Artic cyclone: the conspiracy that wasn’t (Wattsupwiththat goes shark-jumpin)

If you feel like laughing at conspiracy theories, head over to Wattsupwiththat, where the denialists are sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling “LA LA LA LA LA” about Arctic Sea Ice.

If you didn’t already know, the ice cover at the Arctic reached its lowest extent in the satellite era this month. Skip the media coverage, here’s the NASA source.

One reason for the dramatic fall in ice cover: there was a cyclone-strength storm that churned the sea-ice and made it more vulnerable to melting.

The storm has acted as the perfect distraction for denialists like the Wattsupwiththat blog: “NASA finally admits it – Arctic cyclone in August ‘broke up’ and ‘wreaked havoc’ on sea ice” (my emphasis).

That seems to imply that NASA was trying to conceal the interaction between the cyclone and the sea ice.

Except, of course, that NASA didn’t conceal a damn thing. The cyclone – and its likely impacts – were in public, with comments by NASA, back as far as August, while the cyclone was still active.

In this article, for example, discussing the storm back in August, NASA commented that the storm had already detached ice from the main pack – and exposing the detached ice to quicker melting.

So much for the conspiracy theory.

The article I referred to above also pointed out that the sea ice would not have been so vulnerable if it wasn’t already so thin – by the end of July the sea ice retreat had already broken records.

“Conspiracist ideation” anyone?

Can we just forget about the polar bears for a while?

Not that I don’t care, but ever since An Inconvenient Truth made the polar bear the iconic image for climate change, it’s become a distraction from the real debate.

Take this piece of logical legerdemain from Matt Ridley. Admitting through gritted teeth that actually, really, oh-all-right the Arctic sea ice is retreating, he plays a misdirection game: “In the Holocene Optimum there was no collapse of the polar-bear population”.

Keep calm and carry on, people, the polar bears will get by somehow.

That, of course, ignores two itsy-bitsy ever-so-tiny details.

• 1.     Polar bears and arctic foxes are only so-so as a proxy to answer the question “what impact would an ice-free Arctic have on species in the region?” Ridley somehow manages to overlook species, like the muskox and the steppe bison, that may have suffered a population collapse in the Holocene. It’s odd that he’d miss these examples, since he’s a zoologist.

 

• 2.     The survival of the polar bear is not a benchmark for the impact of warming on human society.

Ridley ends with this red herring:

“The sea-dominated Southern Hemisphere is certainly warming more slowly than the land-dominated Northern Hemisphere, but it has still been warming. If warming is supposed to be "global," shouldn't sea ice retreat at both ends of the world?”

That’s a misleading question – since it’s been answered. Ridley seems to be placing a bet that his readers don’t know this. His readers don’t realize that the Antarctic is land, not sea; that the freshening of the Southern Ocean allows it to freeze more readily.

Most importantly, if all of the Antarctic ice is taken into account – both land and sea ice – the Antarctic ice cap, like the Arctic, is shrinking.