Headline from 2014: “Expert predicts ice-free Arctic by 2020 as UN releases climate report“. Here from NASA is a picture by year of the estimated minimum sea-ice extent, which occurs around September each year. The first thing to note is the short, the very short, time span. The second is to recall the 1970s in the northern hemisphere were cold. Which is why back then the predictions were for mass starvations, etc. etc., due to global cooling.
The sheer audacity of Wadhams and others like him, (Al Gore anybody?), is astounding. They are wrong, wrong again, wrong again, wronger, wrongest and yet they just double down. “Next year. I meant in 5 years, not 10. Wait, it’s only 8 years now.” And our august journalists continue to deem them “experts” whose opinion deserves attention.
May 12, 2023·edited May 12, 2023Liked by William M Briggs
The predictions (and re-predictions, and re-re-predictions) could not more obviously scream "eschatological cult" if they were walking around with pentagrams tattooed onto their foreheads. I smelled this cult brewing since the first production of the Hockey Stick graph.
I have been following Wadham and McPherson (the absolute worse case scenario) for a long time. Neither is right as no one knows the future. In this new paradigm of mass internet participation, the extreme viewpoints increases views. Might even attract one of these ESG investor funds for marketing purposes.
Could be something to carbon emissions, my view its about the odds and extreme case scenarios are rare.
I do watch the extent and thickness of the Arctic Sea Ice more than any other change now occurring.
Ice is shrinking fast in geological terms, the best case scenario would be it stays the same for 100,000 years. The hope coming from the opposing the climate is changing viewpoint, in terms of humans doing something different, anyway, the political class, wants the planet to change course, for the ice on the Arctic Sea to thicken. Fat chance o' that! Ha!
Unfortunately, the Greenhouse Effect is not real. If it was, then we could look forward to longer growing seasons, less use of heating fuels, and just generally better life. Life thrives in warmer climates than ours, for reference see the Jurassic Period a time of megaflora and fauna(where turtles were somewhat larger but not Godzilla sized), somewhat warmer than ours. The warming that we are seeing is a combination of natural variation and Urban Heat Island skewing the dataset. CO2 is a lagging indicator of climate. And are lagging indicators causative?
Such antics are common in science and have been for a while.
Perhaps the most pernicious was the Anti-Fat era started pretty much by one man, Ancel Keys. Now Keys didn't change the USDA alone, but his prestige was such that getting on his bad side was not good for your career. Thus a deluge of confirming papers flooded into the academy, The American Heart Association (still unrepentant) and government.Three things fouled it up. 1. A British scientist, John Yudkin, blamed sugar for coronary heart disease almost at the same time Keys blamed saturated fat. 2. Keys' attack on Yudkin led to a scientific dog-pile which pretty much ruined Yudkin but set up Keys for a fall when 3. High-fructose corn syrup became the sole sweetener of most soft-drinks in 1982 and the obesity epidemic began in earnest and a lot more people started dying.
Keys' attack on Yudkin has recently been deleted from his Wikipedia article. This was done by a cabal of Keys supporters who have been trying since about 2011 to rehabilitate his reputation. They refute that he falsified and deleted data when he gah-damn well did. They also claim that he was the first to "recognize" the benefits of the Mediterranean diet. What they cannot refute, BUT NEVER MENTION, is how he and his acolytes attacked Yudkin and any other knuckle-dragging fool who thought sugar was making people fat.
Again, Keys didn't do it alone, the perpetuating nature of careerist science did and kept it going for a long while and tried to crush, even ruin, detractors like Robert Atkins, Barry Sears and others. Sadly, a lot people died along the way.
The sheer audacity of Wadhams and others like him, (Al Gore anybody?), is astounding. They are wrong, wrong again, wrong again, wronger, wrongest and yet they just double down. “Next year. I meant in 5 years, not 10. Wait, it’s only 8 years now.” And our august journalists continue to deem them “experts” whose opinion deserves attention.
The predictions (and re-predictions, and re-re-predictions) could not more obviously scream "eschatological cult" if they were walking around with pentagrams tattooed onto their foreheads. I smelled this cult brewing since the first production of the Hockey Stick graph.
Iceless poles, like artificial general intelligence or commercially viable nuclear fusion, always seem to be just a few years away.
I have been following Wadham and McPherson (the absolute worse case scenario) for a long time. Neither is right as no one knows the future. In this new paradigm of mass internet participation, the extreme viewpoints increases views. Might even attract one of these ESG investor funds for marketing purposes.
Could be something to carbon emissions, my view its about the odds and extreme case scenarios are rare.
I do watch the extent and thickness of the Arctic Sea Ice more than any other change now occurring.
Ice is shrinking fast in geological terms, the best case scenario would be it stays the same for 100,000 years. The hope coming from the opposing the climate is changing viewpoint, in terms of humans doing something different, anyway, the political class, wants the planet to change course, for the ice on the Arctic Sea to thicken. Fat chance o' that! Ha!
Numbskulls.
Unfortunately, the Greenhouse Effect is not real. If it was, then we could look forward to longer growing seasons, less use of heating fuels, and just generally better life. Life thrives in warmer climates than ours, for reference see the Jurassic Period a time of megaflora and fauna(where turtles were somewhat larger but not Godzilla sized), somewhat warmer than ours. The warming that we are seeing is a combination of natural variation and Urban Heat Island skewing the dataset. CO2 is a lagging indicator of climate. And are lagging indicators causative?
An ice free Arctic sounds good to me anyway. Lol.
Our buddy, Tony Heller, has an excellent archive of the "Arctic is melting!" scare-mongering at his site:
https://realclimatescience.com/ice-free-arctic-forecasts-3/
https://realclimatescience.com/arctic-sea-ice-unchanged-from-60-years-ago/
And he just happened to post about the issue today, noting that Arctic ice is expanding:
https://realclimatescience.com/2023/05/expansion-of-arctic-sea-ice/
I accidentally posted this reply on Notes.
Such antics are common in science and have been for a while.
Perhaps the most pernicious was the Anti-Fat era started pretty much by one man, Ancel Keys. Now Keys didn't change the USDA alone, but his prestige was such that getting on his bad side was not good for your career. Thus a deluge of confirming papers flooded into the academy, The American Heart Association (still unrepentant) and government.Three things fouled it up. 1. A British scientist, John Yudkin, blamed sugar for coronary heart disease almost at the same time Keys blamed saturated fat. 2. Keys' attack on Yudkin led to a scientific dog-pile which pretty much ruined Yudkin but set up Keys for a fall when 3. High-fructose corn syrup became the sole sweetener of most soft-drinks in 1982 and the obesity epidemic began in earnest and a lot more people started dying.
Keys' attack on Yudkin has recently been deleted from his Wikipedia article. This was done by a cabal of Keys supporters who have been trying since about 2011 to rehabilitate his reputation. They refute that he falsified and deleted data when he gah-damn well did. They also claim that he was the first to "recognize" the benefits of the Mediterranean diet. What they cannot refute, BUT NEVER MENTION, is how he and his acolytes attacked Yudkin and any other knuckle-dragging fool who thought sugar was making people fat.
Again, Keys didn't do it alone, the perpetuating nature of careerist science did and kept it going for a long while and tried to crush, even ruin, detractors like Robert Atkins, Barry Sears and others. Sadly, a lot people died along the way.
So, good on you for writing this, William.