Experts said Arctic sea ice would melt entirely by September 2016 – they were wrong, by Sarah Knapton.
Dire predictions that the Arctic would be free of sea ice by September of this year have proven to be unfounded after latest satellite images showed there is far more ice now than in 2012.
Scientists such as Professor Peter Wadhams, of Cambridge University and Prof Wieslaw Maslowski, of the Naval Postgraduate School in Moderey, California, have regularly forecast the loss of ice by 2016, which has been widely reported by the BBC and other media outlets.
Prof Wadhams, who is considered a leading expert on Arctic sea ice loss, has recently published a book entitled A Farewell To Ice in which he repeats the assertion that the Arctic would free of ice in the middle of this decade.
As late as this summer he was still predicting an ice-free September.
Yet when figures were released for the yearly minimum on September 10, they showed that there was still 1.6 million square miles of sea ice (4.14 square kilometres), which was 21 per cent more than the lowest point in 2012.
Interestingly this is the “Science” section of the Telegraph. To be picky but accurate, this isn’t science because it is about predictions based on modeling. Science is a process of acquiring knowledge by empirical experiment or observation, preferably repeatable in lab conditions but we’ll take what we can get. Actual empirical outcomes trumps any modeling, the Pope, and any theorist. Science is a product of the Enlightenment, which occurred in the 1700s in Europe. Before that, religious and other theories were considered a higher source of authority than empirical data. Climate change has rather reversed all that, because it is entirely based on modeling (i.e. theory) and certain key empirical data is denied by the theorists.
Notice too how the media beat up the scare by widely reporting alarmist prophecies. I’ll bet the eventual reality isn’t reported so much. We could test by surveying people on what they know. I’ll bet a pretty large number of people think the situation is really dire, because they treated the prophecy somewhat like news.
Btw, my prophecy is that the 2020s will be no warmer than the 1980s, and here is why.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
