According to the UK Met Office the Arctic will NOT be ice-free by the summer of 2020 as many climate "experts" continue to predict. Nope, it will be at least 2060 before that happens. Mark it on your calendars!Also mark my prediction that "pigs will fly" in 2060, and "hell will freeze over" in the same year :^) Seriously, I have made predictions for 2052 and beyond in my free online novel. The beauty of making predictions fifty years in the future is that most of us will be dead by then and those who are alive will have forgotten.
Good news for the polar bears! Not so good for the shipping companies that planned trans-Arctic routes for transporting oil. Or for Global Warming alarmists.
The full text of the UK Met Office October 15th release is here. Key excerpts (with emphasis added):
"Modelling of Arctic sea ice by the Met Office Hadley Centre climate model shows that ice invariably recovers from extreme events, and that the long-term trend of reduction is robust — with the first ice-free summer expected to occur between 2060 and 2080. It is unlikely that the Arctic will experience ice-free summers by 2020.
"Analysis of the 2007 summer sea-ice minimum has subsequently shown that this was due, in part, to unusual weather patterns. ..."
"The high variability has made it difficult to attribute the observed trend to man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, ...
"About half of the climate models involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change fourth assessment report, show that ice declines in steps — failing to recover from extreme years. The observed temporary recovery from the 2007 minimum in 2008 and 2009 indicates that the Arctic ice has not yet reached a tipping point, if such exists."
In other words, the low point for Arctic ice in 2007 was mostly due to Natural Cycles in the ocean currents and solar phenomena, and not Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) due to human release of formerly sequestered carbon. About half of the most recent IPCC climate models are wrong about Arctic ice. We are nowhere near any kind of tipping point.
Don't get me wrong, I'm still concerned about the continuing rapid increase in atmospheric CO2. However, we have decades to figure out how to deal with it most effectively without further wrecking our economies via the Cap and Trade scam. I hope the coming decades of stable temperatures, and perhaps a bit of Global Cooling, will allow cooler heads to prevail and chose something like a revenue-neutral Carbon Tax. That kind of Carbon Tax would require minimum government enforcement and political chicanery. It would be hard to cheat on. Most importantly, it would actually work to reduce carbon emissions over time, harnessing market forces to do so.
Ira Glickstein
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