Christopher Booker – ©The Daily Telegraph | 27 July, 2015
Two events last week brought yet further twists to one of the longest-running controversies of our modern world.
One was the revelation by the European Space Agency that in 2013 and last year, after years when the volume of Arctic ice had been diminishing, it increased again by as much as 33%.
The other was that Canadian scientists studying the effect of climate change on Arctic ice from an icebreaker had to suspend their research when their vessel was called to the aid of other ships trapped in the thickest summer ice seen in Hudson Bay for 20 years.
For more than a decade now the belief that, thanks to global warming, Arctic ice was vanishing has been for the “warmists” the ultimate poster child for their cause, along with those “vanishing” polar bears.
In 2007, with the aid of scientists such as Wieslaw Maslowski and Peter Wadhams, the BBC and others were telling us that the Arctic would be totally “ice-free by 2013”.
By 2011, the BBC’s science editor, Richard Black, was telling us that the ice would “probably be gone within this decade”.
So taken in had others been by all these dire predictions that in 2008 the activist and adventurer Gordon Lewis Pugh, after speaking at a conference alongside Al Gore, set out to paddle a kayak to the North Pole – only to have to abort his trip after a few days because “the ice was too thick”.
In December 2013, the world followed agog the plight of yet another “scientific expedition”, when 52 climate activists, accompanied by reporters from the BBC and the Guardian, sailed into the Antarctic to measure the effects of global warming on its sea-ice.
By Christmas their ship was so dangerously trapped by ice that they had to be helicoptered to a Chinese ship 16km away, which itself then got so trapped in ice that they had to be airlifted again to two other ships even further away.
Of course, the reason they have all wanted the ice at the poles to melt is that this would bring about their ultimate scare scenario: those sea levels rising by as much as 6m, which, as Gore showed in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth, would flood New York, Shanghai and many of the world’s most populous cities.
But, alas, it just is not happening. In recent years there has been more polar ice in the world than at any time since satellite records began in 1979.
The greatest scare story of all simply is not turning out as their computer models predicted.
And no one has been more dangerously taken in by this silly scare story than the warmists themselves.
We might consider an example from the recent literature which illustrates the difficulty of a theory which relies on carbon to explain current global warming. SCIENCEDAILY(Oct. 20, 2008) quoting work by geologists of the Geologic Survey of Norway:
“…the architecture of a sandy shore depends partly on whether wave activity or pack ice has influenced its formation. Beach ridges, which are generally distinct, very long, broad features running parallel to the shoreline, form when there is wave activity and occasional storms. This requires periodically open water…pack-ice ridges which form when drift ice is pressed onto the seashore, piling up shore sediments that lie in its path, have a completely different character … the beach ridges which we have dated to about 6000-7000 years ago where shaped by wave activity. They are located at the mouth of Independence Fjord in north Greenland, on an open, flat plain facing directly onto the Artic Ocean… Such beach formations require that the sea all the way to the North Pole was periodically ice free for a long time. This stands in sharp contrast to the present day situation.”