
Experts said Arctic sea ice would melt entirely – they were wrong - lsh123
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/10/07/experts-said-arctic-sea-ice-would-melt-entirely-by-september-201/
======
dalke
Something seems a bit off in this reporting. From this 2016 article at The
Telegraph:

> Dire predictions that the Arctic would be devoid of sea ice by September
> this year have proven to be unfounded after latest satellite images showed
> there is far more now than in 2012.

> Scientists such as Prof Peter Wadhams, of Cambridge University, and Prof
> Wieslaw Maslowski, of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California,
> have regularly forecast the loss of ice by 2016, which has been widely
> reported by the BBC and other media outlets.

Yet from a 2009 article at The Telegraph, at
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/copenhagen-climate-
cha...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-
confe/6815470/Copenhagen-climate-summit-Al-Gore-condemned-over-Arctic-ice-
melting-prediction.html) :

> Speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, Mr Gore said new computer
> modelling suggests there is a 75 per cent chance of the entire polar ice cap
> melting during the summertime by 2014.

> However, he faced embarrassment last night after Dr Wieslav Maslowski, the
> climatologist whose work the prediction was based on, refuted his claims.

> Dr Maslowski, of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, told
> The Times: “It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at.

> “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.” ...

> Dr Maslowki said that his latest results give a six-year projection for the
> melting of 80 per cent of the ice, but he said he expects some ice to remain
> beyond 2020.

> He added: “I was very explicit that we were talking about near-ice-free
> conditions and not completely ice-free conditions in the northern ocean.”

Of course, that was is 2009. Going back to this 2016 article:

> The view was supported by Prof Maslowski, who in 2013 published a paper in
> the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences also claiming that the
> Arctic would be ice-free by 2016, plus or minus three years.

Yet the 2012 Maslowski paper - yes, 2012, not 2013 - doi:10.1146/annurev-
earth-042711-105345 says (emphasis mine):

> Given the estimated trend and the volume estimate for October–November of
> 2007 at less than 9,000 km^3 (Kwok et al. 2009), one can project that at
> this rate it would take only 9 more years or until 2016 ± 3 years to reach a
> nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer. Regardless of high uncertainty
> associated with such an estimate, it does provide _a lower bound of the time
> range for projections of seasonal sea ice cover_

This isn't quite a prediction that the "Arctic would be ice-free by 2016, plus
or minus three years", though I think the difference is more a quibble than
anything else.

In a BBC article from 2011 ( [http://www.bbc.com/news/science-
environment-13002706](http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-13002706) ),
it sounds like Maslowski's prediction for ice loss is the one of the earliest
in the Arctic ice modelling field, and notable for being so early:

> The original prediction, made in 2007, gained Wieslaw Maslowski's team a
> deal of criticism from some of their peers. ...

> "[Maslowski's] is quite a good model, one thing it has is really high
> resolution, it can capture details that are lost in global climate models,"
> he said.

> "But 2019 is only eight years away; there's been modelling showing that
> [likely dates are around] 2040/50, and I'd still lean towards that.

> "I'd be very surprised if it's 2013 - I wouldn't be totally surprised if
> it's 2019."

So while "experts said" is true, it wasn't "most of the experts". Even this
Telegraph piece quotes an expert who says there are experts "“who have the
summer sea ice remaining until late this century, which is quite impossible.”"
It's as if there was a wide range of uncertainty.

I was also thrown by the comment:

> It is the latest example of experts making alarming predictions which do not
> come to pass. Earlier this week environmentalists were accused of misleading
> the public about the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" after aerial shots proved
> there was no "island of rubbish" in the middle of the ocean. Likewise,
> warnings that the hole in the ozone layer would never close were debunked in
> June.

Who said there was an 'island of rubbish'? The popular articles I've read have
all used phrases like Wikipedia article from
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch)
:

> The patch is characterized by exceptionally high relative concentrations of
> pelagic plastics, chemical sludge and other debris that have been trapped by
> the currents of the North Pacific Gyre.[2] Because of its large area, it is
> of very low density (4 particles per cubic meter), and therefore not visible
> from satellite photography, nor even necessarily to casual boaters or divers
> in the area. It consists primarily of a small increase in suspended, often
> microscopic, particles in the upper water column.

It feels like saying the Sargasso Sea is actually not a floating ship
graveyard of ships caught in the seaweed, when that's never been the case.

Similarly, there wasn't a general belief that the hole in the ozone layer
would never close. Quoting now from
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion)
:

> The 2010 report found, "Over the past decade, global ozone and ozone in the
> Arctic and Antarctic regions is no longer decreasing but is not yet
> increasing. The ozone layer outside the Polar regions is projected to
> recover to its pre-1980 levels some time before the middle of this century.
> In contrast, the springtime ozone hole over the Antarctic is expected to
> recover much later."

Who was warning in 2016 that the hole would never close?

