Experts said Arctic sea ice would melt entirely by September 2016 - they were wrong
8 OCTOBER 2016
Dire predictions that the Arctic would be devoid of sea ice by September this year have proven to be unfounded after latest satellite images showed there is far more now than in 2012.
Scientists such as Prof Peter Wadhams, of Cambridge University, and Prof Wieslaw Maslowski, of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, have regularly forecast the loss of ice by 2016, which has been widely reported by the BBC and other media outlets.
Prof Wadhams, a leading expert on
Arctic sea ice loss, has recently published a book entitled
A Farewell To Ice in which he repeats the assertion that the polar region would free of ice in the middle of this decade.
As late as this summer, he was still predicting an ice-free September.
Yet, when figures were released for the yearly minimum on September 10, they showed that there was still 1.6 million square miles of sea ice (4.14 square kilometres), which was 21 per cent more than the lowest point in 2012.
...scientists have accused Prof Wadhams and others of "crying wolf" and harming the message of climate change through "dramatic", "incorrect" and "confusing" predictions...
It is the latest example of experts making alarming predictions which do not come to pass. Earlier this week environmentalists were accused of misleading the public about the
"Great Pacific Garbage Patch" after aerial shots proved there was no "island of rubbish" in the middle of the ocean. Likewise, warnings that the hole in the ozone layer would never close were debunked in June...
Yet in 2007, Prof Wadhams predicted that sea ice would be lost by 2013 after levels fell 27 per cent in a single year. However, by 2013, ice levels were actually 25 per cent higher than they had been six years before. In 2012, following another record low, Prof Wadhams changed his prediction to 2016...
Yet in 2007, Prof Wadhams predicted that sea ice would be lost by 2013 after levels fell 27 per cent in a single year. However, by 2013, ice levels were actually 25 per cent higher than they had been six years before. In 2012, following another record low, Prof Wadhams changed his prediction to 2016.
The view was supported by Prof Maslowski, who in 2013 published a paper in the
Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences also claiming that the Arctic would be ice-free by 2016, plus or minus three years.
However, far from record lows, this year the Arctic has seen the quickest refreeze ever recorded with the extent of sea ice growing 405,000 square miles (1.05 million square kilometres) in just three weeks since the September 10 minimum. The
Danish Meteorological Institute said that refreezing is happening at the fastest rate since its daily records began in 1987...
Andrew Shepherd, professor of earth observation at the University of Leeds, said there was now "overwhelming consensus" that the Arctic would be free of ice in the next few decades, but warned earlier predictions were based on poor extrapolation..
Scientists said it was clear that sea ice was shrinking but there were large fluctuations between years. For example, 2013 saw a 50 per cent increase from the previous year..
“The signal of Arctic sea ice decline is possibly the clearest we have of climate change. That does not mean, by definition, it is manmade,..
Speaking to
The Telegraph, Prof Wadhams admitted that sea ice decline had not happened as quickly as he had predicted. However, he still believes that an ice-free Arctic is still only a "very small number of years" away.
“My view is that the trend of summer sea ice volume is relentlessly downward, such that the volume (and thus area) will come to a low value very soon - in a very small number of years,” he said.
“This is to be contrasted with some of the bizarre predictions made by computer modellers, who have the summer sea ice remaining until late this century, which is quite impossible.”
telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/10/07/experts-said-arctic-sea-ice-would-melt-entirely-by-september-201/
