According to the NOAA, and the media can’t get enough of it, the tipping point de methane de luxe has arrived in the Arctic so we are all going to die. Specifically, “the region’s tundra has transitioned from being a sink for carbon to a source of emissions as permafrost thaws” so stand by for a runaway greenhouse effect. Which makes a certain kind of sense, by which we mean the announcement not the underlying reality, because you can’t predict that this sort of disaster is imminent indefinitely without at some point saying it arrived or looking foolish. Though it is also a bit awkward to announce that it arrived only to have the world, and even the Arctic ice, stubbornly not end. Still, next year for sure.
The piece has everything you like if you like that sort of thing, while typically leaving out, oh, say, a link to the actual NOAA publication in case anyone is curious. (For those geeks, it’s here.) For instance, the story leads off with “The Arctic just experienced its second-hottest year on record.” Which seems a bit of a rip-off since supposedly the planet as a whole is about to have had its hottest. Why did the poor Arctic get left a consolation prize, especially while warming faster than the average? Inquiring ice floes want to know.
Also, this thawing is, of course:
“releasing carbon dioxide and methane. That will only amplify the amount of heat-trapping gases that enter the atmosphere, paving the way for further warming.”
Result? Chaos and ruin all around:
“The findings, shared Tuesday in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Arctic report card, show how climate change is scrambling ecosystems and shape-shifting the landscape in the part of the planet where global warming is most intense.”
Scrambling ecosystems and shape-shifting landscapes, no less. Look out your window and you may see trees singing in birds, grass growing in the sky, clouds scudding past underfoot and rhetorical tornadoes everywhere. Including the Arctic being “where global warming is most intense”. Because, you see:
“the Arctic is heating up far faster than places at lower altitudes – two to four times as quickly, depending on the baselines scientists use for comparison and which geography they include in assessments.”
Also depending whether they know the difference between altitude and latitude. But who’s fact-checking now?
The journalist is apparently an expert on other science, though. It’s all about the albedo:
“The last nine years in the Arctic have all had the highest average temperatures recorded since 1900. That dynamic is the result of a phenomenon called Arctic amplification. As the Arctic loses snow cover and sea ice, more dark-colored ocean water and rock emerge. Those dark surfaces reflect less radiation back to space, absorbing heat, instead.”
And so it’s all over:
“Together, that means the Arctic is a fundamentally different place from what it was just 10 years ago, said the lead editor of the new NOAA report, Twila Moon, deputy lead scientist and science communication liaison at the National Snow and Ice Data Center.”
A fundamentally different place. It used to be tundra, ice and snow and now it’s snow, ice and tundra. Shocking.
Now if you’re wondering how they know all this stuff, well, they have a sophisticated system for making a lot of it up.
When they have measurements, we find that, for instance:
“This year, sea ice was the sixth-lowest in the 45 years since satellites began measuring; sea ice extents have decreased about 50% since the 1980s.”
Which isn’t impressive at all because a 45-year sample that started at a cyclical peak isn’t statistically meaningful, virtually all of the decline was in the first 25 years or so and for almost two decades there’s been no trend. Which is probably why 2024 did not set a record low or even get into the bottom five despite everything melting and methane blazing forth amid the bare rocks etc.
Now we know what you’re thinking. What does the actual report say? And before we get to it, let us mention that in the best tradition of lurid politicization of science, the NOAA offers “2024 Report Card Headlines”, something journalists rather than scientists used to write though now they work hand-in-glove to lower the reputation of both. And the first “headline” is:
“Losing Arctic carbon sinks/ With wildfire & permafrost thaw, Arctic tundra is now a carbon dioxide source and remains a methane source, both heat trapping gasses.”
Not to be all picky. But they didn’t say it had become a methane source, they said it remains one. So that transition was invented by the journalist.
Also, on the subject of how people know stuff, “Arctic hunters are key researchers”. So evidently we’re comparing their impressions today with those of their great-great-grandparents who didn’t write them down but, see “Supporting Indigenous Arctic livelihoods is sustaining necessary knowledge for Indigenous ways of knowing and research collaborations.” So there. What chatbot wrote that sludge?
Oh, they also say “Oct. 2023 – Sep. 2024 was the 2nd warmest within the 125-year record”. And what “record” exactly would that be? The Indigenous way of knowing? It’s a bit hard to say because the actual report card doesn’t contain one single reference to “125”. On the other hand we did find this passage:
“Seasonal temperature departures were some of the warmest in the Arctic since 1900, with autumn at 1.86°C (2nd warmest), winter at 1.14°C (6th warmest), spring at 0.82°C (6th warmest) and summer at 0.83°C (3rd warmest).”
Then they averaged 2nd, 6th, 6th and 3rd and got 2nd. But who was determining temperatures throughout the Arctic in 1900? Nanook of the North? No. Hansen of the NOAA and others, using computer models to make up numbers (GISTEMP v4, based on GHCN v4 for land and the “NOAA Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature version 5 (ERSS 5) dataset” that calls reconstructions data for oceans), which conveniently fit what they’re certain must have been happening rather than measurements of what was.
As we’ve observed before, it takes hubris piled on chutzpah to pile an Ossa of speculation on a Pelion of interpolation and then tell us to two decimal places how much warmer it was in the Arctic in 2023 than in 1923. And yes, it’s the same NOAA whose “adjusted” temperatures, like those of NASA turned a thermometer-based cooling trend in the continental US since the 1930s into a warming since 1895. QED.
They have to hurry to create doomsday before the DOGE gang gets around to their cushy jobs. I'm not sure NOAA is that much at risk, although perhaps their charter doesn't extend to 'making stuff up', but NASA and the EPA clearly have wandered very far from what they were created to do. Maybe when the CO2 warriors at other agencies get fired, they can go work for Greenpeace or the Sierra Club, who will certainly be glad to continue publishing 'alarming' factless papers.
Climate change is an industry, and a very successful, money-making industry it is too. I wrote the following piece just after COP28 a year ago, but it's still relevant today, and since CDN will be off-air for the next two weeks I thought that you, dear readers, would have time to read it:
No less a personage than the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, has informed us in his wisdom that “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived”.
Duh.
Does this guy ever get out of his office and take a look outside? Or is he deliberately trying to frighten us with an obviously false narrative? And if so, why?
Let’s start with the false narrative idea. Suppose you want to convince people that your husband is a lazy slob, and to do so you post pictures of him on Facebook with his feet up drinking a beer. Never mind if those pictures were taken at the end of a long working day, never mind if he works hard every day and just occasionally relaxes, if all you post is pictures of him apparently unshaven and doing nothing then you can create a false narrative of him as a lazy slob.
Much the same technique on a larger scale is used to create a false narrative of out-of-control global warming. Somewhere on Earth at any given time there will probably be a heatwave, so just concentrate on that and ignore everything else. For example, 2023 was a bad year for wildfires in Canada and the media made a great to-do about it being a sign of global warming. What they didn’t mention was that south of the border the US was having an exceptionally quiet year for wildfires, so that North America as a whole was having an average year. In the same way the media told us that the summer months in the US had record-breaking heat which was obviously a sign of global warming, but conspicuously did not say that the prolonged extremely cold weather (-38 C in Alberta) earlier this winter was due to global cooling.
This is what you might call a passive false narrative – just report the things which seem to back up your narrative and ignore anything else. But beyond this there are active false narratives in which measured data is actively falsified. The US agency responsible for weather forecasting and general monitoring of oceanic and atmospheric conditions, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) routinely adjusts temperature records from the past to make it look as if there has been steady warming over the past hundred years, whereas in fact there has been very little overall warming. The 1930’s were warmer than today – a good example of this is documented in John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath, but according to NOAA this never happened. If you want to delve into this further I can recommend Tony Heller’s blog, Real Climate Science.
It is certainly true that the world has been gently warming since the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850. Anyone who has read Charles Dicken’s novels will be struck by how cold winters were in England at that time. Yet this is all part of a natural cycle. Before the Little Ice Age there was the Medieval Warm Period in which wine grapes were grown in Northern England, before that was the cold period known as the Dark Ages and before that was the Roman Warm Period in which the Roman Empire flourished, and so on. But none of this was caused by human activity, so why have we suddenly assumed that the world is about to come to an end because of us wicked humans burning fossil fuels?
There is no simple answer to this, but there are a number of strands which have come together to create the current absurd folly known as the climate catastrophe. For a start, a lot of people have become rich and powerful by pushing the climate narrative. Once you have scared other people witless by predicting the end of the world (Greta Thunberg, anyone?) you can count on their votes at election time as long as you promise to do something about it. It doesn’t much matter what you do, such as banning plastic straws, as long as you tell these people it will slow global warming they will vote for you.
And then of course there is that wonderful scam called renewable energy. Somewhere in the region of five trillion dollars (US) has been spent in the past twenty years on wind and solar energy, with much, much more to come. Never mind that the vast bulk of the world’s energy still comes from fossil fuels such as gas, oil and coal, never mind that related technologies such as heat pumps and electric vehicles don’t work too well in cold weather, anyone associated with the renewable energy industry has probably become very rich.
But perhaps the most significant strand of them all is the feeling of virtuous superiority that people get when they set out to save the world. Every year the United Nations holds a massive get-together known as the Conference of the Parties to decide what to do about climate change. The latest one, COP28, was held in Dubai last December and had over 70,000 government-sponsored attendees from around the world. The whole thing was a farce. In a world apparently concerned about the use of fossil fuels, all these people flew in on jet aircraft and stayed in air-conditioned hotels. To make things even more farcical the COP28 president was none other than the Chairman of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, which is one of the largest oil companies in the world. This worthy gentleman bluntly informed the conference that fossil fuels would be around for many years to come, so just suck it up, or words to that effect.
Nevertheless, most of the attendees went home from Dubai with a wonderfully warm inner glow from having striven manfully (oops sorry, personfully) to save the world from Climate Catastrophe. No doubt they will look forward to doing the same thing at COP29 a year or so from now at an even more lavish conference from which they will return with an even warmer inner glow, while the rest of the world goes on much as before.
Climate change has become one of the largest, and certainly one of the most financially successful industries in the world. It is an industry in which you can be honest and ask awkward questions, and be thrown out for your pains, or you can go with the flow and have a good chance of becoming rich and powerful. (At age 21 Greta Thunberg has a net worth of a million dollars.) Our present government is firmly in the get rich quick camp. Let’s hope the next government is more intellectually honest.
Ah yes, what would Tony Heller do without NOAA, NASA et al????
He would, I expect, enjoy a quiet retirement. If only...
I quote former US Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, who called news reporters the "Nattering nabobs of negatism."
Well, Alan, Tony will move on to the plethora of other taxpayer-funded organisations, no problem at all...