A few months back, cryosphere expert Mark Brandon and I had an exchange on Twitter in which he noted the long - presumably temperature related - decline in Arctic sea ice and how this trend had been exacerbated by sharper falls in 2007 (due to changes in currents) and last year (due to a major storm).
I was reminded of this when I read Robin McKie's article in the Guardian today, which seeks to explain away recent cold weather as being due to global warming.
The Arctic is warming faster than any other place on Earth," said meteorologist Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University, New Jersey. "Arctic temperatures have increased at more than twice the global rate. You can see this in the sea ice in summer there. In just the three decades, it has declined by 40%. About 1.3m square miles of sea ice have disappeared. That is an astonishing amount of ice to lose and it shows just how much heating is going on up there. More to the point, that warming is now changing weather patterns across the northern hemisphere."
As I understand it there are few, if any temperature stations in the Arctic the purported trends being extrapolations from sub-Arctic stations. Given what we know about the factors that contribute to sea ice trends, going from there to the wild statements made about Arctic temperatures by Dr Francis seems more worthy of a used car salesman than a scientist.
The whole global-warming-will-make-us-colder argument would make many fewer people giggle if its advocates had said so when we were were getting warm winters. And who can forget the BBC's annual ritual of reporting the early arrival of spring? A google search of the BBC along these lines returns quite a lot of related articles.
Rupert Darwall's tweet says it best:
Climate scientists as adept as medieval astronomers in drawing epicycles as post hoc explanations for their predictions going awry
(In related news the global sea ice level is above its long-term average)
