The Arctic Stays Frozen While Climate Science Melts

None of the prognostications of doom have come true

A mainstay of the climate alarmist movement is that the melting of the frozen Arctic Sea is a bellwether of anthropogenic climate change. It is a ‘canary in the coalmine’, warning of us of the peril of the impending catastrophe of our own creation. A few years into the new century, satellite measurements of the Arctic’s sea ice extent began to show what appeared to be a precipitous decline. If these trends continued, warned scientists, the Arctic would soon be free of sea ice in the summer. And that, warned population biologists, was a death warrant for the humble polar bear, whose hunting ground would disappear beneath her paws. Children across the planet wept as David Attenborough described the plight of these poor creatures on BBC natural history documentaries. But this week, it turns out to be that mainstay which is melting at a much faster rate than the ice. The climate debate is changing, and it is the unhumble climate scientists and activists that are in danger of extinction through embarrassment.

In the Guardian this week, environment editor Damian Carrington reports on a new scientific study published in Geophysical Research Letters. “The melting of sea ice in the Arctic has slowed dramatically in the past 20 years, scientists have reported, with no statistically significant decline in its extent since 2005,” he wrote.