Watching the news this week, I keep seeing updates on the sailors who are in trouble in the Okhotsk Sea, off eastern Russia, in the Northwest corner of the Pacific ocean. The Sea of Okhotsk is west of the Bering Sea, its southern edge touching the mostly northern islands of Japan.
The crisis is that the sailors are ice-bound – their ships are stuck in the foot-thick ice. There are multiple stuck ships, with about 500 sailors total. One of the ships is an icebreaker. The Sea of Okhotsk is ice-covered from November to June, so ice in this area is not a phenomenon, but this many ships getting stuck is not something that happens very often.
Just the other day, Steve posted a story about "millions of fish dying" in Maryland recently. The head of Maryland’s environmental agency said it was caused by a "rapid temperature drop" causing "cold water stress". Well, I’ll be darned.
Yet, even today, scientist and environmentalists are still Quixotically "tilting at windmills" about the Arctic ice melting at alarming rates. By the way, "Quixotic" is about the best word you could find to describe these people: "Caught up in the romance of noble deeds and the pursuit of unreachable goals; idealistic without regard to practicality". Problem is, they are trying to shape our political and cultural world to match this flawed nobility.
I found this article from way back in the first days of 2007, when Al Gore was in his glory because parts of the world were seeing higher temperatures, drier weather, and the arctic ice cap was at a low since satellite monitoring had begun in 1979. In it, NASA Goddard Space Center’s chief enviro-chicken-little James E. Hansen claimed that "unless international efforts are launched within the next 10 years, species will disappear and the Earth will be a vastly less habitable planet by the end of the century."
Famous final words?
Well, I did a little digging, and I found some interesting information, from way back in 2009, no less. See how this grabs you….
First, in January, 2009, Tony Hake of the Denver Weather Examiner wrote this article, titled "Arctic Sea Ice Returns to 1979 Levels". This is a pretty amazing title alone, but when you get into the details, you find that only 3 months earlier, in September 2008 (what a year that was, huh?), claims were made that there was "a danger of most sea ice melting", and the Polar Bear was moved to "threatened species" status.
Even more astonishing is what I read in this other article, written by Justin Berk of the Baltimore Weather Examiner, describing how arctic ice monitoring began in 1979, when the Polar Observer was launched, to monitor the rapid and alarming growth of arctic ice, at a time when the same class of enviro-scientists thought that most of the northern United States would soon be covered with it, due to global cooling. Come to think of it, I do remember a lot of massive snow storms and cold spells in the 1970’s, especially that big one in ’78.
After a little reading, it became clear that arctic ice thaws during summer months and then refreezes again in the arctic winter. If you’ve ever looked at fractals, you know that natural events like this never happen consistently; one area might thaw and refreeze to a larger extent; another area may not thaw much, while another may not refreeze much – you can’t expect every area to return to its prior shape and size. Yet, these scientists barked up a storm one year, when some "shelf" areas appeared to be reducing. The funny thing is that these same areas froze back to original or larger extents just a few years later. These people seem to take any shred of partial evidence that seems to make their case, and ignore every bit of other information.
How much data?
The other laughable notion is that all measurements (and subsequent alarms) are all made based on the original 1979 ice levels. First of all, any statistician-geologist (are there any?) knows that 30 years is NOT a good sample for basing scientific analysis on. Second, how do we know that the ice levels weren’t half as high 80 years before? All they had for measurements were spotty fishermen and shipping observations. Heck, for all we know, the ice could have been twice a large and shrinking since then. The point is, we don’t have a benchmark (actually, there really isn’t one), and our data is a very, very small slice of time.
As Justin Berk said in his article, "if you start taking temperature records in February, and look back in June, all you would see is warming." No kidding!
Oh, there’s more…
About a month later, in February 2009, Tony Hake wrote another zinger, telling us how the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), had to report that their satellite provided "faulty data", under-reporting the arctic ice cover by 193,000 square miles – about the size of Cali–areyoukiddingme?–fornia. Something called "sensor drift" started occurring in January 2009 (when Tony reported that the ice levels were back to the 1979 levels), and continued through mid-February, when someone (an internet visitor!) caught the error. Apparently, this can happen, and the quality assurance isn’t quite what it should have been. Gosh.
This guy Tony, he’s a real thorn in the side of these enviro-weenies. He wrote this article a year earlier, exposing the geniuses at NOAA/NASA for falsely claiming that "October 2008 was the hottest [Globally] ever." But alas, the boys and girls at this esteemed organization got the "warmers" all excited over nothing, after some bloggers found anomalies in the data – those darned bloggers.
How many gaffes can they make?
The hits keep coming when NOAA reported the 1990’s as the hottest decade of the 20th century, but had to recant, explaining that they calculated incorrectly, and the 1930’s, in fact, were actually the hottest. The best comment I read was that "Global warming is actually a Y2K bug." Good one. Conversely, 2008 was known as the year of below normal temperatures in the US (including Florida) – and parts of Switzerland experienced their most snow since 1931, and in London since 1922.
Of course, in 2010, parts of the US experienced snow levels that haven’t been since in decades, and Europe is blanketed with massive Christmas snowstorms, after the UK National Weather Service had incorrectly predicted warmer, drier winters for 2008-2010.
Then we come back to a frozen-over Okhotsk and the trapped sailors.
Here’s a tip, enviro-frauds: Weather is variable. It can be warmer and drier than ever in one part of the planet, while it’s colder and wetter than ever in another part – just as ice can thaw and freeze in a variable way in the arctic. Higher temps in 2006-2007, lower temps in 2009-2010.
Keep trying, though, and get back to us when you’ve made ONE solid prediction, go a few years without some sort of data boondoggle, and after you have, say….100 more years of data, ok?
See any difference in the artice ice cover between January 6, 1979 and 2010? Other than an improved resolution, after 30 years? Not really….
