The chicken little theory that the ice cap will disappear permanently appears to have been disproven; as someone who has a modicum of intution, I could have told you that viewpoint was to be taken with a grain of salt. Unfortunately for many of the cherry picking “climate scientists”, the earth isn’t as dumb of a system as they would think; it actually balances itself out quite nicely.

Current sea ice measurements indicate:

…at the south pole the sea ice around Antarctica is actually increasing. The ice there has been covering another 100,000 square km more sea each decade for the last 30 years, despite the well-publicised losses of ice shelf in the Western Antarctic.

Here’s the full article:

No ‘tipping point’ for Arctic sea ice – latest science

Polar cap would be back 2 yrs after an ice-free summer
By Lewis Page

OK, so the floating Arctic ice cap appears to be shrinking. Catastrophe if it goes on, right? As white ice reflects heat into space, past a certain point more and more heat will not be reflected, more and more ice will melt. Past such a “tipping point”, the ice cap would never recover – it would vanish completely, taking with it the ice cover of Greenland which would cause huge rises in sea levels and Biblical flooding worldwide.

Not so much, according to the latest research by German climate scientists. It seems that even in the case of a completely ice-free summer with the sun shining down onto an unprotected Arctic Ocean 24 hours a day (as it does in summer time up there), the heat absorbed by the sea would not be enough to permanently remove the ice cap. It would recover, in fact, within two years: there is no tipping point.

According to Steffen Tietsche, a polar ice expert at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, this is because removal of ice works two ways. It lets the sun’s rays warm the ocean beneath more strongly, but it also lets heat escape from the sea more easily. Thus, following an ice-free summer the Arctic will shed the extra heat fast due to the lack of its usual igloo-like ice blanket. Soon it will be so cold that the ice will reappear.

Tietsche and his colleagues write:

We examine the recovery of Arctic sea ice from prescribed ice-free summer conditions in simulations of 21st century climate in an atmosphere–ocean general circulation model. We find that ice extent recovers typically within two years.

The excess oceanic heat that had built up during the ice-free summer is rapidly returned to the atmosphere during the following autumn and winter, and then leaves the Arctic partly through increased longwave emission at the top of the atmosphere and partly through reduced atmospheric heat advection from lower latitudes. Oceanic heat transport does not contribute significantly to the loss of the excess heat.

Our results suggest that anomalous loss of Arctic sea ice during a single summer is reversible, as the ice–albedo feedback is alleviated by large-scale recovery mechanisms. Hence, hysteretic threshold behavior (or a “tipping point”) is unlikely to occur during the decline of Arctic summer sea-ice cover in the 21st century.

Details of the full paper in Geophysical Research Letters can be read here.

So the gradual decline in ice extent seen in recent decades may continue, but even if a very hot summer seriously eats away at the sea ice – even so much as to completely melt it all – it will recover; there will be no sudden disaster this century.

Meanwhile down at the south pole the sea ice around Antarctica is actually increasing. The ice there has been covering another 100,000 square km more sea each decade for the last 30 years, despite the well-publicised losses of ice shelf in the Western Antarctic.

There is a widely held belief in the mainstream that “the debate has been settled” regarding Global Warming. If, however, you look at the financiers, beneficiaries and the tactics used to push forth with the Global Warming research and the associated policy, it gives one reason to be suspicious of what is really going on here.

More attention needs to be paid to non-conventional views on Global Warming. While the government has shelled out nearly $80 billion U.S. dollars to scientists, in order to generate research indicating man-made global warming is real; only $23 million U.S. dollars have been given to scientists with a skeptical angle.

Give a large swath of scientists a momentous sum of money and they will publish papers showing just about anything is true, whether or not that is actually the case. When you have a massively dis-proportionate sum going to one side of the argument; you will likely have the illusion of consensus and most people will believe that your research proves something concrete.

I’d like to present a few alternative views for your consideration. Now I’m sure these aren’t the be all end all proof of anything in particular; but at least they show an alternative viewpoint and provide a window into the kinds of individuals and organizations involved, as well as the motives, behind the push for Climate Change taxation and regulation.

The Skeptics Handbook II: Global Bullies Want Your Money

Global Warming Skeptics Handbook

It’s unthinkable. Big Government has spent $79 billion on the climate industry,
3000 times more than Big-oil. Leading climate scientists won’t debate in public
and won’t provide their data. What do they hide? When faced with legal requests
they say they’ve “lost” the original global temperature records. Thousands of
scientists are rising in protest against the scare campaign. Meanwhile $126 billion
turned over in carbon markets in 2008 and bankers get set to make billions.

Great Global Warming Swindle

Everything youve ever been told about Global Warming is probably untrue. From Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth to news reports from the popular media outlets and even public classrooms which, in chicken little fashion, seem to be screaming – the sky is falling. But is it really? This film blows the whistle on what may be the biggest swindle in modern history. We are told that Man Made Global Warming is the biggest threat ever to mankind and that it may even threaten our very survival; and, if we do not change our ways and reduce CO2 emissions – polar ice caps will melt, coastal areas will flood and hurricanes like Katrina will become common. With nearly Gestapo like tactics we are told not to question! There is absolutely no room for doubt because there is a “scientific consensus.” Anyone who questions the data or conclusion is an enemy of the state and humanity. Well, bring it on because this is exactly what this well documented film does. The Great Global Warming Swindle uses a plethora of leading scientists who will not bend to political or philosophical or ideaological pressure. So watch this film and make up your own mind.

CBC Documentary: Global Warming Doomsday Called Off

In this eye-opening documentary viewers will discover how the most respected researchers from all over the world explode the doom and gloom of global warming.

Humans stand accused of having set off a global climate catastrophe by increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The prophecy of doom is clear and media pass on the message uncritically.

Now serious criticism has arisen from a number of heavyweight independent scientists. They argue that most of the climatic change we have seen is due to natural variations.

source: UK Telegraph

Mitchell Taylor, who has studied the animals for 30 years, was told his views ‘are extremely unhelpful’ , reveals Christopher Booker.

According to the world’s leading expert on polar bears, their numbers are higher than they were 30 years ago

Over the coming days a curiously revealing event will be taking place in Copenhagen. Top of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (set up under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission) will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming.

This is one of a steady drizzle of events planned to stoke up alarm in the run-up to the UN’s major conference on climate change in Copenhagen next December. But one of the world’s leading experts on polar bears has been told to stay away from this week’s meeting, specifically because his views on global warming do not accord with those of the rest of the group.

Dr Mitchell Taylor has been researching the status and management of polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined.

Dr Taylor agrees that the Arctic has been warming over the last 30 years. But he ascribes this not to rising levels of CO2 – as is dictated by the computer models of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and believed by his PBSG colleagues – but to currents bringing warm water into the Arctic from the Pacific and the effect of winds blowing in from the Bering Sea.

He has also observed, however, how the melting of Arctic ice, supposedly threatening the survival of the bears, has rocketed to the top of the warmists’ agenda as their most iconic single cause. The famous photograph of two bears standing forlornly on a melting iceberg was produced thousands of times by Al Gore, the WWF and others as an emblem of how the bears faced extinction – until last year the photographer, Amanda Byrd, revealed that the bears, just off the Alaska coast, were in no danger. Her picture had nothing to do with global warming and was only taken because the wind-sculpted ice they were standing on made such a striking image.

Dr Taylor had obtained funding to attend this week’s meeting of the PBSG, but this was voted down by its members because of his views on global warming. The chairman, Dr Andy Derocher, a former university pupil of Dr Taylor’s, frankly explained in an email (which I was not sent by Dr Taylor) that his rejection had nothing to do with his undoubted expertise on polar bears: “it was the position you’ve taken on global warming that brought opposition”.

Dr Taylor was told that his views running “counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful”. His signing of the Manhattan Declaration – a statement by 500 scientists that the causes of climate change are not CO2 but natural, such as changes in the radiation of the sun and ocean currents – was “inconsistent with the position taken by the PBSG”.

So, as the great Copenhagen bandwagon rolls on, stand by this week for reports along the lines of “scientists say polar bears are threatened with extinction by vanishing Arctic ice”. But also check out Anthony Watt’s Watts Up With That website for the latest news of what is actually happening in the Arctic. The average temperature at midsummer is still below zero, the latest date that this has happened in 50 years of record-keeping. After last year’s recovery from its September 2007 low, this year’s ice melt is likely to be substantially less than for some time. The bears are doing fine.