The Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Amundsen, assigned to a global warming research mission in the Arctic, was called away from duty last week to help commercial ships navigate the unusually heavy ice in the Hudson Bay – a far cry from the scenario envisioned by Al Gore’s 2009 prediction of an ice-free Arctic by 2014.
The episode brings to mind the ill-fated voyage of the Russian ship Akademik Shokalskiy that became stuck in unexpectedly heavy Antarctic ice in December 2013 while on a research mission to the South Pole.
It seems Mother Nature is simply not cooperating with the ever-more dire global warming forecasts.
A study reported last week that the amount of Arctic sea ice had rebounded by one-third after the cool summer of 2013, erasing the prior three years of sea ice melt. Global sea ice level is on a zero trend for the decade, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
All this is despite atmospheric levels of CO2 being about 8 percent higher over that timeframe and climate alarmist assertions that oceans are absorbing 90 percent of the excess heat caused by global warming.
All this reality has not sat well at all with at least one key alarmist.
Primordial climate hysteric James Hansen last week rushed to publication a study predicting that catastrophic polar ice melt, raising sea level 15-27 feet, could be as little as 10 years away. Hansen completely by-passed the normal journal peer-review process to sound the alarm.
Hansen’s message was so over the top though, other alarmists rushed to squelch it. Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, for example, described Hansen’s paper to the New York Times as “rife with speculation and ‘what if’ scenarios” and “[having] many conjectures and huge extrapolations based on quite flimsy evidence.”
With reality not cooperating, climate alarmists are apparently leery of making forecasts that can be verified (or more likely not verified) within their working careers.
Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com (@JunkScience).