Sometimes The Earth Just Doesn’t Cooperate With The Scientists

The Daily Caller posted an article today about some recent occurrences involving Arctic ice.

The article reports:

For years, scientists have been warning the Arctic was in a “death spiral” and could soon be ice-free during the summertime and shrink to unprecedented levels due to man-made global warming. Such ice loss could be “irreversible,” some scientists claimed.

But new research from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography says that predictions of an ice-free Arctic are based on “oversimplified” theories. Scripps researchers, who were co-funded by the Navy, found that the Arctic sea ice may be “substantially more stable than has been suggested in previous idealized modeling studies.”

I should probably point out at this point that I am not in favor of dirty water, dirty air, or any other sort of pollution. I just have serious doubts as to whether the earth is warming or whether man actually has anything to do with any climate change that is occurring.

There were many predictions saying that Arctic Ice would be gone by 2030–the levels of ice had decreased in 2007, 2008, and 2009, and some scientists were saying that the ice would not come back. However, that is not what has happened.

The article concludes:

NSIDC (National Snow and Ice Data Center) and European satellite data show that multi-year sea ice made a big comeback in 2013 and 2014 — increasing from 2.25 to 3.17 million square kilometers during that time and making up 43 percent of the north pole’s ice pack.

In fact, Arctic sea ice extent as a whole seems to be stabilizing despite this year’s record low maximum in February. NSIDC data shows Arctic sea ice extent is currently within the normal range based on the 1981 to 2010 average extent.

“Global sea ice is at a record high, another key indicator that something is working in the opposite direction of what was predicted,” Dr. Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Forum, told the U.K. Express in January.

“Most people think the poles are melting… they’re not,” he said. “This is a huge inconvenience that reality is now catching up with climate alarmists, who were predicting that the poles would be melting fairly soon.”

Global warming is not a proven fact. Until it is, it would be foolish for industrialized nations to cripple their economies to accommodate faulty science. Again, we need to cut down on pollution simply because it is a bad thing, but we do not have to go overboard to create a result that is questionable at best.

 

Don’t Assume That Scientists Always Get Things Right

The U.K. Daily Mail posted a story yesterday with two amazing pictures:

global cooling

As much as I love the idea of global warming, the pictures seem to indicate that it is just not happening. I would like to point out that in the past we have had cycles of both global warming and global cooling. These cycles occurred long before the industrial revolution and were not related to anyone’s carbon footprint.

The article reports:

Some eminent scientists now believe the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century – a process that would expose computer forecasts of imminent catastrophic warming as dangerously misleading.

The disclosure comes 11 months after The Mail on Sunday triggered intense political and scientific debate by revealing that global warming has ‘paused’ since the beginning of 1997 – an event that the computer models used by climate experts failed to predict.

In March, this newspaper further revealed that temperatures are about to drop below the level that the models forecast with ‘90 per cent certainty’.

The pause – which has now been accepted as real by every major climate research centre – is important, because the models’ predictions of ever-increasing global temperatures have made many of the world’s economies divert billions of pounds into ‘green’ measures to counter  climate change.

Those predictions now appear gravely flawed.

The article concludes:

‘The IPCC (UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) claims its models show a pause of 15 years can be expected. But that means that after only a very few years more, they will have to admit they are wrong.’

 Others are more cautious. Dr Ed Hawkins, of Reading University, drew the graph published by The Mail on Sunday in March showing how far world temperatures have diverged from computer predictions. He admitted the cycles may have caused some of the recorded warming, but insisted that natural variability alone could not explain all of the temperature rise over the past 150 years.

Nonetheless, the belief that summer Arctic ice is about to disappear remains an IPCC tenet, frequently flung in the face of critics who point to the pause.

Yet there is mounting evidence that Arctic ice levels are cyclical. Data uncovered by climate historians show that there was a massive melt in the 1920s and 1930s, followed by intense re-freezes that ended only in 1979 – the year the IPCC says that shrinking began.

Professor Curry said the ice’s behaviour over the next five years would be crucial, both for understanding the climate and for future policy. ‘Arctic sea ice is the indicator to watch,’ she said.

The bottom line here is that we simply don’t understand the earth’s climate cycles. We know they exist, but we don’t know how they work or if human activity impacts them. I am in favor of clean water and clean air, but I am not in favor of crippling economic growth for faulty science. We need to learn balance, and we need to realize that much of the panic we have heard regarding global warming has to do with the desire on the part of some world leaders to transfer wealth from successful free countries into the hands of third-world tyrants. The route to economic success for any third-world country has to include freedom for its people. If there is no incentive, there will be no economic growth.

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