Arctic ice definitely melting
Richard Treadgold | June 26, 2011
From the Washington Post
Associated Press
The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consulafft, at Bergen, Norway.
Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone.
Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 metres showed the Gulf Stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.
Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.
Within a few years it is predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise and make most coastal cities uninhabitable.
I apologize: I neglected to mention that this report is dated November 2, 1922 — 88 years ago.
So what happened next? Was Bergen inundated? Did the polar bears die? Was Miami evacuated?
Amazing that they were thinking that sea ice melting causes sea level rise, even back then.
Looks like a “precedent” to me.
Lmto! You got me there with the fine print. Where did you find this wee gem?
It came to me from Keith Hancox. Thanks for asking: I forgot the hat tip.
I think Richard Lindzen made similar observations in his Heartland keynote speech
Very Droll
Goes hand in hand with the popular predictions in the 1970′s that we were about to descend into an ice age.
The moral? There will always be alarmists seeking headlines, often accompanied by the catch phrase “we need to undertake more research”.
Another doomsday prediction of yore springs to mind: the horse manure problem.
In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan’s third-story windows.
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/03/29/the-horse-manure-problem/
When I was a teenager, I joined the local Boys’ Brigade, mostly to have a whack at playing side drum in their marching band and drum corp. The group was attached to a Protestant church of American origin; attending Church Parade was not optional. My first Church Parade went okay until we got to the sermon and the minister, who suffered an unfortunate muscular tic in one eye, began winking at me while shouting about all the things that would lead us straight to Hell and Eternal Damnation. Man. I was scared!
The following week I handed in my drum and Glengarry cap and left the Boys Brigade for ever.
Why do alarmist tales from CAGW catastrophists remind me of those long-gone days?
Go have a look at Lucia’s sitewhere she does a good analysis of the FOI Commissioner’s thumping of the UEA’s refusal to part with data on basis it infringes intellectual proprty rights. This resonates with NIWA’s reluctance to part with Salinger’s data. I suspect the arguments the C FOI uses to force UEA to ‘fess up are the same ones that could apply in NZ.
99. [...] UEA’s arguments have presented arguments about infringement to intellectual property rights but no convincing evidence has been supplied about the actual affect on the rights holders e.g. impact on the ability to derive value or exploit their intellectual property or other impacts of the loss of control.
100. The Commissioner is in the position of having to carry out a highly speculative exercise as to the potential impact of disclosure. On the basis of the evidence and arguments supplied by UEA he is not satisfied it is more probable than not that disclosure would adversely affect the intellectual property rights of the NMSs and other bodies that supplied information.
101. UEA also argued that disclosure would have adversely affected its own intellectual property rights because it would lose control of the wider dissemination of the withheld informaiton and as a result lose any right of commercial exploitation of the data sets.
102. However, the Commissioner notes that the request was not for a copy of UEA’s current data set but for the datasets that contained temperature data up to November 2008. That particular datasets that were requested were therefor nearly a year old at the time of the request. In addition, the data sets only related to a limited part of the world, covering the latitude zones 30N to 40S, rather being for datasets held by UEA that covered the whole world.
103. The Commissioner also takes note of the fact that UEW has informed him that 85.5% of the information in the withheld data set as already available on the GHCN website. In addition, for the 11.8% of the data in UEA’s database there was comparable but different data on the GHCN website. Only in respect to 2.7% of the data contained in UEA’s data sets was there no comparable data on the GHCN website.
104. Given all of the above, it is not clear to the Commissioner how UEA might have planned to commercially exploit the specific information requested and how disclosures might have impacted on any plans that it might have developed or been in the process of developing. He is consequently not satisfied it is more probable than not that disclosure would adversely affect its intellectual property rights. He has therefore determined that regulation 12(5)(c) is not engaged.