Arctic “Expert” Predicted Sea Ice Gone By Last Year

Arctic

Guido has unearthed a gem from the FT’s archive. Back in 2013 Peter Wadhams told the FT that Arctic sea ice would disappear in the summer of 2016 Wadhams, who is head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at Cambridge, claimed that we would see “the Arctic death spital”, going on to state:

““It could even be this year or next year but not later than 2015 there won’t be any ice in the Arctic in the summer”.

Unfortunately for Peter, who describes himself as the leading authority on the Arctic sea ice, it didn’t disappear last summer, and is in fact in significantly better shape than when he made the prediction back in 2012. Last year the minimum Arctic sea ice extent was 4.41 million square kilometres, compared to 3.39 million square kilometres in 2012. How inconvenient…

Peter of course predicted in The Guardian that the collapse in sea ice would trigger a significant increase in global warming:

“As the sea ice retreats in summer the ocean warms up (to 7C in 2011) and this warms the seabed too. The continental shelves of the Arctic are composed of offshore permafrost, frozen sediment left over from the last ice age. As the water warms the permafrost melts and releases huge quantities of trapped methane, a very powerful greenhouse gas so this will give a big boost to global warming.”

Again such predictions were wide of the mark, with no such vast increases having occurred in global warming since. Yet again the science gets in the way of Wadham’s overblown predictions…

This isn’t the first time the Cambridge professor has made a particularly outlandish statement however, having previously claimed that three climate change scientists studying the ice caps were assassinated to prevent the their explosive research being revealed. Keep drinking the kool-aid professor. Maybe next year…
 mdi-timer 7 January 2016 @ 16:18 7 Jan 2016 @ 16:18 mdi-twitter mdi-facebook mdi-whatsapp mdi-telegram mdi-linkedin mdi-email mdi-comment View Comments