Are the ice caps melting? • The Register: “PBEM The headlines last week brought us terrifying news: The North Pole will be ice-free this summer ‘for the first time in human history,’ wrote Steve Connor in The Independent. Or so the experts at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado predict. This sounds very frightening, so let’s look at the facts about polar sea ice.
As usual, there are a couple of huge problems with the reports.
Firstly, the story is neither alarming nor unique.
In the August 29, 2000 edition of the New York Times, the same NSIDC expert, Mark Serreze, said:
‘There’s nothing to be necessarily alarmed about. There’s been open water at the pole before. We have no clear evidence at this point that this is related to global climate change.’
During the summer of 2000 there was ‘a large body of ice-free water about 10 miles long and 3 miles wide near the pole’. Also in 2000, Dr Claire Parkinson at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center was quoted as saying: ‘The fact of having no ice at the pole is not so stunning.'”