Icecap Note: Before reading George’s rebuttal, see this right on Watts Up with That perspective. Here is George’s Post.

Few phenomena generate as much heat as disputes about current orthodoxies concerning global warming. This column recently reported and commented on some developments pertinent to the debate about whether global warming is occurring and what can and should be done. That column, which expressed skepticism about some emphatic proclamations by the alarmed, took a stroll down memory lane, through the debris of 1970s predictions about the near certainty of calamitous global cooling.

Concerning those predictions, the New York Times was—as it is today in a contrary crusade—a megaphone for the alarmed, as when (May 21, 1975) it reported that “a major cooling of the climate” was “widely considered inevitable” because it was “well established” that the Northern Hemisphere’s climate “has been getting cooler since about 1950.” Now the Times, a trumpet that never sounds retreat in today’s war against warming, has afforded this column an opportunity to revisit another facet of this subject—meretricious journalism in the service of dubious certitudes.

On Wednesday, the Times carried a “news analysis”—a story in the paper’s news section, but one that was not just reporting news—accusing Al Gore and this columnist of inaccuracies. Gore can speak for himself. So can this columnist.

Reporter Andrew Revkin’s story was headlined: “In Debate on Climate Change, Exaggeration Is a Common Pitfall.” Regarding exaggeration, the Times knows whereof it speaks, especially when it revisits, if it ever does, its reporting on the global cooling scare of the 1970s, and its reporting and editorializing—sometimes a distinction without a difference—concerning today’s climate controversies.

Which returns us to Revkin. In a story ostensibly about journalism, he simply asserts—how does he know this?—that the last decade, which passed without warming, was just “a pause in warming.” His attempt to contact this writer was an e-mail sent at 5:47 p.m., a few hours before the Times began printing his story, which was not so time-sensitive—it concerned controversies already many days running—that it had to appear the next day. But Revkin reported that “experts said” this columnist’s intervention in the climate debate was “riddled with” inaccuracies. Revkin’s supposed experts might exist and might have expertise but they do not have names that Revkin wished to divulge. As for the anonymous scientists’ unspecified claims about the column’s supposedly myriad inaccuracies: The column contained many factual assertions but only one has been challenged. The challenge is mistaken.

Citing data from the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, as interpreted on Jan. 1 by Daily Tech, a technology and science news blog, the column said that since September “the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began.” According to the center, global sea ice levels at the end of 2008 were “near or slightly lower than” those of 1979. The center generally does not make its statistics available, but in a Jan. 12 statement the center confirmed that global sea ice levels were within a difference of less than 3 percent of the 1980 level.

So the column accurately reported what the center had reported. But on Feb. 15, the Sunday the column appeared, the center, then receiving many e-mail inquiries, issued a statement saying “we do not know where George Will is getting his information.” The answer was: From the center, via Daily Tech. Consult the center’s Web site where, on Jan. 12, the center posted the confirmation of the data that this column subsequently reported accurately.

The scientists at the Illinois center offer their statistics with responsible caveats germane to margins of error in measurements and precise seasonal comparisons of year-on-year estimates of global sea ice. Nowadays, however, scientists often find themselves enveloped in furies triggered by any expression of skepticism about the global warming consensus (which will prevail until a diametrically different consensus comes along; see the 1970s) in the media-environmental complex. Concerning which:

On Feb. 18 the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that from early January until the middle of this month, a defective performance by satellite monitors that measure sea ice caused an underestimation of the extent of Arctic sea ice by 193,000 square miles, which is approximately the size of California. The Times ("All the news that’s fit to print"), which as of this writing had not printed that story, should unleash Revkin and his unnamed experts.
Read story here.

I have been a bushfire scientist for more than 50 years, dealing with all aspects of bushfires, from prescribed burning to flame chemistry, and serving as supervisor of fire weather services for Australia. We need to understand what has happened so that we can accept or prevent future fire disasters. That this disaster was about to happen became clear when the weather bureau issued an accurate fire weather forecast last Wednesday, which prompted me, as a private citizen, to raise the alarm through a memo distributed to concerned residents.

The decision to ignore the threat has been encouraged by some shocking pseudo-science from a few academics who use arguments that may have a place in political discourse but should have no place in managing our environment and protecting it and us from the bushfire threat. The conclusion of these academics is that high intensity fires are good for the environment and that the resulting mudslides after rains are merely localised and serve to redistribute nutrients. The purpose of this failed policy is to secure uninformed city votes.

Only a few expert retired fire managers, experienced bushies and some courageous politicians are prepared to buck the decision to lock up our bush and leave it to burn. The politicians who willingly accept this rubbish use it to justify the perpetuation of the greatest threat to our forests, water supplies, homes and lives in order to secure a minority green vote. They continue to throw millions (and no doubt soon billions) at ineffective suppression toys, while the few foresters and bush people who know how to manage our public lands are starved of the resources they need to reduce fuel loads.

It is hard for me to see this perversion of public policy and to accept that the folk of the bush have lost their battle to live a safe life in a cared-for rural and forest environment, all because of the environmental fantasies of outraged extremists and latte conservationists.

In a letter to my local paper, the Weekly Times, on January 25, I predicted we were facing a very critical situation in which 1000 to 2000 homes could be lost in the Yarra catchment, the Otways and/or the Strezleckies; that 100 souls could be lost in a most horrible and violent way; and that there was even a threat to Melbourne’s water supply, which could be rendered unusable by the ash and debris. Horrifically, much of this has come to pass, and it is not yet the end of the bushfire season.

In the face of this inferno, the perpetrators of this obscenity should have the decency to stand up and say they were wrong. Southeast Australia is the worst place in the world for bushfires, and we must not waste any time in getting down to the task of making our bush healthy and safe. But don’t hold your breath. Do you hear that lovely sound the warbling pigs make as they fly by? Read full letter here

See in this powerful news 3 New Zealand video and story here how a Family Fined for Firebreak Survived the Inferno.

But today they feel vindicated. “[Being fined] was traumatic and humiliating. It broke us financially - we fought [the decision] because we are right. We still believe we are right,” says Mr Sheahan. Both Liam and Dale Sheahan have criminal records from bulldozing the trees and this meant Dale was targeted by airport security when returning home to New Zealand. “She then gets dragged across with Asian drug dealers and paedophiles and they ask what she has done. She says ‘get rid of trees’ and they say get out,” says Mr Sheahan. On Saturday night they faced the fire that so many others fled from. 

Global warming alarmists who study polar ice behavior delight in using very large numbers to scare the rest of us.  In an AP report of a report by a spokesman for the Britian - based Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research says the ice down there is melting “faster than we thought.”

Quoting AP:

The melting “also extends all the way down to what is called west Antarctica,” said Colin Summerhayes, executive director of the Britain-based Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research.

By the end of the century, the accelerated melting could cause sea levels to climb by 3 feet to 5 feet - levels substantially higher than predicted by a major scientific group just two years ago.

Summerhayes said the biggest of the western glaciers, the Pine Island Glacier, is moving 40 percent faster than it was in the 1970s, discharging water and ice more rapidly into the ocean. The Smith Glacier, also in west Antarctica, is moving 83 percent faster than in 1992.

Together, all the glaciers in west Antarctica are losing a total of around 114 billion tons per year because the melting is much greater than new snowfall, he said. “That’s equivalent to the current mass loss from the whole of the Greenland ice sheet,” Summerhayes said. Looked at another way, it’s more weight than 312,000 Empire State Buildings.

End of quotations.

114,000,000,000 tons of ice/water per year.  Run for the hills!!

But wait.  By my computation the continent of Antarctica contains - get this—19,000,000,000,000,000 tons of ice. Assuming that 10% of the ice is West Antarctica Ice Sheet, it would take 167,000 years to melt all that ice at the alarming rate of 114 Bn tons per year.

The area of the oceans is 3,475,000,000,000,000 sq feet.  By my calculation, if the WAIS is 10% of all the ice, then it would take 96 years to raise sea levels 12 inches at the alarming rate of 114,000,000,000 tons of melt per year (3,600,000,000,000 cuft).

Mr. Summerhayes says this rapid melt rate may have been going on since 1970 or 1993. But meanwhile a recent study by Woppelmann et al., cited at http://www.co2science.org/ indicates that sea level rise has been very constant since 1893.

“… since mean sea-level rose at a constant rate over the entire 114 years [up to and including 2007], it seems highly unlikely that the historical increase in the atmosphere’s CO2 content—which accelerated dramatically over this time interval—could have been the ultimate cause of the steady mean sea-level rise.” The rapid rate of melt since possibly 1970 (or 1993) apparently has been having no added effect on the rate of sea level rise.

So, from now on I will be very careful not to be frightened, at face value by reports of massive ice loss from Antarctica and Greenland.  There really is a lot of ice at these two places. See PDF here.

CCNet is a scholarly electronic network edited by Benny Peiser. To subscribe, send an e-mail to listserver@ljmu.ac.uk ("subscribe cambridge-conference").

It looks more like an Ice Age than global warming. There is so much snow in Oslo, where I live, that the city authorities are resorting to dumping truckloads of it into the sea because the usual storage sites on land are full.

That is angering environmentalists who say the snow is far too dirty - scraped up from polluted roads - to be added to the fjord. The story even made it to the front page of the local paper (‘Dumped in the sea’).

In many places around the capital there’s about a metre of snow, the most since 2006 when it was last dumped in the sea. Extra snow usually gets trucked to sites on land, where most of the polluted dirt is left after the thaw. Those stores are now full - in some the snow isn’t expected to melt before September.

But are these mountains of snow a sign that global warming isn’t happening? Unfortunately, more snow might fit projections by the U.N. Climate Panel, which says that northern Europe is likely to get wetter and the south drier as temperatures rise this century. “By the 2070s, hydropower potential for the whole of Europe is expected to decline by 6 percent, with strong regional variations from a 20 to 50 percent decrease in the Mediterranean region to a 15 to 30 increase in northern and eastern Europe.” it said in its 2007 report. So people in northern Europe may have to buy more snow shovels than parasols to cope with global warming? How about where you live? Read post here. (H/T Benny Peiser)

Actually southern and central Europe has had it even worse than northern Europe with mountain snow depths and totals approaching historic levels.

Rueters

Excerpt: “...governments need to keep pumping money into North and South Pole research in order to keep tabs on global warming pressures...”

The Arctic and Antarctic regions are warming faster than previously thought (the new universal talking point - invariably a fabrication), raising world sea levels and making drastic global climate change more likely than ever, international scientists said on Wednesday. New evidence of the trend was uncovered by wide-ranging research in the two areas over the past two years in a United Nations-backed programme dubbed the International Polar Year (IPY), they said.

“Snow and ice are declining in both polar regions, affecting human livelihoods as well as local plant and animal life in the Arctic as well as global atmospheric circulation and sea-level,” according to a summary of a report by the researchers. An assessment of the findings of the research was still being refined, said the IPY’s “State of Polar Research” report.

“But it now appears certain that both the Greenland and the Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass and thus raising sea level, and that the rate of ice loss from Greenland is growing,” it said. “New data also confirm that warming in the Antarctic is much more widespread than it was thought prior to IPY.”

More than 63 countries and some 10,000 scientists took part in the $1.5 billion programme, which began in March 2007 and ends next month.

IPY experts told a news conference that melting appeared to be speeding up, especially in the Western Antarctic region that stretches to near the southern tip of Latin America and which had earlier been thought stable.

“One could expect to see quite dramatic changes in weather in Chile and Argentina as a result,” said Ian Allison, a co-chairman of the programme’s steering committee. Such a trend would be felt around the world. While the challenges to funding posed by the economic crisis, the report said governments need to keep pumping money into North and South Pole research in order to keep tabs on global warming pressures.

It was the fourth internationally coordinated scientific programme on the polar regions, following previous efforts undertaken in 1882-83, 1932-33 and 1957-58. The IPY was organised by the independent International Council for Science and the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).

Just keep the money flowing boys. We’ll get you the story you paid us to find. Don’t pay attention to satellite telling us Antarctic ice extent has been well above normal the last few years or to the fact that we are reporting the icemelt (just as Tom Brokaw did a few years ago in his special referencing it as the “canary in the coal mine") at the peak of the melt season when it melts every year. If it didn’t they would be snow shoeing in Buenos Aires. Note that even with this unprecedented melting reported, the ice is at 30 year normal levels.

Larger image here.

Read this nonsense story here. See real story rebuttals on arctic here and Greenland here.