IN case you hadn’t noticed, the COVID19 crisis has been highly successful in drowning out the mainstream media’s go-to-weapon of mass fear and panic – ClimateChange™️.
PERHAPS the timing is fortunate as recent and prominent climate data hasn’t really held up as ammunition-worthy material in support of their “climate emergency” nightly narrative, or whatever the latest GretaThunberg™️ meme of the day requires.
TWO of the favoured metrics used by CC activists and sycophant mainstream media, in order to push their memes, are conditions applicable to the Arctic and Antarctica. Namely, sea-ice levels.
UNFORTUNATELY for climate ambulance chasers, sea-ice levels for the Arctic and Antarctica are tapping and well within the long-term average respectively. Completely at odds with ‘expert’ and mainstream media predictions and U.N. climate model forecasts.
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ANTARCTIC SEA-ICE
ACCORDING to NOAA, Antarctic sea-ice coverage in March came in “near the 1981–2010 avg & ended a 41-month period of below-avg monthly values.”
THIS rebound time (41 months) matches nicely the time from the date when a significant portion of Antarctic sea-ice was blasted away by a “perfect storm of tropical, polar conditions not due to climate change” – Malte F. Stuecker et al
ANTARCTICA has always been a thorn in the side of ClimateChange™️. It is very much the ‘inconvenient’ pole, the naughty child, that has been gaining ice mass and cooling for decades, despite a 20 per cent increase in atmospheric CO2, and model predictions to the contrary.
THE Arctic, however, has been the veritable whipping-boy for the climate activist movement, as it has seen clear declines in sea-ice levels since the century-maximum of 1979.
BUT, hardly the declines that the mainstream media and ‘experts’ made us believe to be true, according to their dire and hyper-alarmist predictions.
HERE is a taste of what the fake news media and ‘expert’s’ told you about Arctic sea-ice having “disappeared” years ago …
“Arctic summers ice-free by 2013” (BBC 2007)
“Could all Arctic ice be gone by 2012?” (AP 2007)
“Arctic Sea Ice Gone in Summer Within Five Years?”(National Geographic 2007)
“Imagine yourself in a world five years from now, where there is no more ice over the Arctic” – Tim Flannery (2008)
“North Pole could be ice-free in 2008” – Mark Serreze (New Scientist 2008)
“Gore: Polar ice cap may disappear by summer 2014” (USA Today 2009)
“Arctic expert predicts final collapse of sea ice within 4 years” (Guardian 2012)
“Say Goodbye to Arctic Summer Ice” (Live Science 2013)
“Ice-free Arctic in two years heralds methane catastrophe – scientist” (The Guardian 2013)
“Why Arctic sea ice will vanish in 2013” (Sierra Club 2013)
“Next year or the year after, the Arctic will be free of ice’” – Peter Wadhams (The Guardian 2016)
APOLOGIES for the lack of content over the last few months. Been undergoing a major transition from life in the jungle (Indonesia), to life back in Melbourne, Australia.
ANYWAY, on a wintery night here back in Melbourne, it’s perhaps time to give the mic back over to the greatest of all levellers, Mother Nature.
• “Arctic summers ice-free by 2013” (BBC 2007) • “Could all Arctic ice be gone by 2012?” (AP 2007) • “Arctic Sea Ice Gone in Summer Within Five Years?” (National Geographic 2007) • “Imagine yourself in a world five years from now, where there is no more ice over the Arctic” – Tim Flannery (2008) • “North Pole could be ice-free in 2008” – Mark Serreze (New Scientist 2008) • “Gore: Polar ice cap may disappear by summer 2014” (USA Today 2009) • “Arctic expert predicts final collapse of sea ice within 4 years” (Guardian 2012) • “Say Goodbye to Arctic Summer Ice” (Live Science 2013) • “Ice-free Arctic in two years heralds methane catastrophe – scientist” (The Guardian 2013) • “Why Arctic sea ice will vanish in 2013” (Sierra Club 2013) • “Next year or the year after, the Arctic will be free of ice’” – Peter Wadhams (The Guardian 2016)
DIRE predictions of an “ice-free” Arctic have remained popular on the climate change, fear-mongering circuit for many years now.
BUT, how ‘bad’ really are Arctic sea-ice conditions, in mid-summer, circa 2019?
ACCORDING to this latest piece of anecdotal (real-world) evidence, Arctic “Death Spiral” enthusiasts would be understandably disappointed!
“…what we saw was indeed really impressive sea ice. In fact, the sea ice we encountered was thick enough that reaching our destination—the geographic North Pole—took roughly 1.5 days longer than we’d expected.”
In late June, one of the most powerful icebreakers in the world encountered such extraordinarily thick ice on-route to the North Pole (with a polar bear specialist and deep-pocketed, Attenborough-class tourists onboard) that it took a day and a half longer than expected to get there. A few weeks later, in mid-July, a Norwegian icebreaker also bound for the North Pole (with scientific researchers on board) was forced to turn back north of Svalbard when it unexpectedly encountered impenetrable pack ice.
A polar bear on hummocked sea ice in Franz Josef Land. Photo by Michael Hambrey, date not specified but estimated based on tour dates to be 22 or 23 June 2019.
Apparently, the ice charts the Norwegian captain consulted showed ‘first year ice‘ – ice that formed the previous fall, defined as less than 2 m thick (6.6 ft) – which is often much broken…
DIRE predictions of an “ice-free” Arctic have remained popular on the climate change fear-mongering circuit, owing to the psychological and political currency of all things melting and not least the emotional relevance applicable to the fate of the Arctic’s most famous resident and ‘global warming’ mascot – the polar bear.
SOME of the failed Arctic sea-ice predictions by alarmists ‘scientists’ and the fake news media over the years :
“Arctic summers ice-free by 2013” (BBC 2007)
“Could all Arctic ice be gone by 2012?” (AP 2007)
“Arctic Sea Ice Gone in Summer Within Five Years?”(National Geographic 2007)
“Imagine yourself in a world five years from now, where there is no more ice over the Arctic” – Tim Flannery (2008)
“North Pole could be ice-free in 2008” – Mark Serreze (New Scientist 2008)
“Gore: Polar ice cap may disappear by summer 2014” (USA Today 2009)
“Arctic expert predicts final collapse of sea ice within 4 years” (Guardian 2012)
“Say Goodbye to Arctic Summer Ice” (Live Science 2013)
“Ice-free Arctic in two years heralds methane catastrophe – scientist” (The Guardian 2013)
“Why Arctic sea ice will vanish in 2013” (Sierra Club 2013)
“Next year or the year after, the Arctic will be free of ice’” – Peter Wadhams (The Guardian 2016)
MINIMUM sea-ice extent has been trending up over the past twelve years. The EXACT opposite of what the mainstream media and ‘97% experts’ have been telling you :
ARCTIC temperatures and melt cycles correlate almost perfectly with ocean circulation cycles (AMO), and show no correlation with atmospheric CO2 levels :
Reykjavik, Iceland Temperatures Vs. The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation
NO other icon of ‘Global Warming’ epitomises its very own false narrative like the polar bear does for ‘Climate Change’.
WITH deadly irony, polar bear numbers have grown dramatically as carbon dioxide emissions have risen in lock-step. A CO2 correlation, at last!
INDIGENOUS Inuit’s of Northern Canada are now facing the very real task of having to cull the population as “the polar bear may have exceeded the co-existence threshold.”
“Inuit believe there are now so many bears that public safety has become a major concern,”
“Public safety concerns, combined with the effects of polar bears on other species, suggest that in many Nunavut communities, the polar bear may have exceeded the co-existence threshold.”
Susan Crockford is zoologist with more than 35 years experience, including published work on the Holocene history of Arctic animals. She is currently an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria, British Columbia.
It’s long past time for polar bear specialists to stop holding out for a scientifically accurate global estimate that will never be achieved and determine a reasonable and credible ‘best guess’. Since they have so far refused to do this, I have done it for them. My extrapolated estimate of 39,000 (range 26,000-58,000) at 2018 is not only plausible but scientifically defensible.
In 2014, the chairman of the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) emailed me to say that their global population size number ‘has never been an estimate of total abundance in a scientific sense, but simply a qualified guess given to satisfy public demand.’
In my new book, The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened, I contend that this situation will probably never change, so it’s time to stop holding out for a scientifically accurate global estimate and generate a reasonable and credible ‘best guess’. Recent surveys from several critical polar bear subpopulations have given us the information necessary to do this.
These new numbers make it possible to extrapolate from ‘known’ to ‘unknown’ subpopulations within so-called ‘sea ice ecoregions’ (defined in 2007 by polar bear scientists at the US Geological Survey, see Amstrup et al. 2007), as shown below, to update old estimates and generate new ones for never-studied areas.
USGS – Polar Bear Ecoregions
Since the PBSG has so far refused to take this step, I took on the challenge. I contend that an estimate of about 39,000 (range 26,000-58,000) at 2018 is not only plausible but scientifically defensible. See the graph below from my new book:
Global polar bear population size estimates to 2018. From Chapter 10 of The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened (Crockford 2019).
This new estimate for 2018 is a modest 4-6 fold increase over the 10,000 or so bears that existed in the 1960s and after 25 years, a credible increase over the estimate of 25,000 that the PBSG offered in 1993 (Wiig et al. 1995).
However, my new estimate is much larger than the improbable figure of about 26,000 (range 22,000-31,000) offered by PGSG biologists in 2015 (Regehr et al. 2016; Wiig et al. 2015). The scary question is this: what do Arctic residents do if there are actually as many as 58,000?
See my new book (Crockford 2019) for the full rationale and references used to arrive at this figure.
The bottom line: it is scientifically unacceptable for the PBSG to continue to refuse to provide an extrapolated ‘best guess’ global estimate for polar bears, given that the scientifically accurate estimate they crave is essentially unattainable. An estimate of about 39,000 (range 26,000-58,000) at 2018 is not only plausible but scientifically defensible. Read the rest of this entry »
“Arctic Sea Ice Gone in Summer Within Five Years?”(National Geographic 2007)
“Imagine yourself in a world five years from now, where there is no more ice over the Arctic” – Tim Flannery (2008)
“North Pole could be ice-free in 2008” – Mark Serreze (New Scientist 2008)
“Gore: Polar ice cap may disappear by summer 2014” (USA Today 2009)
“Arctic expert predicts final collapse of sea ice within 4 years” (Guardian 2012)
“Say Goodbye to Arctic Summer Ice” (Live Science 2013)
“Ice-free Arctic in two years heralds methane catastrophe – scientist” (The Guardian 2013)
“Why Arctic sea ice will vanish in 2013” (Sierra Club 2013)
“Next year or the year after, the Arctic will be free of ice’” – Peter Wadhams (The Guardian 2016)
DIRE predictions of an “ice-free” Arctic have remained popular on the climate change fear-mongering circuit, owing to the psychological and political currency of all things melting and not least the emotional relevance applicable to the fate of the Arctic’s most famous resident and ‘global warming’ mascot – the polar bear.
Abundant ice in Svalbard, East Greenland and the Labrador Sea is excellent news for the spring feeding season ahead because this is when bears truly need the presence of ice for hunting and mating. As far as I can tell, sea ice has not reached Bear Island, Norway at this time of year since 2010 but this year ice moved down to the island on 3 March and has been there ever since. This may mean we’ll be getting reports of polar bear sightings from the meteorological station there, so stay tuned.
Sea ice extent as of 11 March 2019, from NSIDC Masie:
Much of the ice that was blown out of the Bering Sea early in the month has returned and ice in the Gulf of St. Lawrence on the East Coast of Canada is the highest its been in years, threatening to impede ferry traffic between Nova…
TRUST in the mainstream media is at an all time low.
A 2018 Monmouth University poll found that 77% of the public believe major ‘news’ outlets report “fake news”. A sharp rise from 63% who felt that way the previous year. A 2018 Axios poll found that 92% of Conservatives believe the media intentionally reports fake news. Concerns vindicated this week by two glaring examples of blatant fake news in the Covington Catholic high school and BuzzFeed media fiascos.
NONE of this is surprising, considering that 92%+ of the mainstream media is monopolised by Left-leaning journalists and editorial boards.
FAKE NEWS is par for the course in the Climate Crisis Industry where gross exaggeration, vague causation, alarmist predictions and even outright falsehoods are common place and excused away as acts of nobility in the righteous quest to “Save the Planet”.
ONE of the perks of climate change scepticism (or realism) is the ability to exploit an almost unlimited supply of wild climate predictions made in the recent past by esteemed ‘experts’ and scientific bodies.
DIRE predictions of an “ice-free” Arctic have remained popular on the climate fear-mongering circuit, owing to the psychological currency of things melting and not least the emotional relevance applicable to the fate of the Arctic’s most famous resident – the polar bear…
CLAIMS that Arctic sea ice is disappearing are patently false. There has been no trend in Arctic sea ice extent since the start of MASIE records in 2006.
THE daily bombardment of fake climate news by the Climate Crisis Media helps foment a conventional wisdom and an accepted world view that there really is a “climate crisis”. This leads to gullible and virtue-signalling politicians, pressured by eco-activist minorities, to enact draconian and costly UN-based climate policies that are doing far more damage to people’s livelihoods and their economies, right now, than any purported 1-2°C “fabricated” temperature rise could ever do by 2100.
MOTHER NATURE has dealt another blow to the credibility of the Climate Crisis Industry, with its favourite ‘canary in the coal mine’ and harbinger of doom – Arctic sea-ice – going AWOL on Global Warming Climate Change alarmists…
THE latest data from the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) shows sea-ice extent hitting the 1981-2000 ‘normal’ range:
COMPARE the latest real-world data to what the “97% of experts” and sycophant mainstream media have been spinning to you for years, driven by CO2-centric UN climate models, politics, ideology and government grants :
WILL the mainstream media report on the uptick in Arctic sea-ice that has brought extent to ‘normal’ levels, confounding past reporting? Not a chance. They are too heavily invested in Global Warming hysteria to bother informing you of truths.
WHAT else do the mainstream media and government funded scientific bodies not tell you in regards to ‘inconvenient’ climate information that contradicts their political, ideological and grant-driven agendas?
Despite the feverish reporting that last summer was hell, and that hot is now the “new normal,” the Arctic ice man is hard at work. In reality, Arctic ice is spreading everywhere. The image below shows how quickly Hudson Bay froze over in recent days.
Hudson Bay freeze over
Baffin Bay in the center next to Greenland is extending south and added 250k km2. Hudson Bay on the left added 700k km2, now at 73% of maximum, with both east and west coastlines freezing all the way down into James Bay.
Chukchi is closing in. On the right side Kara
On the Eurasian side, on the left margin Chukchi is closing in. On the right side Kara has added 300k km2 of ice extent, now at 85% of maximum
The graph below shows 2018 is now exceeding the 11-year average after being down in October.
2018 is now exceeding the 11-year average
MASIE is showing 10.8M km2 ice extent, 400k km2 greater than the average for day 327, Nov. 23. SII is slightly lower, while 2007 is almost 500k km2 lower. In fact, in the past decade, only two years, 2013 and 2015, had more ice than 2018 at this date.
“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue.
Even if the theory of global warming is wrong,
we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.“
– TimothyWirth,
President of the UN Foundation
“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony…
climate change provides the greatest opportunity to
bring about justice and equality in the world.”
– Christine Stewart,
former Canadian Minister of the Environment
***
ARCTIC supply service to Nunavut and Northwest Territories has been cancelled due to “Extreme Ice”. Canadian Coast Guard, unable to get even its largest icebreaker through the ice!
“He said the territory’s barge service is “not an amateur operation” and the Amundsen Gulf is so inundated with ice that “it’s absolutely unequivocal and clear [that] … it is just impossible” to get through.
The territory requested assistance from the Canadian Coast Guard, which was unable to get even its largest icebreaker through the ice, Vandenberg said.
“The ice can be like the pinchers of a giant pair of pliers,” he said. “You don’t survive that.””
The Northwest Territories government is giving residents an idea of what will happen to the seven barges of goods that won’t be making it to their communities this year.
Now, territorial government officials are deciding which items to send to the communities by plane, and what will stay behind until the next barge can bring them in.
“Our priority right now is airlifted diesel fuel into Paulatuk,” said John Vandenberg, assistant deputy minister with the Department of Infrastructure. “There’s not enough fuel there to last the winter.”
To do that, the territory will fly about 600,000 litres of diesel to Paulatuk, requiring between 50 and 60 flights to do it, Vandenberg explained.
The territorial government will pay to ship up the fuel, he said.
But some items won’t be able to be flown up, such as pickup trucks and heavy equipment.
Vandenberg said staff with the infrastructure department will contact every client with items on the barge and determine how important it is for them to receive their goods, flying them up based on priority.
There is still some uncertainty around what will happen to the remaining goods, Vandenberg said, adding that the territorial government is looking at storage options.
He said the territory’s barge service is “not an amateur operation” and the Amundsen Gulf is so inundated with ice that “it’s absolutely unequivocal and clear [that] … it is just impossible” to get through.
The territory requested assistance from the Canadian Coast Guard, which was unable to get even its largest icebreaker through the ice, Vandenberg said.
“The ice can be like the pinchers of a giant pair of pliers,” he said. “You don’t survive that.”
A spokesperson for the Coast Guard confirmed that it couldn’t send an icebreaker to help because of the extreme ice conditions.
The Swedish icebreaker Oden on its way to the North Pole in August 2018. (Photo: Alfred-Wegener-Institut / Mario Hoppmann, meereisportal.de)
Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.” – UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist.
“These facts get little coverage because they don’t sound alarming at all, and for most reporters that means they’re not news. These ‘inconvenient truths’ are nonetheless a helpful reminder that climate change coverage should be taken with a healthy dose of scepticism.” – Harry Wilkinson
“I am a skeptic…Global warming has become a new religion.” – Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.
A Swedish icebreaker on the way to the North Pole has encountered heavy ice conditions and had to stop just before the North Pole.
The Swedish icebreaker Oden embarked to the North Pole from Svalbard last week but encountered difficult ice conditions not seen in one and a half decades.
The captain of the Oden icebreaker described the ice conditions as the most difficult in the past fifteen years.
The pack ice the ship encountered north of 80° was very dense, piled together through a months-long northward ice drift in the Central Arctic Ocean, meereisportal.de reports.
Overall, however, the Arctic’s summer sea ice extent is again very small; the Oden hit the ice edge only at 82°N.
Destination in jeopardy
The dense ice pack left hardly any patches of open water for the ship to navigate between the massive ice floes. The crew and researchers were thus faced with the situation that the North Pole could possibly not be reached.
However, about 200 km before the Pole the situation improved with the Oden encountering younger, thinner ice and tracks of open ice left by a Russian icebreaker plowing the area a few days before.
MORE real-world evidence that the Arctic is not in a “Death Spiral” or “Screaming” and certainly not “Ice-Free”, as the mainstream media and activist climate ‘scientists’ like NSIDC director Mark Serreze have promised you for years.
DATA from the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) record indicates how the Swedish icebreaker – Oden – found itself struggling in the stubborn, thick summer sea-ice that is apparently “screaming” and “Ice-Free” by now.
2.0 – 3.0 metre-thick sea ice covers a vast extent of the Arctic basin:
NO trend in Arctic sea-ice volume/thickness over the past decade. Though, there’s been a big build up in 2018 of 2.0-3.0 meter thick, multi-year sea ice that has stymied Oden’s travels:
WITH the Arctic in good shape, and certainly no sign of imminent meltdown at either pole, it’s hard to see the “climate crisis” that the mainstream media, activist ‘scientists’ and politicians insist is upon us.
“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue.
Even if the theory of global warming is wrong,
we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.“
– TimothyWirth,
President of the UN Foundation
“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony…
climate change provides the greatest opportunity to
bring about justice and equality in the world.”
– Christine Stewart,
former Canadian Minister of the Environment
***
LITTLE gem of a read by Harry Wilkinson on the condition of the Polar Ice Caps and the overtly propagandised meltdown hysteria promulgated by alarmist ‘scientists’ and their government institutions, gleefully pimped out by the ever-compliant global warming theory-obsessed mainstream media.
WILKINSON lays out basic empirical facts that shamelessly contradict the repetitive “Death Spiral” moans from climate and Arctic experts alarmists.
THE piece is a welcome reminder to be cautious of the selective bias that the mainstream media is willing to share with you on all things global warming climate change:
“These facts get little coverage because they don’t sound alarming at all, and for most reporters that means they’re not news. These ‘inconvenient truths’ are nonetheless a helpful reminder that climate change coverage should be taken with a healthy dose of scepticism.”
Arctic sea ice is proving remarkably reluctant to enter its appointed ‘death throes’, despite the usual suspects having already planned the funeral. Climate Change Anxiety Disorder, it turns out, is yet to impose its angst on the actual climate, no matter how hard the BBC tries to make it.
The latest observations show that Arctic sea ice is on course to have a greater minimum extent than in 2015 and 2016, and is running higher than levels seen a decade ago. Back then, the BBC reported that Arctic summers may be ice-free by 2013, although this estimate was described as being ‘too conservative’.
That prediction was spectacularly wrong, and contrary to warnings of an ‘Arctic death spiral’, sea ice extent has been remarkably stable in the last decade. No one can say what exactly will happen next; if this humbling affair teaches anything it should be precisely that.
The climate has misbehaved in other ways too. The Greenland Ice Sheet has been gaining mass at a record rate for the second year running, and Antarctic sea ice extent is perfectly normal relative to the 1981-2010 average. These facts get little coverage because they don’t sound alarming at all, and for most reporters that means they’re not news. These ‘inconvenient truths’ are nonetheless a helpful reminder that climate change coverage should be taken with a healthy dose of scepticism. There is a long way to go before we can make accurate predictions about how the climate will behave, if indeed we ever can.
Climate science has to be more deeply grounded in real-world observations rather than models that are inevitably riddled with flawed human assumptions.
BLINK chart of the past 15 years shows no “Death Spiral” trend in sea-ice volume. It does, however, show a large increase in multi-year, 2.0-3.5 metre thick sea-ice in 2018, that will consolidate into Autumn and go nowhere for years:
A polar bear on hummocked sea ice in Franz Josef Land. Photo by Michael Hambrey, date not specified but estimated based on tour dates to be 22 or 23 June 2019. 
Climatism 
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