The great ‘ice pause’: A 10 Year Hiatus in Arctic Ice Decline – ‘No significant change in the past decade’
By David Whitehouse, GWPF Science Editor
It’s that time of year when the minimum ice extent in the Arctic. One common way to look at it is to pick a particular month and wield a straight line. Fig 1 is from 1979 showing the ice extent going down and down, prompting claims of an ice-free Arctic sometime in the near future. It shows the declining Arctic ice cover which seems precipitous until one considers that it is a decline of about 10% by its measure of ice extent in 35 years! Important certainly but not as dramatic as the graph shows. But with graphs like those one needs to step back and consider the context, for it does not show what it appears to.
Between 1979 and 2015 – the years covered by the graph – atmospheric CO2 levels increased a lot, from 340 ppm to 400 ppm. To put it into context the increase from 1960 to 1979 was just 25 ppm. Fig 1 shows that during this unprecedented increase the gradient – the rate of decline – of the sea ice loss remained constant. In other words the addition of almost 20% of CO2 into the atmosphere did not change the behaviour of the sea ice at all. If one was being strict, based only on the arctic ice data and CO2 information, one would have to conclude that there is no correlation between Arctic sea ice extent and atmospheric CO2 levels! Surely one might have expected the more CO2 in the atmosphere the greater would be the so-called polar amplification effect, and the greater the decline in the rate of loss of sea ice.
As I wrote when looking at last year’s data the declining Arctic ice cover has been one of the most powerful images of climate change and that many who follow the debate don’t look too hard at the data. This results in superficial reporting that does not convey any of the complexities of the situation and as such is poor science communication.
Last year a suggestion (which had been made before) that Arctic ice was more resilient that was thought prompted much discussion but little media coverage despite the research being published in Nature Geoscience by Tilling at el (2015)called “Increased Arctic sea ice volume after anomalously low melting in 2013.” The headline was that the volume of Arctic sea ice increased …
BACK TO THE DARK AGES AS BLACKOUT HITS S. AUSTRALIA: THE PRICE FOR HEAVY RELIANCE ON RENEWABLE ENERGY
The blackout will trigger renewed debate over the state’s heavy reliance on renewable energy which has put the electricity network in South Australia under stress.
Traffic in total darkness around the streets of Adelaide as residents are left without power on Wednesday night
Hard on the heels of a “near miss” in July when it narrowly averted widespread blackouts, South Australia was warned on Wednesday night to prepare for an extended loss of electricity in the wake of wild weather.
Described as a once in a 50-year storm, the statewide disruption prompted power companies to warn that users of medical equipment should prepare to use back-ups, and mobile phone users to conserve batteries.
“We are experiencing a state-wide outage which means we have no supply from the upstream transmission network,” electricity distributor SA Power Networks told clients late Wednesday.
In an unprecedented development, the state was cut-off from the national electricity network, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) said “resulting in a state-wide power outage in South Australia”. As a result, the entire electricity market in the state had been suspended as it sought to work with electricity transmission company ElectraNet “to identify and understand the severity of the fault, as well as determine a power restoration time”.
There were no implications for other states from the extensive blackout in South Australia, the energy market operator said.
The extensive disruption follows the narrow avoidance of widespread blackouts in South Australia in July. At that time, the state government brought pressure to bear on a local power company for an idled power station to be restarted to avoid potential disruptions, following a lack of electricity generated from wind and solar sources at a time when it was unable to “import” sufficient supply from Victoria.
But Wednesday’s event will trigger renewed debate over the state’s heavy reliance on renewable energy which has forced the closure of uncompetitive power stations, putting the electricity network in South Australia under stress.
Earlier this week, the Grattan Institute warned that South Australia’s high reliance on renewable energy sources left it exposed to disruptions. It pointed to the fact that while the renewable energy target had encouraged the development of wind and solar generation, it had the potential to undermine supply security at a reasonable price, because it forced the closure of inefficient power stations without encouraging …
Despite ‘hottest year’ even a loaded vague climate survey of Aussies shows 61% don’t agree with warmists
After the hottest ever El Nino year with relentless propaganda on Australian media, even a loaded survey finds that only 39% of Australians agree that humans are the major drivers of the climate. The survey is being painted as a success by obedient “journalists”. But this is not skyrocketing support, it’s more likely last gasp noise. The results will be down again next year (with the weather).
It is yet another meaningless motherhood survey that avoids asking real questions, offers unbalanced answers, and uses the same ambiguous language as most of these pointless surveys do. Would you like apple-pie?
Who doesn’t want nicer weather — and for free?
The questions climate fans are too scared to ask
Obviously The Climate Institute don’t want real answers, which they must know would be devastating. They won’t ask how much people want to pay out their own pocket to fix the climate. They won’t ask people to rank “climate change” against all the other issues they care about. They won’t ask people if Climate Change is a scam, a con, or a scheme to make the green industry rich (a year ago a US poll showed 31% were happy to call climate change a “total hoax“). Things don’t get more skeptical than that, but if surveyors don’t ask, they’ll never know.
These surveys never ask if the public thinks windmills will slow storms or make floods less likely. There is a good reason for that…
The ugly truth — for the public it’s not important, and they don’t want to pay
…The EPA’s ‘Clean Power Plan’: Executive Power Unhinged
…The ‘Science’ Underlying Climate Alarmism Turns Up Missing
In the list of President Obama’s favorite things to do, using government power to save the world from human-caused “climate change” has to rank at the top. From the time of his nomination acceptance speech in June 2008 (“this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal . . .”), through all of his State of the Union addresses, and right up to the present, he has never missed an opportunity to lecture us on how atmospheric warming from our sinful “greenhouse gas” emissions is the greatest crisis facing humanity. Just a couple of weeks ago, while on his way in Air Force One to China to “ratify” his new climate non-treaty treaty, he stopped off to make two speeches on the subject, one in Nevada and the other in Hawaii. From the Guardian on September 1:
Obama embraced language that would not be out of place from an environmental group, calling on politicians “to be less concerned with special interests and more concerned about the judgment of future generations”. He lamented the “withering” crops in the Marshall Islands and the fact that the government of Kiribati, another low-lying Pacific nation, has purchased land in Fiji to relocate its people due to the rising seas.
And don’t forget, Air Force One is two 747s, not just one. Hey, you wouldn’t want the President to go crossing the Pacific without a backup 747, now would you? And while the President lectures us about our sins against the planet, his EPA and other agencies embark on the project to impose penance on us by forcing the closure of coal and other fossil fuel power plants, blocking pipelines, bankrupting the coal mining industry, subsidizing intermittent power sources that can’t possibly run a fully operational electrical grid at reasonable cost, and multiplying our cost of electricity by an order of magnitude or so. To save the planet!
But is there actually any scientific basis for this? Supposedly, it’s to be found in a document uttered by EPA back in December 2009, known as the “Endangerment Finding.” In said document, the geniuses at EPA purport to find that the emissions of “greenhouse gases” into the atmosphere are causing a danger to human health and welfare through the greenhouse warming mechanism. But, you ask, is there any actual