Lies, Damned Lies and Al Gore on Climate

The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, aka Lord Christopher Monckton, refutes some of Al Gore’s lies.

Gore: The Arctic is warming at an unprecedented rate. New research, which draws upon recently declassified data collected by U.S. nuclear submarines traveling under the Arctic ice cap for the last 50 years, has given us, for the first time, a three-dimensional view of the ice cap, and researchers at the Naval Postgraduate School have told us that the entire Arctic ice cap may totally disappear in summer in as little as five years if nothing is done to curb emissions of greenhouse gas pollution. For most of the last 3 million years, it has covered an area the size of the lower 48 states. Almost half of the ice has already melted during the last 20 years. The dark ocean, once uncovered, absorbs 90 percent of the solar heat that used to bounce off the highly reflective ice. As a direct consequence, some of the vast amounts of frozen carbon in the permafrost surrounding the Arctic Ocean are beginning to be released as methane as the frozen tundra thaws, threatening a doubling of global warming pollution in the atmosphere.

Answer: For most of the last 3 million years, the Earth endured ice ages, with brief interglacial periods of 5000 years occurring roughly every 125,000 years. Naturally, therefore, Washington and much of the contiguous US was under miles of ice most of the time. We are in an unusually-prolonged interglacial period at present – 11,000 years. For most of that period – and notably during the Minoan, Roman, and medieval warm periods – it was warmer than today in the Arctic and worldwide. Indeed, in the 1930s and early 1940s it was up to 4 Fahrenheit degrees warmer than today in the Arctic.

It is not true that “almost half” of the Arctic sea ice has melted – its winter extent has barely declined at all, though there has been some decline in summer, particularly in 2007, for largely natural reasons (we know the reason cannot have been “global warming”, because the planet had been cooling for six years at the time – a cooling that has continued and is now seven and a half years long).

At present, both Arctic and Antarctic sea-ice extents are at or near record high levels for the time of year – the Arctic has set a nine-year record according to IARC/JAXA, and the Antarctic is approaching the record-high sea-ice extent set in late 2007, according to the University of Illinois. There is no likelihood of a total disappearance of Arctic sea ice any time soon.

That is only a teaser. Be sure to read it all at Science & Public Policy Institute.

H/T JunkScience