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| Arctic Ice Regrows, As Northern Hemisphere Chills
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Posted on: Tue, 5 Feb 2008 16:24:23 +1100
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Arctic Ice Regrows, As Northern Hemisphere Chills
Christopher Booker
4 Feb 2008
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/02/03/nbook103.xml
So it appears that Arctic ice isn't vanishing after all
There was some coverage of the chaos caused in central and southern
China by their heaviest snowfalls for decades - but little attention was
paid to the snow that last week carpeted Jerusalem, Damascus and Amman,
none of them exactly used to Dickensian Christmas card weather.
Similarly, Saudis last month expressed amazement at their heaviest snow
for many years, in Afghanistan snow and freezing weather killed 120
people and large parts of the United States and Canada have been swept
by unusually fierce blizzards.
If the northern hemisphere's chilliest winter in a long time was bad
news for the propagandists of global warming, they also had to face
serious questions about some of the most iconic images used to support
the claims that the world is hotting up towards disaster.
Last autumn the BBC and others could scarcely contain their excitement
in reporting that the Arctic ice was melting so fast there would soon be
none left.
Sea ice cover had shrunk to the lowest level ever recorded. But for some
reason the warmists are less keen on the latest satellite findings,
reported by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA) on the website Cryosphere Today by the University of Illinois.
This body is committed to warmist orthodoxy and contributes to the work
of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Yet its graph of
northern hemisphere sea ice area, which shows the ice shrinking from 13
million sq km to just 4 million from the start of 2007 to October, also
shows it now almost back to 13 million sq km.
A second graph, "Global Ice Area", shows a similar pattern repeated
every year since satellite records began in 1979; while a third,
"Southern Hemisphere Ice", shows that sea ice has actually expanded in
recent years, well above its 30-year mean.
Still more inconvenient was the truth about an image that has been
relentlessly exploited to promote this panic over the "vanishing" Arctic
ice. It is the photograph of two polar bears standing forlornly on the
fast-melting remains of an iceberg which has been reproduced thousands
of times to show that there will soon be no bears left (ignoring
evidence that their numbers have risen recently).
Now, thanks to a Canadian journalist, Carole Williams (on
NewsWithViews.com), we can read the story behind this picture, which was
taken in 2004 just off Alaska by a marine biologist, Amanda Byrd. As Ms
Byrd is happy to point out, the bears were in no danger so close to the
coast (they can swim 100 miles). She wanted a photograph more of the
"wind-sculpted ice" than of the bears.
The biologist who took this picture says this pair were within easy
swimming distance of the Alaskan coast
The image was copied by another member of the crew and passed on to
Environment Canada. Then it was eagerly adopted by the warmist
propaganda machine - above all by Al Gore, who used it to powerful
effect as an emotive backdrop to his highly lucrative lectures.
"Their habitat is melting," he likes to declaim, "beautiful animals,
literally being forced off the planet."
As the old joke has it, it seems those famous bears were not drowning
after all, they were just waving. But the BBC is no more likely to tell
us that than it was to lead the news with last week's snow in Jerusalem.
--
Regards
Bonzo
The Fourth Report of the IPCC might just as well decree the
suppression of all climatology textbooks, and replace them in our
schools with press communiqués. ... Day after day, the same mantra -
that 'the Earth is warming up' - is churned out in all its forms. As
'the
ice melts' and 'sea level rises' the Apocalypse looms ever nearer!
Without realizing it, or perhaps without wishing to, the average
citizen in bamboozled, lobotomized, and lulled into mindless acceptance.
... Non-believers in the greenhouse scenario are in the
position of those long ago who doubted the existence of God ...
Marcel Leroux
It should be abundantly clear by now that the AGW hypothesis is
contradicted by the facts/measurements/observations and should
therefore be abandoned and be substituted by a hypothesis which
better matches the facts.
- Hans Labohm
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231666. Arctic Ice Regrows, As Northern Hemisphere Chills
231965. Arctic Ice Regrows, As Northern Hemisphere Chills
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