Quote:The melting ice caps: Another area where the warmists’ predictions have proven incorrect concerns the amount of ice at the Earth’s poles. They predicted a complete melting of the Arctic ice cap in summers that should have already happened, and even claimed that Antarctic ice was melting rapidly.
As far as the Antarctic is concerned, in 2007, the UN IPCC claimed the ice sheets of Antarctica “are very likely shrinking,” with Antarctica “contributing 0.2 ± 0.35 mm yr - 1 to sea level rise over the period 1993 to 2003.” The UN also claimed there was “evidence” of “accelerated loss through 2005.” In 2013, the UN doubled down on its false claim, claiming even greater sea-level rises attributed to the melting in Antarctica: “The contribution of … Antarctic ice sheets has increased since the early 1990s, partly from increased outflow induced by warming of the immediately adjacent ocean.” It also claimed Antarctica’s “contribution to sea level rise likely increased from 0.08 [ - 0.10 to 0.27] mm yr - 1 for 1992 - 2001 to .40 [0.20 to 0.61] mm yr - 1 for 2002 - 2011.” The reality was exactly the opposite.
Quote:In a statement released in October, NASA dropped the equivalent of a nuclear bomb on the UN’s climate-alarmism machine, noting that ice across Antarctica has been growing rapidly for decades.
NASA said only that its new study on Antarctic ice “challenges” the conclusions of the IPCC. In fact, the UN could not have been more wrong. Rather than melting ice in the southern hemisphere contributing to sea-level rise, as claimed by the UN, ice in Antarctica is expanding, and the growing ice is responsible for reducing sea levels by about 0.23 millimeters annually. According to the NASA study, published in the Journal of Glaciology, satellite data shows the Antarctic ice sheet featured a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001 — more than a trillion tons of ice in less than a decade. Between 2003 and 2008, Antarctica gained some 82 billion tons of ice annually.
Quote:The UN’s inaccurate Antarctic claims were illustrated most comically, perhaps, when a ship full of alarmists seeking to study “global warming” was trapped in record Antarctic sea ice in the summer of 2013 and had to be rescued by ships burning massive amounts of fossil fuels.
Quote:In the northern hemisphere, alarmists have fared no better. In 2007, 2008, and 2009, Al Gore, a man who has made a fortune pushing warmist ideology, publicly warned that the North Pole would be “ice-free” in the summer by around 2013 due to AGW. “The North Polar ice cap is falling off a cliff,” Gore said in 2007. “It could be completely gone in summer in as little as seven years. Seven years from now.” Speaking to an audience in Germany six years ago, Gore alleged that “the entire North Polarized [sic] cap will disappear in five years.” “Five years,” Gore emphasized, is “the period of time during which it is now expected to disappear.”
Contrary to Gore’s predictions, satellite data showed that Arctic ice volume in summer of 2013 had actually expanded more than 50 percent over 2012 levels. In fact, during October 2013, sea-ice levels grew at the fastest pace since records began in 1979. In 2014, the Arctic ice cap, apparently oblivious to Gore’s hot air, continued its phenomenal rebound, leaving alarmists struggling for explanations.
Quote:Data from the taxpayer-funded National Snow and Ice Data Center’s “Multisensor Analyzed Sea Ice Extent” (MASIE) also show Arctic ice steadily growing over the last decade, with a few minor fluctuations in the trend. Despite alarmist claims, polar bear populations are thriving there, too.
Quote:Increased storms, drought, and sea-level rise: The ice sheets have not cooperated with warmists, and neither have other weather-related phenomena, such as mass migrations owing to sea-level rise.
On June 30, 1989, the Associated Press ran an article headlined: “UN Official Predicts Disaster, Says Greenhouse Effect Could Wipe Some Nations Off Map.” In the piece, the director of the UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) New York office was quoted as claiming that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.” He also predicted “coastal flooding and crop failures” that “would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ threatening political chaos.” Of course, 2000 came and went, and none of those things actually happened. But that didn’t stop the warnings.