Not drowning, but waving!

Them pesky polar bears make another appearance today, this time in The Sunday Telegraph, as Booker notes that, "Arctic ice isn't vanishing after all".

He also observes that, while there was some coverage of the chaos caused in central and southern China by their heaviest snowfalls for decades, little attention was paid to the snow that last week carpeted Jerusalem, Damascus and Amman, none of them exactly used to Dickensian Christmas card weather.

Similarly, Saudis last month expressed amazement at their heaviest snow for many years, in Afghanistan snow and freezing weather killed 120 people (estimated now to have increased to 500) and large parts of the United States and Canada have been swept by unusually fierce blizzards.

But, writes Booker, if the northern hemisphere's chilliest winter in a long time was bad news for the propagandists of global warming, they also had to face serious questions about some of the most iconic images used to support the claims that the world is hotting up towards disaster.

Last autumn, he reminds us, the BBC and others could scarcely contain their excitement in reporting that the Arctic ice was melting so fast there would soon be none left. Sea ice cover had shrunk to the lowest level ever recorded. This was recorded by the Goddard Space Flight Center which issued a striking series of animations.

However, relying on a series of graphs posted by one of our forum members, produced from the latest satellite findings, Booker is able to paint a different picture.

As reported by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on the website Cryosphere Today by the University of Illinois – a body committed to warmist orthodoxy and a contributor to the work of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – a graph of northern hemisphere sea ice area shows the ice shrinking from 13,000 million sq km to just four million from the start of 2007 to October, also shows it now almost back to 13 million sq km.

This is shown graphically by the most up-to-date satellite representations taken from the site, which from simple inspection shows this to be the case.


Interestingly, towards the end of January, the news agency AFP retailed a report from the Paris-based National Centre for Scientific Research stating that the Arctic ice cap had shrunk by an area twice the size of France's land mass over the last two years. Research Director Jean-Claude Gascard then said, "The year 2008 promises to be a critical year on every level."

So far, so good, which brings us back to the "inconvenient truth" about those polar bears, the image of which has been relentlessly exploited to promote this panic over the "vanishing" Arctic ice. It was most famously used by Al Gore, who declared that, "Their habitat is melting … beautiful animals, literally being forced off the planet." But, concludes Booker, having reported that the ice isn't melting after all (and that the bears were within easy swimming distance of the shore) it seems those famous bears were not drowning after all, they were just waving.

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