Record Arctic Sea Ice Growth In September

History Keeps Proving Prophets Of Eco-Apocalypse Wrong

 

 

Since hitting its earliest minimum extent since 1997, Arctic sea ice has been expanding at a phenomenal rate. Already it is greater than at the same date in 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2015. Put another way, it is the fourth highest extent in the last ten years. Even more remarkably, ice growth since the start of the month is actually the greatest on record, since daily figures started to be kept in 1987. --Paul Homewood, Not A Lot Of People Know That, 25 September 2016

One of the world's leading ice experts has predicted the final collapse of Arctic sea ice in summer months within four years. In what he calls a "global disaster" now unfolding in northern latitudes as the sea area that freezes and melts each year shrinks to its lowest extent ever recorded, Prof Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University calls for "urgent" consideration of new ideas to reduce global temperatures. --John Vidal, The Guardian, 17 September 2012

The declining Arctic ice cover has been one of the most powerful images of climate change. The minimum ice extent was nothing unusual at 4.1 million km2, not the lowest and about the same as 2007. Some media reports portrayed this as the second lowest and mentioned its comparison with 2007 without making the obvious comment that it was curious in these days of much talk of rapid ice decline in the Arctic that the minimum extent was the same as it was 9 years ago. --David Whitehouse, GWPF Observatory, 22 September 2016 

The ability to make accurate predictions is a hallmark of good science. Conversely, making false predictions implies either that a statement is not based on science, or that it is based on bad science. So why is it that we continue to believe environmental doom-mongers, even though history has proven them wrong time and time again? Oh, wait. It turns out we don’t believe them. Almost 10-million voters in a huge United Nations poll have ranked climate action dead last out of 16. Those are the fruits of constant, shrill, exaggerated alarmism. Get proven wrong by history often enough, and four out of five ordinary people will stop believing you. – Daily Maverick, 20 September 2016 GWPF Energy, 26 September 2016 

Actual growth in South East Asian fossil fuel consumption over the last twenty years, and projections of a near doubling of demand by 2040, indicate that developing nations won’t undermine their own development objectives in favour of decarbonisation. Southeast Asia’s rapidly rising energy demand is daunting in itself, but the outlook is still more remarkable. The IEA projects demand to increase by 80% up to 2040, reaching 1,070 mtoe per year. The bulk of this increase is provided by fossil fuels, which increase their share from 74% at present to 78% in 2040. While renewables grow, their share actually declines from 26% to 21%. This is the fundamental truth behind the Paris agreement, echoing through the ASEAN minister’s response to the IEA: aspirations are one thing, demands for affordable energy in the real world are another. --John Constable, GWPF Energy, 26 September 2016

 

Yet the current “debate” over climate change—which is really, in Ridley’s (2015a) terms, a “war” absent any real debate—has potentially done grave harm to this scientific enterprise. As Ridley documents, one researcher after another who has in any way challenged the climate orthodoxy has met with withering criticism of the sort that can end careers. We must now somehow return to actual scientific debate, rooted in Popperian epistemology, and in so doing try to reestablish a reasonably nonpolitical ideal for scientific investigation and discovery. Otherwise, the poisoned debate over climate change runs the risk of contaminating the entire scientific endeavor. --Brian J. L. Berry, Jayshree Bihari and Euel Elliott, Cato Journal, Fall 2016

Using automatic text generation software, computer scientists at Italy’s University of Trieste created a series of fake peer reviews of genuine journal papers and asked academics of different levels of seniority to say whether they agreed with their recommendations to accept for publication or not. In a quarter of cases, academics said they agreed with the fake review’s conclusions, even though they were entirely made up of computer-generated gobbledygook -- or, rather, sentences picked at random from a selection of peer reviews taken from subjects as diverse as brain science, ecology and ornithology. --Jack Grove, Times Higher Education, 22 September 2016

Brought to you by Benny Peiser's Global Warming Policy Forum