Ice

In one of the last books, State of Fear, Michael Crichton predicted that "global warming" hysterics were in the process of changing terminology, replacing the phrase "global warming" with "climate change." They were making this move, Crichton contended, because the activist scientific cadre that falsified data and otherwise promoted a political rather than scientific agenda, could not discount growing evidence that global warming is a tenuous hypothesis that cannot be proven. Of course the truly insidious nature of the phrase "climate change" is that the climate does change over the centuries. But the changes have almost nothing to do with the over-hyped causes that alarmists always seem to mention.

No matter. Climate change has become a quasi-religious belief system that moves almost all of the left and a few outliers on the right to condemn CO2, suggest ruinous cap and trade taxation, and otherwise ring their hands about shrinking polar caps, rising sea levels and other imaginary boogie men. Barack Obama is a strong proponent of this belief system, following in the shallow footsteps of Al Gore.

There's only one problem, virtually every prediction that has been based on the "climate change" belief system has been incorrect or grossly exaggerated. Nearly every scientific model that predicted rising sea levels, increasing global temperatures, and shrinking ice caps has been proven incorrect by rigorous scientific data over the past decade. Nearly every human prediction of catastrophe based on climate change (whether it's increased hurricane intensity, global famine, or flooded cities) has been proven false.

For example, from 2005 to 2009, proponents of the catastrophic effects of "climate change" argued that polar sea ice was shrinking at an alarming rate. In fact, its was predicted that summer ice would disappear in the north in 2013. In 2009, Barack Obama's science advisor, John Holdren, stated:

…if you lose the summer sea ice, there are phenomena that could lead you not so very long thereafter to lose the winter sea ice as well. And if you lose that sea ice year round, it’s going to mean drastic climatic change all over the hemisphere.

Here's the problem (for Holdren and other alarmists who think like him). There is as much Sea ice today as there was in 2002. In fact, this year, we have had a record increase in ice cover area. Of course, Sea ice levels vary year over year as evidenced by the simple graph below.

Even this graph must be considered suspect, because it is scientifically dishonest to use short term trends (either positive or negative) to make an argument about long term climatic change. But that's what alarmists do on a regular basis, and sadly, that what low information proponents of climate change believe.

Have you noticed that the media almost never reports on climate change today. The reason is that the data no longer supports their biased arguments, unless it has been rigged by dishonest scientists (think: the IPCC scandal of a few years ago).

Update
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The UN IPCC Report on Climate Change will be published next week. The IPCC was and remains a key proponent of global climate change, but previews of the report indicate that even they have significantly downgrade their estimates of the amount of change and the potential damage caused as a result.

The Wall Street Journal comments:

Since the last IPCC report in 2007, much has changed. It is now more than 15 years since global average temperature rose significantly. Indeed, the IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri has conceded that the "pause" already may have lasted for 17 years, depending on which data set you look at. A recent study in Nature Climate Change by Francis Zwiers and colleagues of the University of Victoria, British Columbia, found that models have overestimated warming by 100% over the past 20 years.

Explaining this failure is now a cottage industry in climate science. At first, it was hoped that an underestimate of sulfate pollution from industry (which can cool the air by reflecting heat back into space) might explain the pause, but the science has gone the other way—reducing its estimate of sulfate cooling. Now a favorite explanation is that the heat is hiding in the deep ocean. Yet the data to support this thesis come from ocean buoys and deal in hundredths of a degree of temperature change, with a measurement error far larger than that. Moreover, ocean heat uptake has been slowing over the past eight years.

The most plausible explanation of the pause is simply that climate sensitivity was overestimated in the models because of faulty assumptions about net amplification through water-vapor feedback. This will be a topic of heated debate at the political session to rewrite the report in Stockholm, starting on Sept. 23, at which issues other than the actual science of climate change will be at stake.

Let's see if and how the MSM reports these findings.