From red to green
Delighted to see that Professor Philip Stott has re-started his excellent blog which casts a robustly sceptical and authoritative eye over our environmental madness. He has posted a characteristically insightful comment about that ignoble prize for al Gore:
But, more importantly, the politics of this process illustrate perfectly J.-F. Lyotard’s telling prediction in The Postmodern Condition that science will become increasingly legitimised by the ‘social bond’, that is, by what society wishes to be true. Do you think anyone would receive the Nobel Peace Prize for showing that ‘global warming’ is not a threat? In Europe especially, ‘global warming’ is the chosen trope of the political classes. It is a powerful Barthesian myth, and its aim is to exclude all other constructions of knowledge from debate. Al Gore’s ‘elevation’ is simply part of this process of exclusion, namely the trampling down of any dissent by an increasingly assertive, self-referential, grand narrative in the style of Marxism. This must not be allowed to happen.
Alas, it already has. Many scientists have been successfully bullied into silence by the ferocious McCarthyite/Stalinist smear campaigns and inevitable loss of reputation, grant funding or promotion prospects that follows any voicing of the truth about the great climate change scam. But the facts are there for those with eyes to see. Take the great ice calamity. We are told endlessly that man-made global warming is definitively proved by the unprecedented melt under way in the Arctic. But at the same time, as I wrote here the ice in the Antarctic has increased to a level not seen since 1979. So the warmers must therefore believe one of two propositions: either a) that global climate change only affects half the planet but not the other half; or b) that since the melting of Arctic ice proves the planet is about to fry up, the expansion of Antarctic ice must prove that the planet is about to freeze up. Simultaneously.
The scientists observed less perennial ice cover in March 2007 than ever before, with the thick ice confined to the Arctic Ocean north of Canada. Consequently, the Arctic Ocean was dominated by thinner seasonal ice that melts faster. This ice is more easily compressed and responds more quickly to being pushed out of the Arctic by winds. Those thinner seasonal ice conditions facilitated the ice loss, leading to this year’s record low amount of total Arctic sea ice.
Nghiem said the rapid decline in winter perennial ice the past two years was caused by unusual winds. ‘Unusual atmospheric conditions set up wind patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and then sped its flow out of the Arctic,’ he said. When that sea ice reached lower latitudes, it rapidly melted in the warmer waters.
‘The winds causing this trend in ice reduction were set up by an unusual pattern of atmospheric pressure that began at the beginning of this century,’ Nghiem said. The Arctic Ocean’s shift from perennial to seasonal ice is preconditioning the sea ice cover there for more efficient melting and further ice reductions each summer. The shift to seasonal ice decreases the reflectivity of Earth’s surface and allows more solar energy to be absorbed in the ice-ocean system.