PRESS RELEASE
New Arctic Ice Cap Story Is a Hoax
by Laurence Hecht, Editor-in-chief,
21st Century Science & Technology
May 2, 2007 (EIRNS)—A non sequitur and a fallacy of composition are the essence of scare stories circulating on major wire services today, which report on a new study of the extent of Arctic sea ice melt.
The study, published in the May 1 issue of Geophysical Research Letters, reports an historical review of satellite and other data which indicates that the extent of Arctic sea ice at the end of the summer melt season in September has been declining since 1953. The news stories twist this statistical fact into scare stories, the one circulated by Agence France Presse claiming that the sea level will rise by seven meters.
In fact, as anyone who observes ice melting in a cold drink can determine, when floating ice melts, the water level remains the same or falls very slightly. The claim of a rise in sea level is thus a non sequitur. It is justified on the basis of a wild fallacy of composition—the claim that the melting of the Arctic sea water will inevitablily lead to the melting of the entire Greenland glacier.
Never reported is the fact that the last major study of the Greenland ice sheet [Zwally, et al. Journal of Glaciology (2005)] showed a slight increase in ice mass from 1992-2002. The one- to two-mile thick Greenland ice sheet was thinning at the margins but growing by a greater extent inland.
Polar specialists know well that the Arctic climate is highly variable and very sensitive to small changes in local temperature. As Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu of the Alaska Arctic Research Center in Alaska noted, the extent of Arctic sea ice melt in the 1920s was greater than today (with far less contribution from human-produced carbon dioxide), and was followed by a period of thickening. Akasofu called Al Gore's movie "science fiction." (See interview.)
The theory that human-produced carbon dioxide produces climate warming has no scientific validity, and has been amply refuted by hundreds of leading scientists in thousands of papers.
The new study (Stroeve, et al. "Arctic sea ice decline: Faster than forecast") is questionable in that it focuses entirely on statistical methods of modeling and extrapolation. In general, extrapolation from short-term statistical trends is meaningless in scientific investigation. Three astronomical phenomena suggest that the Earth is moving towards an Ice Age: northern hemisphere summer is occurring near aphelion; orbital inclination is high at 23.5 degrees; and ellipticity is moderate. The Earth is about 11,000 years into an approximately 20,000-year long interglacial. The climatic optimum was reached nearly 5,000 years ago, and the Earth has been cooling since. New studies indicate the effect of galactic causes, such as cosmic ray influx, on the determination of climate.
But far worse than the methodological problems of the Arctic sea ice study are today's news reports of it. These represent the height of politically motivated irresponsibility. At bottom, greenhouse warming is a hoax. Its purpose is to stop industrial development, reduce population, and condemn two-thirds of the world to continued poverty and misery. As the science isn't there to prove it, the theory can only be justified by fabrications of the sort circulating on wire services today.
