Sunday, August 31, 2014

Myth of arctic meltdown

Myth of arctic meltdown: Stunning satellite images show summer ice cap is thicker and covers 1.7million square kilometres MORE than 2 years ago...despite Al Gore's prediction it would be ICE-FREE by now

Seven years after former US Vice-President Al Gore's warning, Arctic ice cap has expanded for second year in row

An area twice the size of Alaska - America's biggest state - was open water two years ago and is now covered in ice

These satellite images taken from University of Illinois's Cryosphere project show ice has become more concentrated

The speech by former US Vice-President Al Gore was apocalyptic. ‘The North Polar ice cap is falling off a cliff,’ he said. ‘It could be completely gone in summer in as little as seven years. Seven years from now.’

Those comments came in 2007 as Mr Gore accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for his campaigning on climate change.

But seven years after his warning, The Mail on Sunday can reveal that, far from vanishing, the Arctic ice cap has expanded for the second year in succession – with a surge, depending on how you measure it, of between 43 and 63 per cent since 2012.

To put it another way, an area the size of Alaska, America’s biggest state, was open water two years ago, but is again now covered by ice.

The most widely used measurements of Arctic ice extent are the daily satellite readings issued by the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, which is co-funded by Nasa. These reveal that – while the long-term trend still shows a decline – last Monday, August 25, the area of the Arctic Ocean with at least 15 per cent ice cover was 5.62 million square kilometres.

This was the highest level recorded on that date since 2006 (see graph, right), and represents an increase of 1.71 million square kilometres over the past two years – an impressive 43 per cent.

Other figures from the Danish Meteorological Institute suggest that the growth has been even more dramatic. Using a different measure, the area with at least 30 per cent ice cover, these reveal a 63 per cent rise – from 2.7 million to 4.4 million square kilometres.

The satellite images published here are taken from a further authoritative source, the University of Illinois’s Cryosphere project.

They show that as well as becoming more extensive, the ice has grown more concentrated, with the purple areas – denoting regions where the ice pack is most dense – increasing markedly.

Crucially, the ice is also thicker, and therefore more resilient to future melting. Professor Andrew Shepherd, of Leeds University, an expert in climate satellite monitoring, said yesterday: ‘It is clear from the measurements we have collected that the Arctic sea ice has experienced a significant recovery in thickness over the past year.

‘It seems that an unusually cool summer in 2013 allowed more ice to survive through to last winter. This means that the Arctic sea ice pack is thicker and stronger than usual, and this should be taken into account when making predictions of its future extent.’

The speech by former US Vice-President Al Gore (above) was apocalyptic. He said that the North Polar ice cap is falling off a cliff and could be gone in seven years

Yet for years, many have been claiming that the Arctic is in an ‘irrevocable death spiral’, with imminent ice-free summers bound to trigger further disasters. These include gigantic releases of methane into the atmosphere from frozen Arctic deposits, and accelerated global warming caused by the fact that heat from the sun will no longer be reflected back by the ice into space.

Judith Curry, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, said last night: ‘The Arctic sea ice spiral of death seems to have reversed.’

Those who just a few years ago were warning of ice-free summers by 2014 included US Secretary of State John Kerry, who made the same bogus prediction in 2009, while Mr Gore has repeated it numerous times – notably in a speech to world leaders at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen in 2009, in an effort to persuade them to agree a new emissions treaty.

The ice cap is falling off a cliff. It could be completely gone in summer in as little as 7 years from now

Mr Gore – whose office yesterday failed to respond to a request for comment – insisted then: ‘There is a 75 per cent chance that the entire polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.’

Misleading as such forecasts are, some people continue to make them. Only last month, while giving evidence to a House of Lords Select Committee inquiry on the Arctic, Cambridge University’s Professor Peter Wadhams claimed that although the Arctic is not ice-free this year, it will be by September 2015.

Asked about this yesterday, he said: ‘I still think that it is very likely that by mid-September 2015, the ice area will be less than one million square kilometres – the official designation of ice-free, implying only a fringe of floes around the coastlines. That is where the trend is taking us.’

For that prediction to come true it would require by far the fastest loss of ice in history. It would also fly in the face of a report last year by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which stated with ‘medium confidence’ that ice levels would ‘likely’ fall below one million square kilometres by 2050.

Politicians such as Al Gore have often insisted that climate science is ‘settled’ and have accused those who question their forecasts of being climate change ‘deniers’.

However, while few scientists doubt that carbon-dioxide emissions cause global warming, and that this has caused Arctic ice to decline, there remains much uncertainty about the speed of melting and how much of it is due to human activity. But outside the scientific community, the more pessimistic views have attracted most attention. For example, Prof Wadhams’s forecasts have been cited widely by newspapers and the BBC. But many reject them.

An area twice the size of Alaska was open water two years ago and is now covered in ice after the arctic ice cap has expanded for the second year in a row

Yesterday Dr Ed Hawkins, who leads an Arctic ice research team at Reading University, said: ‘Peter Wadhams’s views are quite extreme compared to the views of many other climate scientists, and also compared to what the IPCC report says.’

Dr Hawkins warned against reading too much into ice increase over the past two years on the grounds that 2012 was an ‘extreme low’, triggered by freak weather.

‘I’m uncomfortable with the idea of people saying the ice has bounced back,’ he said.

However, Dr Hawkins added that the decline seen in recent years was not caused only by global warming. It was, he said, intensified by ‘natural variability’ – shifts in factors such as the temperature of the oceans. This, he said, has happened before, such as in the 1920s and 1930s, when ‘there was likely some sea ice retreat’.

Dr Hawkins said: ‘There is undoubtedly some natural variability on top of the long-term downwards trend caused by the overall warming. This variability has probably contributed somewhat to the post-2000 steep declining trend, although the human-caused component still dominates.’

Like many scientists, Dr Hawkins said these natural processes may be cyclical. If and when they go into reverse, they will cool, not warm, the Arctic, in which case, he said, ‘a decade with no declining trend’ in ice cover would be ‘entirely plausible’.

Peer-reviewed research suggests that at least until 2005, natural variability was responsible for half the ice decline. But exactly how big its influence is remains an open question – and as both Dr Hawkins and Prof Curry agreed, establishing this is critical to making predictions about the Arctic’s future.

Prof Curry said: ‘I suspect that the portion of the decline in the sea ice attributable to natural variability could be even larger than half.

‘I think the natural variability component of Arctic sea ice extent is in the process of bottoming out, with a reversal to start within the next decade. And when it does, the reversal period could last for several decades.’

This led her to believe that the IPCC forecast, like Al Gore’s, was too pessimistic.

‘Ice-free in 2050 is a possible scenario, but I don’t think it is a likely scenario,’ she concluded.

GOOD NEWS FOR POLAR BEARS...

The apparent recovery in Arctic ice looks like good news for polar bears.

If there is more ice at the end of the summer, they can hunt seals more easily. Yet even when the ice reached a low point in 2012, there was no scientific evidence that bear numbers were declining, with their estimated total of 20,000 to 25,000 thought to be higher than in the 1970s, when hunting was first banned.

In many Arctic regions, say scientists, they are in robust health and breeding successfully.

Computer model predictions of decline caused by ice melt have also failed to come true. In 2004, researchers claimed Hudson Bay bear numbers would fall from 900 to fewer than 700 by 2011. In fact, they have risen to over 1,000.

However, the main international bear science body, the Polar Bear Specialist Group, admits it has no reliable data from almost half of the Arctic, so cannot say whether numbers are falling or rising.

More Obama Arrogance

Editorial: More Obama arrogance

By Herald Staff

President Obama plans to join an international agreement next year to limit emissions of carbon dioxidewithout making a treaty. He may try to sell his deal as the equivalent of a treaty, but he's wrong. No country should rely on him.

What the White House called a "politically binding" deal that would "name and shame" nonparticipants would be worthless, because a subsequent administration in Washington could repudiate it. Given the stubborn uncertainties of climate science, the next administration shouldrepudiate it if it comes about.

In the 64th Federalist paper, John Jay wrote in 1788 "that it would be impossible to find a nation who would make any bargain with us, which should be binding on them absolutely [Jay's italics] but on us only so long and so far as we may think proper to be bound by it."

The Constitution provides that the president, with the consent of the Senate, makes treaties which become "the supreme law of the land." Why bring in the Senate? Jay's colleague Alexander Hamilton said in the 75th Federalist: "It would be utterly unsafe and improper to entrust that power (to make treaties) to an elective magistrate of four years' duration." Hamilton argued that, "An ambitious man might make his own aggrandizement, by the aid of a foreign power, the price of" action against the national interest.

Rather sounds like the current resident of the White House, no?

Presidents often make agreements binding only themselves, but Obama knows that only a treaty binds the nation, and the Senate's unwillingness to approve one on global warming is why he's trying a go-around. He may get away with ignoring the law on Obamacare and immigration, but his arrogance on this will get him nowhere.

Paul Ryan’s Way Forward

The congressman reminds us that government depletion of social capital harms the culture.

By George Will

To take the measure of this uncommonly interesting public man, begin with two related facts about him. Paul Ryan has at least 67 cousins in his Wisconsin hometown of Janesville, where there are six Ryan households within eight blocks of his home. And in his new book, The Way Forward: Renewing the American Idea, he says something few politicians say, which is why so many are neither trusted nor respected. Ryan says he was wrong.

At a Wisconsin 4-H fair in 2012, Ryan encountered a Democrat who objected to what then was one of Ryan’s signature rhetorical tropes — his distinction between “makers” and “takers,” the latter being persons who receive more in government spending than they pay in taxes. He had been struck by a report that 60 percent of Americans were already — this was before Obamacare — “net receivers.” But his encounter at the fair reminded him that, for a while, he and many people he cared about had been takers, too.

The morning after a night “working the Quarter Pounder grill at McDonald’s,” Ryan, 16, found his father, who had been troubled by alcohol, dead in bed. Janesville’s strong sinews of community sustained Ryan and his mother; so did Social Security survivor benefits. When GM’s Janesville assembly plant closed, draining about $220 million of annual payroll from a town of 60,000, many relatives, friends and constituents needed the social safety net — unemployment compensation, job training, etc.

“At the fair that day, I realized I’d been careless with my language,” he writes. “The phrase gave insult where none was intended.” He has changed his language and his mind somewhat but thinks the fundamental things still apply.

“Society,” Ryan writes, “functions through institutions that operate in the space between the individual and the state,” and “government exists to protect the space where all of these great things occur.” Hence government has a “supporting role” as “the enabler of other institutions.” Progressive government, however, works, sometimes inadvertently but often deliberately, to subordinate or supplant those institutions. This depletion of social capital is comprehensively injurious to the culture. And “all the tax cuts in the world don’t matter much if you don’t get the culture right.”

Progressivism aims to place individuals in unmediated dependency on a government that can proclaim, as Barack Obama does: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” Meaning, people depend on government for what they are and have.

Few of today’s progressives are acquainted with their doctrine’s intellectual pedigree or its consistent agenda. Progressivism’s founders, however, considered it essential that the nation make progress, as they understood this, beyond the Founders’ natural-rights philosophy, which limits government by saying (in the Declaration of Independence) that it is “instituted” to “secure” these rights.

Hence Woodrow Wilson, a progressive who understood his doctrine’s premises, urged Americans to “not repeat the [Declaration’s] preface.” Progressivism preaches that rights do not pre-exist government, that they are dispensed and respected by government as it sees fit and to fit its purposes. Those purposes grow unconstrained by the Constitution that progressives construe as a “living” — meaning infinitely elastic — document.

Since 1999, when he became its second-youngest member, Ryan has been an intellectual ornament to the House of Representatives — and a headache for risk-averse Republican-party operatives. They pay lip service to electing conservatives who will make the choices necessary to stabilize the architecture of the entitlement system and unleash the economic growth that must finance the system’s promises. But they want to let voters remain oblivious about the choices required by that architecture’s rickety condition.

Such Republicans are complicit with Obama, who demonstrated the self-destructive nature of his now-evaporating presidency by his contemptuous, and contemptible, treatment of Ryan on April 13, 2011. After he loftily aspired to teach Washington civility, the White House invited Ryan to sit in the front row at a speech in which Obama gave an implacably hostile and mendacious depiction of Ryan’s suggestions for entitlement reforms. Obama thereby repeated his tawdry performance in his 2010 State of the Union address, when, with Supreme Court justices in the front row of the House chamber, he castigated them for the Citizens United decision, which he misrepresented.

Both times, Obama’s behavior bespoke the insecurity of someone who, surrounded by sycophants, shuns disputations with people who can reply. Ryan, however, has replied with a book that demonstrates Obama’s wisdom in not arguing with a man who has a better mind and better manners.

Will Jews turn on Obama, Dems in 2014 and turn out for GOP?

This year, as in every election year since Barack Obama has been in the White House, we are hearing the cry of the hopeful Republican: This is the year that Jewish voters and donors and activists are going to turn on the president and his party and turn out for the GOP.

The great majority of American Jewish Democrats see their party and its agenda as their secular religion.

All this, according to some conservative pundits, has created a tipping point. In November, they say, Jews could turn out in key congressional elections, especially in Senate contests, and vote for Republicans who have made support for Israel a signature issue. And in 2016, fed up with Obama’s chilly attitude toward the Jewish state and his weakness in the face of Islamic aggression, Jews could abandon their traditional affiliation with the Democrats and give their energy, their contributions and their votes to the Republicans.

I hate to rain on anybody’s inaugural parade, but this is sheer fantasy.

Jews are not simply supporters of the Democratic Party; they are at the heart of everything from union leadership to campaign funding, think-tank policymaking to grass roots organizing.

Three of the four liberal justices on the Supreme Court are Jews. There are 10 Jewish U.S. senators and more than 20 Jewish members of the House.

In contrast, after the departure of Majority Leader Eric Cantor, there isn't a single Jewish Republican in Congress (or in any statehouse). And 2014 isn't going to reverse that.

There are only three congressional races – two in New York, one in Connecticut – where Jewish candidates are considered competitive, and all three are long shots. The GOP has no Jewish senatorial candidates at all.

The Republican side of the aisle in both houses of Congress has, and will have, about as many Jewish members as the Icelandic parliament.

There aren't even any great Hebrew hopes out there, just a few obscure local politicians who might, someday, run for higher office. The best known (and most influential) Republican Jew in America is Sheldon Adelson, the octogenarian casino mogul and mega-donor. Whatever Adelson’s virtues, he isn't anybody’s idea of an electoral poster boy.

Of course you don’t have to be Jewish to get Jewish votes. Al Smith, a New York Catholic, won almost 75 percent in his loss to Herbert Hoover in 1928. Franklin Roosevelt got between 85-90 percent in four straight elections. John F. Kennedy, the son of a notorious anti-Semite, topped 80 percent in 1960. Four years later, Lyndon Johnson got 90 percent running against Barry Goldwater, the grandson of frontier Jews. Obama got 69 percent of Jewish voters in 2012.

In the last 20 presidential elections, only Jimmy Carter, a transparently unfriendly figure, got less than two-thirds of the Jewish presidential vote – and even he out-polled the strongly pro-Israel Ronald Reagan.

The fact is, the great majority of American Jewish Democrats see their party and its agenda as their secular religion. Reform Judaism, America’s largest Jewish denomination, is sometimes jokingly called “the Democratic Party with holidays.” A lot of Jews would sooner convert to Shia Islam than leave the party of their forefathers.

Republicans sometimes wonder at this loyalty. After all, polls show that they and their voters are more pro-Israel than Democrats. Republicans are attracted to the Jewish state because of its pioneer ethos, its “peace through strength” posture in the face of anti-Western jihad, its reflexive pro-Americanism and, for Christian evangelicals, its biblical roots.

None of this means much to most American Jews, however (except to the Orthodox, still a relatively small minority). There isn't much data, but conventional political thinking is that secular Jews, to the extent they are voting as Jews, are more concerned about a woman’s right to choose, gay rights or comprehensive immigration reform than they are about specific Israel-related policy.

Jews of all sorts tend to be pro-Israel. For many it is personal. But that doesn't mean supporting specific policies. The Democrats will retain their loyalty as long as the party maintains an acceptable level of support for Israel – to be, as Barack Obama once said about Hillary Clinton in a different context, “likable enough.”

President Obama clears that bar. Clinton, if she runs in 2016, will do even better. Bibi Netanyahu would prefer a Republican president, but he won’t be on the ballot, and any candidate he supports will lose big time to Hillary Clinton. Or Chelsea, for that matter.

Zev Chafets is a Fox News contributor.

+ FollowFoxNewsOpinion on Facebook

The hope stems from a few observable truths. President Obama is not a great friend of Israel and he visibly doesn’t get along with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The American Jewish community – white, assimilated and prosperous – is out-of-place in a Democratic Party determined to build a coalition around an appeal to racial gender minorities, unmarried women, the LGBT community, immigrants and the dependent poor. And while the Jewish community is shrinking because of low birthrates and intermarriage, its Orthodox wing – strongly pro-Israel and socially conservative – is gaining in numbers and self-confidence.

Barack Obama refuses to decide and fails to

President Barack Obama reaches into the crowd to greet guests on the tarmac upon his arrival at T.F. Green Airport, Friday, Aug. 29, 2014 in Warwick, RI. Obama traveled to Westchester, NY and Rhode Island to attend private Democratic fundraisers on Friday.

Barack Obama got a warm reception in Rhode Island last week, yet his lack of strategy has dismayed many others

Picture: AP

By Janet Daley
6:16PM BST 30 Aug 2014

Instead of a strategy to deal with Isil and Russia, the presidency offers veiled threats

Just in case you thought that the Leader of the Free World was secretly harbouring a calculated, well-developed plan for bringing Isil under control and putting Russia’s imperial leader back in his box, Barack Obama banged that idea firmly on the head last week. He gave an extraordinary briefing, which the Washington press corps had been led to believe would contain a major announcement on the White House strategy on foreign policy. It did. The announcement was that there was no White House strategy on foreign policy. Seriously. In the president’s exact words: “We don’t have a strategy yet.”

When that bizarre statement hit the news outlets, the White House spin team flew into full-on operation (ie panic) mode and began tweeting to the effect that what the Commander-in-Chief had actually meant was that there was “a range of options” which were still being considered and that there certainly was something called a “long-term plan” blah-blah-blah. But considering that Mr Obama had devoted most of his press conference to saying what was absolutely not under consideration, ie, any possibility of confrontation with Russia in Ukraine, or US air strikes in Syria as opposed to Iraq (even though the border between the two has now effectively disappeared), or concerted action against the Assad regime (in spite of the fact that the UN has declared it guilty of war crimes), it was difficult to undo the damage. So many things were definitively ruled out that virtually no plausible effective action was left in.

Why on earth did the President of the United States convene a press conference apparently designed to reassure the leaders of Isil, and Vladimir Putin, that America was not about to do any of the things that they feared? There are really only two possible interpretations, neither of them edifying.

The first and most obvious is that the Obama team is hopelessly divided. This became embarrassingly evident when the grotesque murder of the American journalist James Foley by Isil landed the Middle East crisis right on the nation’s doorstep. Mr Obama offered a five-minute blast of rhetorical outrage (before returning to the golf course) but notably no material change in US policy. Then things got rather more confusing.

His defence secretary, Chuck Hagel, stated that Isil was an “imminent threat” to US interests and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey, sitting next to him, delivered a thunderous declaration of the need to confront Isil in Syria: “This is an organisation that has an apocalyptic, end-of-days vision that will have to be defeated.” He went on, “Can they be defeated without addressing that part of the organisation that resides in Syria? The answer is no.”

By the next day, both Mr Hagel and Mr Dempsey were, as the Americans say, “walking back” their fateful pronouncements. Isil was now just a “regional threat” with no immediate consequences for US national security.

Then, just to add to the incoherence, the White House Deputy National Security Adviser, Ben Rhodes, proclaimed that the killing of James Foley constituted “a terrorist attack” on the US and said: “We’re actively considering what’s going to be necessary to deal with that threat and we’re not going to be restricted by borders.”

The world’s one remaining superpower seems not only incapable of deciding what to do: it can’t even decide what to say. This is a picture of confusion and contradiction which is quite terrifying in the global circumstances in which we find ourselves.

In truth, however, this is not so unprecedented or even surprising. Democratic governments are rightly reluctant to go to war – or even to risk engaging in actions which could create accidental war. They are often divided in the run-up to such action. Presidents and prime ministers receive conflicting advice (as so many political memoirs recount) on which they must make judgments.

So the crucial factor here is the paralysis of the president himself: it is the proper business of a national leader to decide, to make his choice of what Mr Obama calls the “range of options” and then to act. The hallmark of the Obama presidency in foreign policy has been a refusal to decide and a failure to act.

But the other explanation for this peculiar public recitation of things-we-will-not-do was the subtext of Mr Obama’s remarks last Thursday. He repeated several times that the US would not act without the support of “partners”. (At one point, he said: “[We are] cobbling together a coalition”. The phrase “cobble together” means to make something quickly without much care, using whatever is available: is that really what he meant?)

He spoke of the Nato summit next week where the famous “range of options” would be put forward to allies, and more pointedly of the countries of the region which were most directly affected by Isil. There was a lot of pious obscurity but one thing was clear enough: America will do nothing alone. This would have to be a team effort in which the US would be just one player. So, instead of providing unequivocal leadership, the American presidency offered scarcely veiled threats.

The only country with the military capability to deal with this crisis (as the president boasted) was the US but its intervention would be conditional on the participation of a “coalition of the willing”. For what? Moral cover? Shared political responsibility if it all went horribly wrong?

Mr Obama mentioned Australia, Britain and France specifically as having been consulted but David Cameron’s invitation seems to have been lost in the post: Downing Street claimed that it had received no request from the White House to join action in Syria. Was this yet another failure of communications – or just botched diplomacy being used to conceal doubts all around about where this was going to end?

In the meantime, Mr Cameron, according to some reports, seems ready to make it clear at this week’s Nato summit that he is prepared to consider joining the US in air strikes over Syria. Although there is contradictory briefing going on here too: one government minister was quoted as saying that Mr Cameron “is simply not going to want to get involved this close to an election, even though it’s the right thing to do”.

This will not be the only lively point of debate at that fateful summit. Ukraine is now seeking full membership of Nato, the organisation to which Mr Obama, in one of his few unambiguous statements, gave total support last week. And Nato would seem to be on board for some serious action over Ukraine. What if, as well, Australia, France and Britain prove willing to join in a move against Isil? Will that help the Obama decision-making process or prolong it even further? How Mr Putin, and the terrorists in the Middle East, must be enjoying all this.