upon for the future. The potential short Arctic shipping routes remain too uncertain for anybody to bank on. In the late summer of this year, the big cruise ship Crystal Serenity made a successful west to east transit in the southern route of the Northwest Passage. It was accompanied by an icebreaker and supported by two ice-spotting helicopters. All went well. Conversely, a yacht crewed by Warmists (dubbed by Real Science “the Ship of Fools”) attempted a counterclockwise circumnavigation of the entire Arctic Ocean. They had no icebreaker support and got essentially nowhere. The Laptev Sea was completely choked with ice.

Arctic sea ice extent is more likely to increase than decrease in the future. Some analysts think they can see an overall inflection point in 2007 with a small increase since then. If the Atlantic currents that go up into the Barents Sea cool down – as they seem to be doing – then ice extent will increase accordingly. Even if the Warmists are to some degree correct, latitude and sun angle dictate that the Arctic will always be covered in ice for most of the year. Oh… and melting of sea ice does not effect sea level. It’s a net-zero displacement factor.

In any event the Telegraph provided an important service by holding a Warmist accountable after the fact for his previous claims. I wish there was more of that.

– Tacitus

Copyright 2016 Tacitus
http://www.vicsocotra.com