Reference: Arctic sea ice drops drastically, Bangkok Post, August 28, 2008

The two most extreme summer ice melts in the Arctic in the satellite data era have occurred during a period of global cooling well after warming had peaked (Arctic sea ice drops drastically, Bangkok Post, August 28, 2008). Therefore they could not have been caused by global warming. Yet, a tendency to blame ice melts on global warming persists. Some time ago, when there was a greater focus on Antarctica than on the Arctic, we were told that global warming was melting the West Antarctic Ice Shelf even though the melting was localized to the Shelf. That idea has since been shelved because there happens to be an active volcano underneath the melting ice (The fire below, Bangkok Post, April 28, 2008). We should also note that the period of the satellite observations being used to infer climate trends is rather short when compared with the periods of known long term cyclical weather phenomena. A brief interval of a longer cycle can therefore be mistaken for a trend, but the data are presented to us as trends anyway and even extrapolated into scary forecasts. These forecasts should be not be accepted at face value without critical evaluation.

Cha-am Jamal
Thailand