Arctic Ice Re-freezes In Record Time

You know what these global warming screamers and worry warts remind me of? Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street. Oscar would be the temperamental character with a recurrent pattern of negativistic, defiant, disobedient, and hostile behavior according to Oscar's psychological profile that was psycho-analyzed recently. Yet, people would run around and use the latest news like how the Arctic ice saw massive melting of ice this year that worried even a few scientists to no end. Even to the point of blaming anthropogenic global warming for the rapid ice melting even though past history through millions of years Arctic ice waxed and waned when humans never existed who couldn't have contributed carbon dioxide. Still, some worry warts were bold to predict that there would be no ice in the Arctic ocean by 2040 and some say even earlier! But at the same time these same worry warts continue to ignore (or most likely don't know) recent history as far back in 1903 as far as record keeping goes the North Pole's ice were never always completely covered and that ships made out of wood were able to navigate across a portion of the Arctic ocean through the Northwest Passage.

The changing ice conditions in the Arctic are poorly understood by scientists. Now they have to contend with the fact that from late October into early November of this year (2007) the Arctic had a record-setting pace of re-freezing of ice!

...according to the NASA Earth Observatory. Some 58,000 square miles of ice formed per day for 10 days in late October and early November, a new record.

Welllll, I'll be durned! Record re-freezing of ice! Now what will these scientists say about that? And for the Northern latitudes (that's us and all the way up to the North Pole for you Santy lovers) winter is just barely getting started and the freezing will continue in the Arctic ocean until Spring.

This is all about the media's ability (with nods from their political friends) to manipulate public perception since they are basically an easy and ignorant lot to begin with. Dr. Tim Ball says it well:

Exploitation of fear by environmental groups was explained well in Crichton’s book, State of Fear. He could also have written a book titled, State of Knowledge. Most people know very little about the natural world and how it works. This lack of knowledge is easily exploited and coupled with fear makes it an even more powerful manipulative tool. The idea that knowledge is power isn’t new, but that is the positive side. Lack of knowledge is the negative side and makes you very vulnerable. As Derek Bok said, “If you think education is expensive - try ignorance.” Ignorance allows presentation of natural events as unnatural or normal events as abnormal.

While the media were out preying on public fear on the gloom and doom on disappearing Arctic sea ice they conveniently ignored reports that the Antarctic (i.e. South Pole) winter sea ice extent was the greatest on record. Now, will the sea ice extent for the Arctic become greatest on record, too?

So much for all the Oscars out there who continue to do the chicken little dance. But knowledge is power, folks.

UPDATE:

Climate changes constantly and I don't see anyone disagreeing on that aspect. Yet there is a difference between local and regional pollutions that affects us readily. This is something we can do about (i.e. air pollution, water pollution, land pollution, etc). What many people do not know is that scientists (over 19,000 American scientists - see here and here, and here in a letter ) signed a letter that question (or don't believe) CO2 as being the main driving agent on climate change and cause catastrophic climate results. There are so many factors and parameters involved on the interplays that influence climate change. We are still "green" on learning these hugely complex interactions. And this is an emerging science.

Water vapor is a greenhouse gas that makes up much more of the atmosphere than CO2. Yet we don't understand fully how these things work and why, and how it affects other climatic patterns. It's deeply complex and anyone who says they understand everything that need to be understood is lying through his/her teeth. And the funny thing about CO2 being labeled as a "pollutant" because it isn't. We exhale (and the animals, too) CO2. Maybe we need to slap a carbon tax on people for breathing too much CO2? No more exercises for you exercise freaks! Or tax overweight or out of shape people who exhale too much CO2 after walking around some.

Using scare tactics in order to pass laws and introduce taxes to force people to reduce CO2 will not work. Especially if scare tactics are based on false premises and disinformation. Just plain disengious and sets a dangerous precedence. It's like shoot first and ask questions later.

For those people who utter the words "choose carefully" are nothing more than hypocrites themselves. They are polluters. too. If they exhale CO2, then they are polluters. Use plastic? They are polluters. Burn biofuels? They are CO2 polluters. Buy food? You're a polluter of CO2 and everything else. It'd be better to "choose carefully" on who are neighbors will be and I'd be more concerned about nuclear/chemical/biological war than global warming which has been warming and cooling for eons. Way before man was around. People don't even see that logic at all. Because they choose to be ignorant on earth science, be knee jerkers and let politics be their "truth." A bad combo.

Michael Crichton (best known for his novels but also a graduate of Harvard Medical School and a former postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies) warned his audience of the dangers of "consensus science" in a 2003 speech,

"Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

"Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus.

"Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world.

In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus."

Indeed. It's not about "deniers" but about questioning CO2 as compared to, for example, water vapor in the atmosphere.

With all the attention given to the CO2 content of the atmosphere it is purplexing that the water vapor content is ignored when a change in the water vapor content from 3.0 percent to about 2.96 percent has the same effect on global warming as if all the CO2 in the atmosphere disappeared. If in fact the water vapor content of the atmosphere does fluctuate between 2 percent and 4 percent the attempt to relate global temperature to the greenhouse gas content of the atmosphere is hopeless without information on water vapor content.

The situation is even more extreme than what was presented just above because the greenhouse gases vary in their effectiveness in absorbing thermal radiation. A molecule of H2O is 50 percent more effective or efficient in absorbing radiation than a molecule of CO2. If the molecular compositions are weighted according to their relative radiative efficiencies this is what the greenhouse gas content of the atmosphere looks like (see graph colored in blue).

Just be careful on how you choose words like "deniers" which conjures up images of the Holocaust and how people have denied it ever happened. And be careful on justifying the use of emotion over logic in a debate. It reflects poorly on you as a knee jerker. There is no "consensus" in science. Just verifiable and reproducible results. It's all about manipulating perception of an already clueless public.