Well that news won’t please current beachfront owners.
September is the month when minimum annual Arctic sea ice extent is recorded. We have been warned repeatedly by the Arctic sea ice gurus to expect the summer ice to disappear soon because the world is warming. Experts have taken a peek into their crystal balls and reported the results to the media and we are still waiting for someone to get it right.
This year(2014) was Al Gore’s turn. In 2009 he had suggested 2014 as an early date for the demise of the summer Arctic sea ice. Mother Nature did not acommodate. In 2013, a scientist working for the Sierra Club of Canada saw cracks in the ice in March of 2013 that led him to forecast an Arctic free of sea ice in September of that year. He only had to look 6 months into the future and still got it wrong. There have been many previous attempts to get the year correct and each one has failed. Professor Wadhams is up for 2015 but he apparently got cold feet (must be all the ice in the Arctic) and recently revised his forecast to 2020 under the tried and true scientific theorem that it is harder to invalidate moving goalposts. Scientists need to learn to make their prediction far enough into the future so that they are not around when Mother Nature issues a recall on their crystal ball after their embarrassing gaffe. They all sound so earnest when they are making their predictions and the MSM love the scary sound bites. Bad predictions make them look like they didn’t know what they were talking about. Failed predictions are not only detrimental to their own reputations but to their discipline as well. Public skepticism is understandably enhanced.
The decades from 1910 through the 1940s were a warming period during which newspaper articles worrying about the melting Arctic can be found. Scientists warned about flooding coastal cities from melting ice caps. Perhaps what goes on in the Arctic is cyclical because all that sounds very familiar. We still await the deluge.
Are recent predictions of an ice free Arctic now being exported to more distant decades in an attempt to maintain expert reputations at least until death? But isn’t the climate changing now and much faster than scientists once thought?
Mr Wanless seems to have learned from the Arctic ice free forecasters and has started off with dates so far in the future that few adults alive today will be around to hold him to account even posthumously. However, the curators at the Hall of Fame of Failed Forecasts have already dusted off shelf space for the arrival of his commemorative plaque.
I stumbled across a summary of sea level predictions, errors and revisions here:
Current data here: And Pigs Might Fly!
Interesting stuff presented at AGU2014 here: http://cires.colorado.edu/news/press/2014/AGUgreenland.html
Climate change - the settled science of moving goalposts. It is harder to invalidate a running target.
