The Disappearance of the Arctic Ice Coverage

We are hearing many claims that the arctic ice has melted, retreated to historic low coverage, and that this is due to global warming.  Actually the big drivers of arctic ice coverage are usually wind and sometimes precipitation.  The main reason for the present low arctic ice coverage is an August cyclone that broke up the arctic ice coverage.  See the NASA video of the cyclone winds here.


Meanwhile, and little remarked, the ice coverage in Antarctica is near a record high.  At Real Science it is noted that:

Day 256 Antarctic ice is the highest ever for the date, and the eighth highest daily reading ever recorded. All seven higher readings occurred during the third week of September, 2007 – the week of the previous Arctic record minimum.

 See the Day 256 Antarctic ice coverage data below:

There is no evidence here for the often claimed global warming.  Perhaps we can find some evidence by looking at sea level data.  Well, here is the NOAA sea level data, which you must remember is the result of the sea level and the level of the land.  Just as the sea level may actually rise or fall, so does the land at these various coastal areas.  If you adjust the world map to examine North America and Europe, you will see that mostly the sea level is rising in the 0 to 3 mm/yr range indicated by upward green arrows.  In these areas, the land is relatively static and this is indicative of the range in which the real sea level rise is to be found.  But, you will observe that the Mississippi delta is sinking, as is the Texas coast at a more moderate rate.  Similarly to the Texas coast sinking, there is sinking land in South Carolina and in the Chesapeake and Delaware Bay areas.  On the other hand, there is rising land on the Canadian and Alaskan Pacific coasts and in parts of the St. Lawrence River area.  In Europe, most of Norway, Sweden, and Finland have rising land.  There are a few areas in the Aegean Sea that are sinking, but most of Europe has a sea level rise in the 0 to 3 mm/year range.

So, even at the top of this range, 100 years of rising at 3 mm/year is 0.3 meters, which is at the bottom end of the range of the 2007 4th IPCC report prediction for the next 100 years.  The NOAA data actually looks more consistent with a rate of 0.15 meters over the next 100 years, but even that may be too high given the indications of an on-coming global cooling.  Given that through most of the last 10,000 years sea level has been rising, though land levels in many areas have also as the weight of glaciers was removed from the land, there is no looming catastrophe here.

The Melting of Arctic Sea Ice

According to Archimede's principle anything floating in water displaces its own weight in water.  Thus, an ice cube of pure water floating in pure water will not cause the water level to change at all when the ice melts.  But, the arctic ice is not floating in pure water, since ocean water is saline and a bit warmer than the ice.  According to a study by Professor Andrew Shepherd of the University of Leeds and colleagues called Recent Loss of Floating Ice and the Consequent Sea Level Contribution and published in Geophysical Research Letters, the loss of about 1.5 million ice bergs the size of the Titanic has resulted in a sea level rise of 49 micrometers!

Al Gore recently bought a home overlooking the beach in the elite Montecito area of Satellite Beach on an Atlantic Ocean coastal island.  He invested $8.875 million in it, so he apparently thinks that all of his dire predictions of catastrophic sea level rise is just so much bunkum for the lowly masses of peasants.  Apparently peddling such bunkum to them is very remunerative, however.  In view of this recent research finding, he may want to change keep an emergency life raft at his new home, perhaps tied to the top of his chimney.

For those of us with level heads, the diameter of a human hair lies in the range from 17 to 181 micrometers.  So, the melting of a huge amount of arctic sea ice still has no significant effect upon sea level.

Booker - Climate Change Rhetoric Spirals Out of Control

Christopher Booker comments in "Climate change rhetoric spirals out of control" at Telegraph.co.uk that there were some real howlers issuing from the mouths of the anthropogenic global warming alarmists in February.

First, the BBC highlighted an American Professor Chris Fields as a "leading climate scientist" and he says that "the severity of global warming over the next century will be much worse than previously believed." Future temperatures "will be beyond anything predicted." Turns out that Professor Chris Fields is an evolutionary biologist. The BBC then posted a video on its website saying that global warming will be made worse by "negative feedback." Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That pointed out that negative feedback would cause lower temperatures, not higher temperatures.

Dr. James Hanson, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, wrote that "Coal-fired power plants are factories of death." "The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains." A year ago, he testified that a single new British coal-fired electric plant would cause the death of 400 species.

We have all heard the claim over and over again that "the world's top 2,500 climate scientists" from the IPCC studies all believe that anthropogenic global warming is a reality and a catastrophe. I heard a Greenpeace representative assert this even more broadly on Fox News yesterday. According to him, all climate scientists agree with this. This is a colossal lie. Booker points out that Professor William Schlesinger, a lead author for the IPCC, was asked at a public debate how many of the IPCC contributors were climate experts. He said "something on the order of 20% have had some dealing with climate."

Finally, Booker notes that the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) showed a sharp decrease in sea-ice cover with 500,000 square kilometers of ice disappearing in the Arctic winter. This was an error discovered by Anthony Watts. The NSIDC itself had posted 45 days of bad data without noticing the problem. Their data is used in the IPCC reports.

Booker says that "When politicians plan measures to 'combat climate change' costing tens of trillions of dollars, we can at least expect them to ensure that their figures are halfway believable." Well no, we can expect them to tell the big lie so they can use an apparent crisis as a means to grab power the people would not otherwise give them. Rahm Emanuel has made it perfectly clear that the practiced and wily politician will never let a crisis go unused if it can be used as a means to acquire more power. Examining the so-called banking crisis, which is being hugely exaggerated, and the anthropogenic global warming crisis, which is similarly being gigantically exaggerated, we can see that these dishonest exaggerations are simply political tools to manufacture the crisis atmosphere needed to get the people to give the politicians power they could not otherwise get.