Desperate Warmists Try to Save their Skins by Throwing Alarmist 'Sea Ice' Professor to the Wolves

If ever you’ve worried about vanishing Arctic ice, the ‘expert’ almost certainly to blame is a Cambridge professor called Peter Wadhams.

For years now, Wadhams has been the go-to doommonger of choice for any newspaper or green pressure group or huckster politician in need of a scare story about why the Arctic sea ice will very soon be a thing of the past, that it’s all our fault and that basically we’re all doomed. And because he’s a professor from a highly respected university who just happens to specialise in studying sea ice and who has led more than 40 expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic people have tended to believe him.

Here is an interview he gave last year to a greenie website run by the German-based insurance company Allianz (see how far the tentacles of environmental propaganda reach). In it he says that the IPCC has been far too “complacent” in its estimates of sea ice decline – and that in the summer months it will be non-existent by 2020. He also predicts sea level rises of a metre by the end of the century.

Here he is being bigged up in 2012 by the Guardian’s John Vidal, warning of a sea ice collapse by 2016 and of an impending “global disaster.”

Here’s the Guardian again – Nafeez Ahmed, this time – giving him another opportunity to spout his polar catastrophism, including his theory that the melting sea ice will lead to an even more disastrous methane leak.

Here’s the Telegraph thinking it’s the Guardian in 2011 – and even managing to shoehorn in the threatened polar bears urban myth – eagerly assisted by one Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University.

Here – inevitably – is the BBC’s Roger Harrabin swallowing Wadhams’s claims whole in 2012.

And here, even more inevitably, is Greenpeace celebrating the kind of expert they love: the one who tells them exactly what they want to hear. (Did I mention his name was Peter Wadhams, a professor of Cambridge University?)

Anyway, to cut a long story short, his alarmist scientist colleagues in the alarmist science establishment have decided to throw him to the wolves for being, ahem, too alarmist.

It all kicked off at a meeting held last month at Alarmist Central – aka the notoriously parti-pris Royal Society. Instead of listening respectfully to the great man’s iterations of imminent doom, the assembled warmists – among them Michael Mann’s chum Gavin Schmidt – spent much of Wadham’s lecture engaged in mocking tweeting.

Here’s a flavour:

@ClimateOfGavin: Wadhams clearly states that there is no physics behind his extrapolations.

@Ed_Hawkins: Good to see Wadhams extreme views challenged by other climate scientists. Disappointed he didn’t agree to bet on 2015 sea-ice!

@ClimateOfGavin: In case there was any ambiguity, statements by Wadhams on arctic sea ice/CH4 trends are *not* widely agreed with by scientists

@nathanaelmelia: Entertaining break with Wadhams. Back to science now

@jamesannan: Hasn’t Wadhams already predicted 4 of the last 0 ice-free summers?

An understandably miffed Wadhams has now written to the Royal Society to complain about this disrespectful treatment. But his former comrades-in-alarmism have given him the brush-off with the following statement:

‘Climate scientists are often accused of not being critical of work presented by “their own”.”we re-iterate that climate scientists have long been criticized for not speaking against those who some may consider “extremists” within our community.’

What they say here is perfectly true. It is indeed the case that the alarmist community has long been excedingly reluctant to subject the science of anyone on the warmist side of the argument to any kind of critical scrutiny: which is why, of course, so many dodgy papers have crept into the IPCC reports, sanctioned by a”peer-review” process so corrupt it has now become more accurately known as “pal review”.

The fact that they have now had a change of heart is, to a degree, encouraging. But not, I would suggest, because it signifies a new sense of realism, honesty and rigour within the climate alarmist establishment. Only because of what it says about the panic and desperation that is beginning to set in as they realise that the game is up.

Poor Peter Wadhams is being thrown to the wolves not because his science is flawed and unduly alarmist – it’s quite obvious that his contemporaries have known this for quite some time – but rather because these unconscionable creeps need a handy sacrificial victim to distract from their corruption, incompetence and malpractice.

The many journalists who so credulously reported on his nonsense deserve little credit either. In their eagerness to get a quick attention-grabbing story they not only failed in their basic duty to check the credibility of their sources but also they helped promulgate a myth which formed one of the main pillars of the great global warming narrative.

We should all do more to combat climate change because sea ice, they told us. And from this unscientific idiocy, a million and one more idiocies flowed in the form of higher taxes, higher energy bills, more regulation, more solar panels, more wind farms, more fuel poverty. So it’s really not just Peter Wadhams who should be wolf bait right now. By rights, it should be the whole ruddy lot of them.