11 years ago, Al Gore quoted a government paid expert, who reported that it was 75% likely there would be no more summer Arctic Ice by 2013!
Boy was this prediction spectacularly wrong!
There have been many, many predictions that there would be no more ice in the arctic at least in summers. Many are made by the experts we are supposed to rely on for accurate information. In 2009, Al Gore said it, it is on YouTube. Mr. Gore quoted this government expert that it was 75% likely that the end of arctic ice was going to happen soon at a major climate conference where they talked about CO2 being the control knob of the climate. They said that our climate was warming so fast that is why the arctic ice would be gone.
BTW: Water vapor is the biggest most important green house gas. Because there is so much more of it. Clouds and humidity make huge differences in whether our weather and climate warms or cools over time.
September is the month for the lowest arctic ice extent. This year it was nearly 1.5 million square miles. That is about half the square miles of the lower 48 states. That’s far from being gone.
Image September 15th Arctic Sea Ice Extent – Lowest 1.44 million square miles
This is the second lowest extent in 42 years of satellite measurements, back to 1979. 2012 was the smallest arctic extent. This 42 year of measurements is not very long in the big scope of the planet and what we know. Second smallest seems bad. Yet …
This is what was said about the arctic ice in the past, in 1922. This was marked as true by Snopes.
The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consulate, at Bergen, Norway.
Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.
Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.
I apologize, I neglected to mention that this report was from November 2, 1922. As reported by the AP and published in The Washington Post — 88 years ago!
The arctic ice has been ebbing and flowing since the beginning of time. It has been greater and less than now in just the last 200 years. The ice extent was likely smaller in 1922 than 90 years later in 2012. And it was very likely when Greenland was green during the Medieval Warm Period, from about 950 to 1300, there was even less arctic ice.
We do know that the earth has been on a general warming trend since the end of the little ice age, sometime around 1750. Even with the general warming trend there have been decades and years with lower temperatures, such as the early 1800’s and the 1970’s. We are thankfully in a modern warm period. The last ones were the Roman and Medieval warm periods when it was warmer than it is now.
