What Is This World Coming To?

According to a report in National Geographic Magazine, “Arctic warming has become so dramatic that the North Pole may melt this summer, report scientists studying the effects of climate change in the field.”

“We’re actually projecting this year that the North Pole may be free of ice for the first time [in history],” David Barber, of the University of Manitoba, told National Geographic News aboard the C.C.G.S. Amundsen, a Canadian research icebreaker.”

Global warming proponents love to say things like “first time in history” as if ‘history’ only goes back as far as the earliest climate records. That is generally considered to be around 1850. Earlier records exist, but they are generally unreliable.

Over the course the reliable historical record, there have been two recorded warming periods: 1910-1945 and 1976 - 2000. The UN’s International Panel on Climate Change reported that, over the past 100 years, the global temperature has increased 0.74 degrees C (or just over 1 degree F)

However, there is a level of uncertainty regarding global temperature statistics estimated at about .05 degrees since 1950 and as much as 0.15 degrees before that. And the UN IPCC itself concluded in 1997 that; ” that the ability to monitor the global climate was inadequate and deteriorating.”

However, even if the Arctic were to completely thaw in September, it would not raise sea levels. And Antarctica is cooling, not warming. So the only way Al Gore’s cataclysmic flooding can take place is for Greenland’s glaciers to melt and for the runoff to make it to the North Atlantic.

However, a new study has concluded that Greenland’s rate of melting is not accelerating, and in fact may actually be decreasing when viewed over a longer timescale. The study, which used 17 years of satellite measurements to reach its conclusions, determined the overall yearly movement of ice to the sea is not increasing, and is actually decreasing in some places.

The researchers noted the speedup observed by past studies was strictly a short-term transient phenomena, occurring primarily in the summer months.

So, if you are among those who has invested in a piece of the Arizona desert, hoping to leave their heirs beach-front property in fifty years, maybe you should rethink that investment strategy. It isn’t gonna happen.

Global warming is a business, not a science. There is money to be made in selling the disease and power to be had by offering the cure. If the symptoms fail to cooperate with the diagnosis, then the only alternative is to invent new symptoms.

So the Arctic is melting. Maybe. We’ll revisit this again in September. It will interesting to hear the explanation for why it didn’t.