Reference: Less ice less pups, Bangkok Post, April 19, 2010

Changing wind patterns in the Arctic Oscillation cycle - not temperature - had caused an extensive summer melt of Arctic sea ice in 2007 and a low Arctic ice extent in October of that year. Nevertheless, global warming activists seized on this melt data as the leading indicator of climate change Armageddon with headlines saying that the Arctic "is screaming", that it is the "canary in the coal mine", and that polar bears and other creatures in the Arctic are dying off and facing imminent extinction. They said that melting sea ice had set up a positive feedback system that would cause the summer melts in subsequent years to be greater and greater until the Arctic became ice free in the summer of 2012 unless we acted immediately to cut carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels.

Press releases and "research papers" in this vein continue to this day even though the trend in the summer melt extent has been going in exactly the opposite direction and even though Arctic ice has made a complete recovery from its 2007 melt and even though no actual empirical study of animal populations has shown that their numbers are diminishing.

The 2007 ice data have given such momentum to global warming advocacy that even now, in 2010, in the face of overwhelming data to the contrary, we find find two articles in the Bangkok Post still screaming about Arctic creatures endangered by global warming. Clearly, there are still too many scientists out there whose livelihood depends on publishing papers that support the war against carbon dioxide.

Cha-am Jamal

Thailand