Global warming’s ice cube fantasy

My newest article at Brenner Brief 

 Are Scientists who do not use scientific principles to reach conclusions really scientists?

Natural ice cube l Photo Credit Wiki Commons

Let me propose a science experiment, don’t worry you don’t actually have to perform the experiment, this is the best kind of science, you can do it in your mind using only good old common sense. First take two identical ice cubes outside and place one in the sun and one in the shade, which will melt faster? Technically they are both in the same air temperature the sunshine hitting the surface of the ice is not air temperature.

Everyone knows that the ice-cube in the sun is going to melt much faster than the one in the shade. Just for kicks and giggles I actually performed this experiment. At the time that I sacrificed my two ice cubes to science it was a clear sunny day and my digital thermostat said it was 86 degrees Fahrenheit outside. Both cubes were placed on the same surface, grass. The cube in the sun melted, in just over 21 minutes. The cube in the shade however held on for 37 minutes. Of course you knew this would be the case because you have common sense.

Let’s take our common sense experiment a little further. Let’s take two more imaginary ice cubes and place one in a refrigerator where the temperature is probably around 36 degrees. How long would it take that ice-cube to melt? Well my test cube is still in my fridge after 48 hours and looks like it will be there for longer than I care to wait to write this article.  Do I even need to mention what happens to an ice-cube in a freezer or will we all just stipulate that without the sun beating down on it that ice kept below freezing will not melt.

So let’s review, ice above freezing temperatures melts faster in the sun than ice melts in the same temperature without sun.  Ice near freezing temperature without sun melts very slowly but with sun will melt faster. Ice below freezing will not melt without the sun, period.  Childish review of the known properties of ice but I think necessary when reviewing modern climate cult narratives.

Now check out the graph below which I will explain in more detail after you have looked at it for a minute, or skipped it and gone to the text below.  Unlike the NSA I have no way of monitoring your compliance.

Arctic Temperatures
Daily Mean Temperatures North of 80 degree North (2013). from DMI Center for Ocean and Ice

This is a graph from the Danish Meteorological Institute of last years temperatures above 80 degrees North latitude which is considered the high Arctic.  Being a scientific institution and all the DMI measures temperatures in Kelvin (K) but to make it simple for us lay people they put a blue line at 273.5 K which is the freezing mark (32 degF).  To further identify what we are talking about,  235 degrees Kelvin is the same as -36.67 degrees fahrenheit, or very, very cold.

The green line is the average temperature for this region between the years 1958-2002. Before I get into deeper “scientific” analysis I would have you note that in 2013 the summer months in this northern most Arctic region were much colder than “normal.” If you look at the  charts going back to the beginning of the series in 1958 few years were as cold as it was this past summer in the “Polar Circle.”  Perhaps this is why the “polar vortex” which attacked the United States this winter was so cold? What you will also note is that there are actually very few days where the temperature, even in a normal year, reach above freezing. In an average year about 90 days are above freezing and despite global warming in 2014 there were less than half that number!  This all means that, on average, for 270 days a year this region is below freezing where ice will not melt unless exposed to the sun. Remember though the Sun is not directly causing global warming “man-made” CO2 is, or so the story goes.

There is a very simple reason why this region is so cold, from late September to late March there is no direct sunlight, it is in either complete darkness orvarying stages of twilight. Of course the opposite is also true, this is after all the “land of the midnight sun” there is a period during the summer months where just like the old British Empire “the Sun never sets.” This period of nearly continuous sunlight, if not cloudy,  accounts for the period in the graph above where temperatures hover around freezing.

In the graph above 275 degrees Kelvin is your refrigerator, 35.33 degF and we know how long it takes to melt an ice-cube in your refrigerator. The warmest temperature ever recorded at the North Pole was a balmy 41 degF. To understand how truly cold the Arctic region is the closest fixed weather station to the North Pole is in Greenland 440 miles south of the Pole. The average July temperature, the hottest month,  at this station is 35 degrees and this is 440 miles south of the North Pole!

Why is all of this important? Well let’s just consider everything below that blue line as your freezer and everything above that blue line your refrigerator. A concept that is just too simple for modern climate scientists with there play station computer models to grasp.

From National Geographic Magazine, December 12, 2007:

Just last year two top scientists surprised their colleagues by projecting that the Arctic sea ice was melting so rapidly that it could disappear entirely by the summer of 2040.

This week, after reviewing his own new data, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: “At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions.”

Forget for a moment, if you can, the inaccuracy of the prediction, just consider the lack of  basic science behind the prediction. There are reasons that the Arctic Ocean which includes nearly all the area represented in the above graph could conceivably become ice-free but global warming even under the most dire of predictions is not one of them. Unfavorable winds and currents along with a particularly clear skied summer season might conspire to completely break up the ice pack, though there is no record of this ever occurring, but that is not what the “climate scientist” is suggesting what they are saying that the ice will melt due to global warming (air temperature).

“The Arctic is screaming,” said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the government’s snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colorado….

…”The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming,” said Zwally, who as a teenager hauled coal. “Now as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines.”

These scientists were not alone in these fantastic claims at the time, another climate scientist, Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union convention that he thought it would be even worse than previously predicted:

Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007,” the researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, explained to the BBC. “So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.”

This obviously is the same 2013 represented in the graph above and this is the prediction that Al Gore cited when he made the same claim in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. Putting aside Al Gore for a moment, ah that we could, you may be thinking that these are trained scientists, surely they know what they are doing. Well if they knew what they were doing would they be brazenly projecting an ice free Arctic Ocean when temperatures actually turned out to be colder than normal? Are Scientists who do not use scientific principles to reach conclusions really scientists?

The idea that this area of the globe is going to “melt” due to man-made global warming is just pure silliness. Despite the, as usual, attempt to put a Cassandra spin on the news, consider the implications of this press releasefrom NASA last year on that “vulnerable” Arctic sea ice.

After an unusually cold summer in the northernmost latitudes, Arctic sea ice appears to have reached its annual minimum summer extent for 2013 on Sept. 13, the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado in Boulder has reported. Analysis of satellite data by NSIDC and NASA showed that the sea ice extent shrunk to 1.97 million square miles (5.10 million square kilometers).

This year’s sea ice extent is substantially higher than last year’s record low minimum. On Sept.16, 2012, Arctic sea ice reached its smallest extent ever recorded by satellites at 1.32 million square miles (3.41 million square kilometers). That is about half the size of the average minimum extent from 1981 to 2010.

The predictions of an ice-free Arctic made in 2007 were only off by 1.32 million square miles when Arctic Sea Ice reached its “lowest extent ever” in 2012. “Ever” actually means since 1979 when satellites started recording sea ice which was way back near the end of the disco epoch geologically speaking.

Consider this for just a moment, how much warmer would it have to be to melt what amounts to an ice-cube the size of the state of Colorado (in 2012) or Texas (2013) in the short time frame available before the long cold winter night grips the Arctic? The government paid scientists whose job it is to forecast this based on their years of experience and the most advanced and expensive climate models were off by well over a million square miles in 2012 and almost 2 million square miles in 2013.

It is beyond shameful that these “scientists” had the unmitigated gall to go out and claim such irreconcilable faulty predictions in such hyperbolic terms. “The Arctic is screaming,” “The canary has died,” really?

It is essential to remember it is these very models with their temperature projections that have not only been so far off, but are still used as a basis for so many apocalyptic predictions by climate “scientists.”  These continued projections of  an”ice free” Arctic defy simple common sense and basic physical principles. As I write this on May 18, 2014 there is still ice on Lake Superior which is 5000 miles south of the high Arctic and receives direct sunlight the year round.

 The idea that even if, a big if, temperatures continue to rise over the next century that they will somehow melt the Arctic Ocean in the brief time span available to do so without some other unusual climatic or natural event is simply ludicrous. Everything written here is even more applicable for Antarctica where temperatures and climate conditions are even far more extreme.

Perhaps though the real shame is that the scientific community has succeeded in convincing the world that if this did happen it would be a horrible thing. The fact is that it would be wonderful, a warmer environment would be a boon to life on Earth.  Human, animal and plant life would all greatly benefit from an increase in global temperatures of a few degrees. There would be losers for sure, there always is, but the benefits would greatly outweigh the negative effects, something which the scientific community with their agendas and greed dare not admit or investigate while they are busy melting ice cubes in freezers.