Subject: „Ice-cap found to be
How good do we understand how
climate works? In so far the subject ‘ice-cap thinning’ is of
interest, as it is frequently raised in connection with man made
global warming. Since 1979 until 2005, the size of the summer polar
ice cap has shrunk more than 20 percent has been claimed.
Only recently the Oscar price winner Al Gore said that the North Pole
ice cap is melting nearly three times faster than the most pessimistic
computer models predicted.
Can we rely on such claims? Lets make a test.
London Times reported that measurements showed an average reduction in
thickness of about 30 per cent in an area north of Greenland, and that
this substantial thinning of the Arctic polar ice-cap has been
discovered by scientists at Cambridge University, who believe it could
be evidence of the greenhouse effect on Earth’s climate. Actually
the average thickness of the ice cap has been fallen from an average
of six to seven metres to four to five metres in just 12 years. Does
that prove AL Gore correct? Actually presumably not, as The Times
article had been published on September 1, 1989.
Between the Cambridge University analysis and Al Gore’s recent
statement lay a time period of 18 years.
Each claim alone, but particularly
if compared with each other, can hardly be regarded as a serious
contribution to understanding what caused the warming when viewing the
graph on arctic temperatures anomalies from 1880 to 2004 by Steven
Nevertheless, this is not the only problem and not the most serious
flaw of the mentioned claims which is actually the linking of the
ice-cap thinning to the greenhouse effect with no regard to the sudden
big warming of the Arctic in the Spitsbergen region since winter
1918/19. Suddenly the winter temperatures ‘exploded’ within a very
short period of time and continued to rise for 20 years until 1940.
This has recently been investigated:
Without a full understanding of the arctic
warming in the first half of the last Century any claim whether by
Cambridge University, or by Al Gore, should be treated with suspicion.
Have an interesting reading about
‘Who did it’.