This week, National Geographic, continuing its slide into irrelevance, published an article on Arctic ice melt. It was the usual apocalyptic-catastrophic rhetoric meant to frighten people into economically untenable political policy.
However, ice cover is dynamic and always changing.
According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (nsidc.org), ice currently covers 6 million square miles, or one-tenth the Land area on Earth, about the area of South America. Floating ice, or Sea Ice, alternately called Pack Ice at the North and South Poles cover 6% of the ocean’s surface (nsidc.org), an area similar to North America. The most important measure of ice is its thickness. The United States Geologic Survey estimates the total ice on Earth weighs 28 million Gigatons(a billion tons). Antarctica and Greenland combined represent 99% of all ice on Earth. The remaining one percent is in glaciers, ice sheets, and sea ice. Antarctica can exceed 3 miles in thickness and Greenland one mile. If they were to melt sea level would indeed rise over 200 feet, but not even the most radical alarmists suggest that possibility arising due to the use of fossil fuels. However the ice that flows off of the Antarctic and Greenland called shelf ice represents only half a percent of all the Earth’s ice and which if melted would raise sea level only 14 inches, (nsidc.com).
Although Sea Ice covers 6% of the entire oceans at an average thickness of 6 feet, were it all to melt sea level would rise only 4 inches. If we melted all 200,000 of the Earth’s temperate zone glaciers sea level would rise another two feet. So total catastrophe can only occur if we can melt the Antarctic and Greenland. But the Antarctic is the coldest place on Earth. At www.coolantarctica.com calculations show the temperature would have to rise 54 degrees Fahrenheit to start the warming of that Ice Cap.
The geologic record provides a perspective on how climate impacts the quantity of ice on Earth. They have encompassed every extreme. 800 million years ago the planet was almost entirely encased in ice (Rafferty, J.P. Cryogenics Period). Since then there have been many extended periods when there has been no ice present. As recently as 3 million years ago sea levels are believed to have been 165 feet higher than today. While ice covered a third of the entire planet during the last ice age, when sea levels were 400 feet lower, allowing ancient peoples to cross the Siberian Land Bridge to populate North America.
Al Gore predicted in 2007 that by 2013 the Arctic Ocean would be completely ice-free. In the summer of 2012 ice levels did reach all-time lows in the Arctic. Emboldened by this report Australian Professor Chris Turney launched an expedition in December of 2013 to prove that the Antarctic Sea Ice was also undergoing catastrophic melting only to have his ship trapped in sea ice such that it could not even be rescued by modern ice-breakers.
The Professor should have known that a more accurate estimate of sea ice can be had from satellite images taken every day at the Poles since 1981. These images show that between summer and winter, regardless of the degree of summer melting, the sea ice completely recovers to its original size the winter before for almost every year since the pictures were taken. The sea ice has been stubbornly resistant to Al Gore’s predictions. In fact, the average annual coverage of sea ice has been essentially the same since satellite observations began in 1981. However, that has not stopped global warming advocates and even government agencies from cherry-picking the data to mislead the public.
Africa’s Mt. Kilimanjaro has been the poster child for land-based melting supposed to be caused by Global Warming. It did lose half of its ice cover between 1880 and 1936 before the major use of fossil fuels and only 30% more in the past 80 years. However, the temperature at its peak has not risen at any time during these years above freezing (32 degrees Fahrenheit). The melting has been due to deforestation and the dry air rising to the mountain top causing the ice to turn directly into water vapor a process called sublimation.
Melting glaciers are another topic of the warming alarmists. Indeed they can choose to point to some that are actually melting, ignoring those that are growing or remaining stable. Why the differences? They are largely dependent on whether over periods of time more snow falls than ice melts or the reverse. They are a great place to cherry-pick data.
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Sadly Natl. Geographic is trending the same way as so many other periodicals and looking for headlines and sound bytes, whether accuracy is being sacrificed or not. Instead of promoting academia and an industry whose “facts” are suspect to say the very least, they should be presenting both sides.
The academia part is related to the entire collegiate industry misleading The American public for degrees that will help no one get jobs, and at great expense.
While we all can easily accept the fact we should use energy wisely and with little detriment to Mother Earth, we should not be told we can affect the climate of this huge planet when no one has proof that we can, at such a HUGE EXPENSE.
“CLIMATE, HISTORY AND THE MODERN WORLD,” Second Edition by H.H. Lamb, 1994
COOLING IN THE ARCTIC
The cooling of the Arctic since 1950–60 has been most marked in the very same regions which experienced the strongest warming in the earlier decades of the present century, namely the central Arctic and northernmost parts of the two great continents remote from the world’s oceans but also in the Norwegian—East Greenland Sea.
(In some places, e.g. the Franz Josef Land archipelago near 80°N 50–60°E, the long-term average temperature fell by 3–4°C and the ten-year average winter temperatures became 6–10°C colder in the 1960s as compared with the preceding decades.)
It is clear from Icelandic oceanographic surveys that changes in the ocean currents have been involved.
Indeed a greatly (in the extreme case, ten times) increased flow of the cold East Greenland Current, bringing polar water southwards, has in several years (especially 1968 and 1969, but also 1965, 1975 and 1979) brought more Arctic sea ice to the coasts of Iceland than for fifty years (fig. 97): in April–May 1968 and 1969 the island was half surrounded by the ice, as had not occurred since 1888.
Such ice years have always been dreaded in Iceland’s history because of the depression of summer temperatures and the effects on farm production.
In the 1950s the mean temperature of the summer half year in Iceland had been 7.7°C and the average hay yields were 4.3 tonnes/hectare (with the use of 2.8 kg of nitrogen fertilizer); in the late 1960s with mean temperature 6.8°C the average hay yield was only 3.0 tonnes/hectare (despite the use of 4.8 kg of fertilizer).
The temperature level was dangerously close to the point at which the grass virtually ceases to grow.
The country’s crop of potatoes was similarly reduced.
The 1960s also saw the abandonment of attempts at grain growing in Iceland which had been resumed in the warmer decades of this century after a lapse of some hundreds of years.
At the same time the changes in the ocean have produced changes in the spawning grounds and seasonal range of migration of fish stocks — a not much publicized aspect of the international wrangles and ‘cod wars’ of recent times.
With the fall by over 1°C in the mean sea surface temperatures off west Greenland from the peak years in the 1920s and 1950s, the cod fishery there declined by the early 1970s to a tiny fraction of what it had been in those times.
The Greenland cod migrated to Iceland waters, and for a few years (1967–71) offset the declining stocks there; but since 1974 the spawning stocks in Iceland waters have been only a tenth of what they were in the late 1950s and the total stocks have fallen by almost a half, the decline being probably attributable to combined effects of the change in water climate and over-fishing.
Similarly, herring stocks have moved from Iceland waters to the wider reaches of the Norwegian Sea farther east, south and north and to the North Sea, while a southward shift of the southern limit of cod seems to have led to increased catches in the North Sea since about 1963.
An interruption of the colder regime introduced by the 1960s affected Europe and Iceland, part of east Asia and the eastern United States in the early-mid 1970s and was perhaps too hurriedly hailed as a reversal of the trend.
Most of Europe and parts of the other regions named experienced between 1971 and 1977 four to seven mild winters in a row, largely thanks to repetitive occurrences of anticyclones in positions which gave them southerly or southwesterly winds.
One or two of these winters produced extreme phenomena such as the roses still blooming in the parks in Copenhagen in late January.
But much of the remaining areas of the northern hemisphere, in Asia and Africa and including the polar region and the two great oceans as well as eastern Canada, had a straight run of colder than usual winters in the same years.
As the pattern depended so largely on the positions of stationary (‘blocking’) features in the wind circulation in middle latitudes, no great surprise should have been caused when conditions were reversed again in many of these regions in the immediately following years later in the decade.
By the end of the decade in Iceland, as in other regions of the Arctic fringe, it had to be concluded that the colder regime which set in in the 1960s seems to be continuing; and after notably cold years in 1979 and 1980 the widely debated expectation of global warming setting in as a result of the impact of the man-made increase of carbon dioxide on the world climate is being called in question in these countries.