Eideard

This is one of those posts that is only a footnote for climatologists – except for the dweebs who can’t seem to comprehend the difference between weather and climate and, more than any other ethic, hate to own up to any responsibility for global warming on the part of human beings.

Arctic sea ice is unlikely to shrink below a 2007 record low this year in a reprieve from the worst predictions of climate change even though new evidence confirms a long-term thaw is under way, experts said.

The 2007 record raised worries of a melt that could leave the North Pole ice-free this year, threaten indigenous hunters and thaw ice vital for creatures such as polar bears. It would also help open the Arctic to shipping and oil and gas firms…

It is still far smaller than the average of recent decades.

“Ninety percent … of the decreasing sea-ice extent is empirically ‘accounted for’ by the increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” Ola M. Johannessen wrote in a study to be published next month in a journal by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The Arctic has been warming about twice as fast as the rest of the globe in recent decades. Ice and snow reflect heat and any thaw uncovers darker ground or sea water that soak up the sun’s warmth and further accelerate the melt.

The propaganda campaign against human responsibility not only is comparable to that waged by the tobacco industry against years of cancer study, it’s the same hangers-on trumpeting any individual day’s forecast that counters massive trends by an infinitesimal amount. Exactly the same louts who fear losing their chance to smoke themselves to oblivion at the American Legion Bar on a Friday night.