Our title today is shamelessly plagiarised from the “Watts Up With That” blog of our old friend Anthony Watts. However daring to be different we have redacted the initial word “Claim -“.
The Last Interglacial (LIG), a warmer period 130,000–116,000 years before present, is a potential analogue for future climate change. Stronger LIG summertime insolation at high northern latitudes drove Arctic land summer temperatures 4–5 °C higher than in the pre-industrial era. Climate model simulations have previously failed to capture these elevated temperatures, possibly because they were unable to correctly capture LIG sea-ice changes. Here, we show that the latest version of the fully coupled UK Hadley Center climate model (HadGEM3) simulates a more accurate Arctic LIG climate, including elevated temperatures. Improved model physics, including a sophisticated sea-ice melt-pond scheme, result in a complete simulated loss of Arctic sea ice in summer during the LIG, which has yet to be simulated in past generations of models. This ice-free Arctic yields a compelling solution to the long-standing puzzle of what drove LIG Arctic warmth and supports a fast retreat of future Arctic summer sea ice.
There’s no mention of “2035” in there, so let’s look instead at yesterday’s press release from the British Antarctic Survey:
Regular readers will no doubt recall that I have previously been “banned” on trumped up charges at the “Watts Up With That” blog. It thus came as a pleasant surprise when I recently popped back there and tried to pass comment on a “reprint” of an article by Professor Byron Sharp in Medium entitled “How I changed my mind… about global warming“:
Most, if not all, people would consider themselves to be open-minded. Yet, if you ask someone to name an important belief that they have changed their mind about, in response to evidence and/or logic, most struggle to give even one example.
This is the first in a series of blogs where I describe how and why I changed my mind about something. I hope to encourage myself to change my mind more often. And to encourage others.
Short summary: I now worry less about global warming than I did, the scientific evidence is that it’s not going to be catastrophic. PS Our best course of action is to adapt to the effects and to invest in R&D to develop new low carbon energy.
My initial comments survived the onerous WUWT moderation process and several of them were published without undue delay. The gist of my argument was quite simple:
I even managed to comment when somebody introduced the word “thickness” into the discussion:
Needless to say my good fortune couldn’t last forever, and eventually Anthony himself was on my case:
My request for an explanation has thus far been ignored:
How “unfortunate” it is then, that a couple of days after my “banning” on yet more trumped up charges WUWT published an article by David Middleton entitled “Back to the Anthropocene! Arctic Sea Ice Edition”, telling a familiar tale:
Two key takeaways:
Maximum Holocene sea ice extent occurred within the past 500-1,000 years at every location.
The current sea ice extent is higher at all of the locations than over 50% to 85% of the Holocene.
A significant reduction in Arctic summer sea ice relative to today, would be returning to Early Holocene conditions. If we currently have an “Anthropocene in the Arctic,” it’s actually icier than most of the Holocene’s “Goldilocks conditions.”
David’s article once again neglected to mention Arctic sea ice thickness and/or volume. My plaintive cries were made in vain:
Amongst other things my recent “banning” from Watts Up With That means I am unable to ask David the same question my Arctic alter ego “Snow White” recently put to Down Under’s favourite skeptical senator, Malcolm Roberts:
What were the sea levels in London like at the time @MRobertsQLD? Or Miami, or Manhattan, or Dhaka?
Arctic tours ship MS MALMO with 16 passengers on board got stuck in ice on Sep 3 off Longyearbyen, Svalbard Archipelago, halfway between Norway and North Pole. The ship is on Arctic tour with Climate Change documentary film team, and tourists, concerned with Climate Change and melting Arctic ice. All 16 Climate Change warriors were evacuated by helicopter in challenging conditions, all are safe. 7 crew remains on board, waiting for Coast Guard ship assistance.
Something is very wrong with Arctic ice, instead of melting as ordered by UN/IPCC, it captured the ship with Climate Change Warriors.
Not a lot of people know that despite all that purple prose Malmö has somehow managed to emerge unscathed from the clutches of the sea ice on the other side of Svalbard from Longyearbyen:
It will come as no surprise to our regular readers that the web site of our even older friend Anthony Watts has also published the self same story, also without the happy ending.
Whilst it is reasonable to assume that Paul and Anthony are not fluent in Norwegian, it seems they are also unfamiliar with Google. If they had performed the merest modicum of due diligence and employed the services of Google translate before pressing the “publish” button they would have discovered the coverage of the “massive false information” about the Malmö’s story in the Svalbard Post, published on September 5th:
Trygve Monsen and expedition leader Tore Toppe were among the 16 who were evacuated when MS Malmö got stuck in the ice on Tuesday. They respond strongly to what they call misinformation on the right-wing website document.no
Those who were on board MS Malmö have a completely different version of events.
“First, we are not Swedish. We are a group of middle aged Norwegians following the route of the Ahlmann expedition of 1931“, says Trygve Monsen. He himself has worked for the Norwegian press for a long time, particularly Aftenposten, where he has been both digital manager and correspondent in Berlin.
Together with Expedition Chief Tore Topp, Monsen arrived at the Svalbard Post on Thursday. He had tried to contact document.no many times before that, to correct the false information. They also say that they are not climate activists.
“No way. But when you are in the Arctic, and have been here many times over several years, you can’t help but notice what is happening to the environment up here”, says Topp. This is the seventh expedition he has led in the Arctic.
The evacuation of MS Malmö on Tuesday took place without significant drama. The boat was surprised by harsh ice conditions and eventually got stuck. The captain decided to ask for evacuation, for safety. The Governor came by helicopter and after a few minutes all the passengers were evacuated. The crew on the boat remained on board, and later got help from KV “Andenes” to get out of the sea ice.
In other old news the southern route through the Northwest Passage opened on August 15th this year, although with the assistance of the icebreaker CCGS Terry Fox the MS Bremen made it through a few days earlier:
[Edit – September 11th]
MS Malmö is now back in the range of an AIS receiver, whilst apparently en route back to Norway:
[Edit – September 12th]
I ventured onto Twitter this morning, where I discovered Matt Ridley regurgitating the same nonsense about MS Malmö, plus this news from the Norwegian Coastguard:
Kystvakten fikk melding om at MS Malmø trengte assistanse sør i Hinlopen-stredet. Da KV Andenes kom frem til området hadde MS Malmø klart å komme seg løs fra isen i åpen råk. Fartøyet ble eskortert ut av området og MS Malmø går nå for egen maskin tilbake til Longyearbyen. pic.twitter.com/ZFpa6fEmCN
Perhaps Paul, Anthony, Matt et al. would care to click @Jack’s helpfully provided “Translate Tweet” button?
I’ve also discovered that document.no eventually published a “correction” to their original story on September 9th. Perhaps Paul, Anthony, Matt et al. would care to follow suit?
Yet another greenie expedition to the Arctic to raise awareness of ‘global warming’ has been scuppered by unexpected large quantities of ice.
Furthermore James has brought my attention to the fact that my foolish numbering system is out of date. According to his reckoning MS Malmö is actually “Ship of Fools IV”. Mind you he’s also claiming that Northabout was “Ship of Fools II”, which is obviously another porkie pie of epic proportions.
James also repeats the “stuck in ice off Longyearbyen” nonsense. For Donald, James, Paul, Anthony, Matt et al. here’s the current view of all the sea ice off Longyearbyen, via Joss Stone on Twitter:
Wow, this place is stunning. Feel very lucky to be here. Cant wait to share our experiences with you. Now, where can I get a cup of tea? #arcticpic.twitter.com/JpjbS48Ebj
In actual fact there is of course currently less sea ice in the Arctic than in any previous year (in the satellite record) apart from 2012:
[Edit – September 13th]
Today on Twitter I’ve found myself in conversation about #MalmoGate with Ken. He doesn’t say an awful lot, but he appears to think that MS Malmö being “surprised by harsh ice conditions” is significant in some way:
What’s that supposed to prove Ken?
According to #WUWT “MS Malmo… got stuck in ice on Sep 3 off Longyearbyen”
The captain would have been very surprised to encounter such conditions, because that’s unadulterated ballcocks! #MalmoGate
One of the things that is actually significant about the 2019 melting season is quite the reverse of that. The Swedish icebreaker Oden spent a couple of weeks pootling around in the Sherard Osborn Fjord in North Greenland without getting “stuck in the vanishing Arctic ice”:
[Edit – September 14th]
What Ken, Paul Joseph, Donald, James, Paul, Anthony, Matt et al. evidently fail to comprehend is that the sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean doesn’t merely expand and contract with the seasons. It also moves. Just in case any of them do get around to doing a modicum of due diligence, take a good long look at this animation of Arctic sea ice age from the September 2015 minimum to the end of August this year:
[Edit – September 15th]
It has just come to my attention that our very old friend Tony Heller (the artist formally known as Steve Goddard) has somewhat belatedly jumped on the MalmoGate bandwagon:
Sixty years ago this week, the USS Skate surfaced at the North Pole. Arctic sea ice was two meters thick.
using these images as “evidence”:
Please note that according to the July 1959 issue of National Geographic magazine:
The winter sun still hid below the horizon last March 17 when USS Skate crunched up through the ice at 90° N – first ship in history ever to surface at the Pole.
Note also that when USS Skate surfaced at the North Pole on March 17th 1959 she was alone. There was no polynya to be seen, let alone a second submarine in one.
What do you suppose the odds are that Tony’s “No Change In Arctic Sea Ice Over The Past 60 Years” assertion is equally aberrant?
[Edit – August 18th]
A reader on Twitter, apparently a fan of Mr. Heller asks:
So, is there any change in Article sea Ice over the last 60 yrs, which was the title of the post?
Of course there is! According to Commander James Calvert in the May 1959 edition of LIFE magazine:
On March 17 we arrived in the vicinity of the geographic North Pole. We had a job we very much wanted to do here, but as we cruised back and forth in the darkness below the Pole it seemed doubtful that we would be able to perform the last service requested by Sir Hubert Wilkins. No frozen leads or polynyas appeared. For a time I thought it would be necessary to conduct the service while submerged and discharge the ashes from one of the torpedo tubes as we passed under the pole.
Then suddenly we spotted the faint light of a small lead and we started up. This was our toughest surfacing so far. The quarters were cramped and we had to take special care not to hit Skate’s delicate rudder against the walls of ice. It took us two hours of careful maneuvering before Skate’s sail buckled the ice at the precise top of the world.
Climbing to the bridge I was greeted by an awesome sight. Skate was in a small lead completely surrounded by 10-foot-high hummocks of ice. This was the most inhospitable terrain we had seen so far.
[Edit – October 18th 2019]
The Skate and Seadragon surfacing at the North Pole meme has just been resurrected by David Middleton at “Watts Up With That”. He asserts that:
The North Pole may not have been totally ice free in 1962, but there clearly was a lot of open water…
USS SKATE (SSN 578), CDR Joseph L. Skoog (Dr. W.K. Lyon and Richard Boyle), and USS SEADRAGON (SSN 584), CDR Charles D. Summitt, (Walter Wittman) conducted the first rendezvous of 2 ships at the North Pole.
Unfortunately for Mr. Middleton, Commander Summitt wrote a book about his experiences, the relevant section of which reads as follows:
When we were a couple of miles from the pole, we started watching for a large enough polynya to hold both of us. However, we reached the pole without either of us having any luck.
Regular readers will be aware that Snow White and I have long been banished from the hallowed halls of Watts Up With That. What is one to do, then, when Anthony Watts publishes these scurrilous allegations about one’s character by the pseudonymous “Sunsettommy” under an article by David Middleton on a topic under much discussion here?
Your ice obsession is destroying you and Jim Hunt,who was exposed as a dishonest person over his absurd cherry picking of a small area while Tony was covering the ENTIRE Arctic region. Tony just today exposed Hunts dishonesty, by showing that his small Canadian region is actually thicker than last year.
The two of you are gaining a stellar reputation as wild eyed warmist morons,who will lie or distort the topic presented, Tony has effectively destroyed your low Arctic ice baloney, to the point that you now get derision there, since your replies are free of any science information,meaning you have no effective counterpoint to offer,just brainless opinions, nothing more.
With the usual channels of communication solidly blocked our very good friend Alice F. helpfully leapt into the breach:
SST – It seems as though you’ve been unable to confirm Aphan’s conjecture with evidence of an accurate prediction [from Tony Heller]? Meanwhile your aforementioned “Mr. Hunt” posted this “data based presentation” earlier:
“You don’t even need to be familiar with the satellite products to understand that the sea ice edge to the north of the Barents Sea doesn’t currently consist of multi-year ice.”
Any comment?
Much witty banter about Arctic sea ice maps and metrics ensued! Here is one of the more inventive comments, from the pseudonymous “2hotel9”:
Every time leftarded c*nts like you get caught being leftarded c*nts all you do is cry. Wahwahwahwahwahwahwah. Too f*cking funny.
That sort of thing apparently does not violate any of the carefully crafted house rules at WUWT, whereas this comment of Alice’s does:
Unabashed by her love letter being so swiftly trampled underfoot on the WUWT cutting room floor Alice valiantly pursued the matter with Anthony on Twitter, where in his habitual fashion he gleefully unfrocked her in public view of the whole of cyberspace:
Anthony Watts has finally [snip]ped the four letter words uttered by “2hotel9”.
However there’s still no sign of him allowing yours truly a right of reply to SST’s libellous attacks upon my unblemished (outside the cryodenialosphere) character:
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