"Re jellyfish!-for what it's worth Christopher Booker-Sun Tel 9 days ago - said that the combined Antarctic and Arctic ice has had a mega freeze-and is back to normal more or less. Elizabeth Browning does appear to talk cool sense (and is relevant to jelly fish! - decadal Pacific oscillator, if you remember). A change from opinionated hysterics; I bet 99% of people who think they can "save the planet" (I'll do the jokes) have done zilch scientific homework. It's a farce."

David Fuller's view Thanks for your thoughts and for pointing our Christopher Booker's articles on this subject for The Telegraph. Here is the opening from his article on 21st September: The ice is not melting, yet the scaremongers blunder on:


The news that hundreds of scientists and officials from all over the world are this weekend converging on Stockholm to discuss the next 2,000-page report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) again highlights what is the most terrifying political conundrum facing our country today. Emerging in instalments over the next seven months, this report will try to convince the world, without a shred of hard evidence, that the prospect of catastrophic man-made global warming is "extremely likely".

The air is already thick with familiar claims and counterclaims, President Obama quotes yet another laughably silly paper trying to make out that "97 per cent of scientists" support the IPCC "consensus". Sceptics point out yet again that the lack of global warming over the past 17 years makes a nonsense of all those computer-model projections on which the IPCC has been basing its case for 23 years. And we can only look on this endlessly sterile non-debate with a suffocating sense of déjà vu.

Noting Barack Obama's 97% claim above I have to say, in the social science field of trend extrapolation, if subscribers heard that 97% of investors were predicting continuation rather than reversal, most of us would be looking to take the opposite view.

Can we say the same about trend extrapolations in natural science? Not really, although there is so much uncertainty, fear and opportunism surrounding the climate change debate that too many interpretations and forecasts are biased on the basis of social science.

Here is the opening from another Telegraph article by Hayley Dixon, published on 8th September: Global warming? No, actually we're cooling, claim scientists:


There has been a 29 per cent increase in the amount of ocean covered with ice compared to this time last year, the equivalent of 533,000 square miles.

In a rebound from 2012's record low, an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia's northern shores, days before the annual re-freeze is even set to begin.

The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific had remained blocked by pack-ice all year, forcing some ships to change their routes.

One ship has now managed to pass through, completing its journey on September 27.

A leaked report to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) seen by the Mail on Sunday, has led some scientists to claim that the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century.

If correct, it would contradict computer forecasts of imminent catastrophic warming. The news comes several years after predictions that the arctic would be ice-free by 2013.

I have long been concerned that the debate over climate change is largely split along stereotypical right versus left political views, and the latter group has certainly won the public relations battle, at least up to now. Those who are global warming sceptics or even agnostics, are often described as ignorant or worse, being corporate industrial polluters on the scale of satanic mill operators from the Victorian era. In contrast, those on the left who forecast potential disaster are praised for being aware, clean and green, and trying to save the planet. They have received Nobel Prizes for their efforts. However, if the significant previous reduction in Arctic ice proves to be temporary, and it may judging from the latest evidence, those who have driven up our energy bills, weakened our economies and blotted our landscapes with wind farm monstrosities will not be quickly forgiven.