Arctic Ice A Classic False Scare

Another Climate Change Scare Is On Thin Ice

By Dr. Tim Ball
Thursday, December 2, 2010

All the scares generated by the false climate science promoted by political agendas disappear from the mainstream media and are rarely heard of again. There’s no follow up in the mainstream media, no apologies for providing false or inadequate information.

Nasty old Mother Nature causes the demise by going about her normal business. As the old advertisement said, it’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature. The Northern Hemisphere winter is already proving once again that global warming is another undelivered government promise.

The sequence begins with identification of an issue. This occurs in several ways including reporters scanning science journals for articles to sensationalize; a scientist or Environmental group publicizing an issue. If the story catches, they’ll push it from various angles. If it loses traction, they bring in a different scientific angle or raise the level of potential damage.

Arctic Ice A Classic False Scare

Melting Arctic ice grabbed attention and became a major part of Gore’s propaganda movie An Inconvenient Truth. Dying polar bears grabbed emotions and rising sea levels flooded fertile land inhabited by much of the world’s poor people. Context quickly appeared as historic reconstructions of Arctic temperatures and the natural annual variation of ice amounts showed everything within normal variability. Polar bear experts, like Mitch Taylor, debunked the endangered polar bear claims. What to do? Everyone is familiar with the dangers of thin ice so spread the claim the ice is thinning rapidly and as usual intimate it is unnatural.

We’ve only had satellite measures of ice cover since 1980. Launched in 1978 it took two years to establish reliable procedures and determine accuracy. Since then various computer models have used different methods to measure and display what is going on. There is still disagreement between them. One of the differences is how they determine old, young, and new ice. Another was the problem of ice with water lying on top. However, the satellite never measured ice thickness.

Fritz Koerner, a Canadian glaciologist who also drilled ice cores on Baffin and Ellesmere Island, produced an excellent early (1973) assessment of the situation. Fritz was the first person I heard report to an Ottawa conference, that his cores were showing CO2 levels changing after temperature change. http://www.igsoc.org/journal/12/65/igs_ ... 73-185.pdf In his paper Koerner notes, “The mean end-of-winter thickness of the ice is calculated to be 4.6 m in the Pacific Gyral and 3.9 m in the Trans Polar Drift Stream.â€