It's politics, not science, driving climate mania: Why are environmentalists and scientists so reluctant to discuss long-term increases in southern hemisphere sea ice?

  • UN computer predictions subject of ridicule: not got it right for 18 years
  • Across the globe, there are about 1m sq km more sea ice than 35 years ago
  • Authorities are now guessing global temperatures based on nearby weather stations

By Andrew Mountford, Climate Change Author

Published: 16:01 EST, 5 July 2014 | Updated: 18:54 EST, 5 July 2014

For years, computer simulations have predicted that sea ice should be disappearing from the Poles.
Now, with the news that Antarctic sea-ice levels have hit new highs, comes yet another mishap to tarnish the credibility of climate science. 

Climatologists base their doom-laden predictions of the Earth’s climate on computer simulations.

But these have long been the subject of ridicule because of their stunning failure to predict the pause in warming – nearly 18 years long on some measures – since the turn of the last century.

An adult chinstrap penguin jumps out of the sea at Port Lockroy, Antarctica

An adult chinstrap penguin jumps out of the sea at Port Lockroy, Antarctica

It’s the same with sea ice. We hear a great deal about the decline in Arctic sea ice, in line with or even ahead of predictions.

But why are environmentalists and scientists so much less  keen to discuss the long-term increase in the southern hemisphere?

In fact, across the globe, there are about one million square kilometres more sea ice than 35 years ago, which is when satellite measurements began.

 

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It’s fair to say that this has been something of an embarrassment for climate modellers. But it doesn’t stop there. 

In recent days a new scandal over the integrity of temperature data has emerged, this time in America, where it has been revealed as much as 40 per cent  of temperature data there are not real thermometer readings.

Many temperature stations have closed, but rather than stop recording data from these posts, the authorities have taken the remarkable step of ‘estimating’ temperatures based on the records of surrounding stations. 

A Crabeater seal on an iceberg in Paradise Bay, Antarctica. Crabeater seals are the most common large mammal on the planet after humans, with an estimated population of 15 million

A Crabeater seal on an iceberg in Paradise Bay, Antarctica. Crabeater seals are the most common large mammal on the planet after humans, with an estimated population of 15 million

So vast swathes of the data are actually from ‘zombie’ stations that have long since disappeared.  This is bad enough, but it has also been discovered that the  US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is using estimates even when perfectly good raw data is available to it – and that it has adjusted historical records.

Why should it do this? Many have noted that the effect of all these changes is to produce a warmer present and a colder past, with the net result being  the impression of much faster warming.

They draw their conclusions accordingly.

Naturally, if the US temperature records are indeed found to have been manipulated, this is unlikely to greatly affect our overall picture of rising temperatures at the end of the last century and  a standstill thereafter.

The US is, after all, only a  small proportion of the globe. 

Similarly, climatologists’ difficulties with the sea ice may be of little scientific significance in the greater scheme of things.

We have only a few decades of data, and in climate terms this is probably too short to demonstrate that either the Antarctic increase or the Arctic decrease is anything other than natural variability. 

But the relentless focus by activist scientists on the Arctic decline does suggest a political imperative rather than a scientific one – and when put together with the story of the US temperature records, it’s hard to avoid the impression that what the public is being told is less than the unvarnished truth. 

As their credulity is stretched more and more, the public will – quite rightly – treat demands for action with increasing caution…

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Our ability to see what's happening is brand new, and we assumed that our first "snapshot" represented "normal", and that "normal" can never change. It's human nature.

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Orwell called it "Double-Think." I remember when "fuel cells" were all the rage among the enviro-whackos....until one day George W. Bush gave a speech touting fuel cells. INSTANTLY, without skipping a beat, fuel cells became a "big oil conspiracy." No leftie has had anything good to say about them ever since. They have no principles, good or bad. Right or wrong. They just know they're against anything they perceive "white male conservatives" are for, and for anything those guys are against. Remember when hippies were saying, "Question Authority"? Now they worship it. Funny how that happens.

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One of the picture captions states the crabeater seal is the 2nd most populous large mammal after humans at 15m. Huh? Are cattle not large mammals? There are 1.4 billion of them worldwide by an estimate I read. I didn't do too much further fact checking as even a huge error on either side wont close the gap much between 15m and 1.4 billion, unless you work for the government.....

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This Article should be updated to include the very recent scientific study that the Arctic ice is melting from geothermal activity from underwater volcanoes.

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This Article should be updated to include the very recent scientific study that the Arctic ice is melting from geothermal activity from underwater volcanoes.

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The "progressives" will switch mid stream and say an ice age is coming due to global warming. I have a computer models that prove it. Or history....

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Climatologists. When have they ever published their credentials? Then to refer to themselves as scientist is an oxymoron. In veiled terms Physicist refer to them as idiots but in much kinder words. In North America and Europe we came out of a mini ice age officially in 1865 that had continued for a thousand years. Are you aware the extreme temperature range for our planet is Minus 400 to Plus 400 degrees. What we experience today is Minus 140 to Plus 140 degrees. Just a 1 degree change in inclination to the Sun would drastically change these numbers. The above ratio is the primary reason we even have variation in weather.

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Climatologists. When have they ever published their credentials? Then to refer to themselves as scientist is an oxymoron. In veiled terms Physicist refer to them as idiots but in much kinder words. In North America and Europe we came out of a mini ice age officially in 1865 that had continued for a thousand years. Are you aware the extreme temperature range for our planet is Minus 400 to Plus 400 degrees. What we experience today is Minus 140 to Plus 140 degrees. Just a 1 degree change in inclination to the Sun would drastically change these numbers. The above ratio is the primary reason we even have variation in weather.

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Show me a believer in the faux global warming mess that comes out the southern end of a north bound bull and I'll show you a liberal left wing nut job.

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Or that the recent temperature variation, the recent build up of Arctic ice is no more than our ability to more accurately measure the natural variability of climate factors. There are a number of possible explanations that do not entail the "sky is falling" that radical environmentalists wish to dismiss by ridiculing any one bringing up the question.

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