Harrabin Peddles Latest Arctic Nonsense
By Paul Homewood
More nonsense from Roger Harrabin:
A rapid climate shift under way in the Barents Sea could spread to other Arctic regions, scientists warn.
The Barents Sea is said to be at a tipping point, changing from an Arctic climate to an Atlantic climate as the water gets warmer.
A conference in Norway heard that the Kara Sea and the Laptev Sea – both further to the east – are likely to become the new Arctic frontier.
The scientists warn that it will affect ecosystems.
It may also impact on global weather patterns, although there’s no agreement on that.
They’re concerned because the north Barents Sea has been governed by an Arctic climate since the end of the last Ice Age, 12,000 years ago.
The Arctic Ocean has a cold, fresh surface layer which acts as a cap on a layer of warm, saltier Atlantic water beneath.
But now in the Barents Sea there’s not enough freshwater-rich sea-ice flowing from the high Arctic to maintain the freshwater cap.
And that’s allowing warm, salty Atlantic water to rise to the surface.
In what’s known as a feedback loop – the more the layers mix, the warmer the surface gets. And the warmer the surface gets, the more the waters mix.
So it’s now only a matter of time, the researchers say, before this section of the Arctic effectively becomes part of the Atlantic. It could happen in as little as a decade, they warn….
And in another puzzle, freshwater in the western Arctic seems to be increasing as it diminishes in the eastern Arctic. Scientists are still struggling to fathom the complexities of human impact on the planet.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46976040
Why on earth should any of this have to do anything to do with “human impact on the planet”?
You only have to go back to the 1920s to see exactly the same climatic changes in that part of the Arctic.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0493%281922%2950%3C589a%3ATCA%3E2.0.CO%3B2
This period, called the Warming in the North, is well known to scientists, and lasted from around 1920 to 1960.
Bob Dickson and Svein Osterhus wrote extensively about it in their seminal paper, “One hundred years in the Norwegian Sea”:
As our hydrographic time series is lengthened into the middle decades of the 20th century, it begins to capture evidence of one of the largest and most widespread regime shifts to affect our waters within the modern instrumental record. These were the decades of ‘the Warming in the North’, when the salinity of North Atlantic water passing through the Faroe-Shetland Channel into the Norwegian Sea reached a century-long high (Dooley et al. 1984), when salinities were so high off Cape Farewell that they were rejected as erroneous (Harvey 1962) and when a precipitous warming by more than 2°C in the 5-year mean pervaded the West Greenland banks (Fig. 6), and also when the northward dislocations of biogeographical boundaries for a wide range of species, from plankton to commercially important fish, terrestrial mammals, and birds, were at their most extreme in the 20th century. The astonishing nature of these radical events is vivid in the contemporary scientific literature, most notably in the classic accounts by Knipowitsch (1931), Sæmundsson (1934), Hansen et al. (1949), Stephen (1938), Jensen (1939), Tåning (1943), Tåning (1949), Fridriksson (1949), and many others summarized in a comprehensive bibliography by Arthur Lee (1949) and reviewed in an ICES special scientific meeting on ‘Climatic Changes in the Arctic in Relation to Plants and Animals’ in Copenhagen in 1948.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00291950701409256
The Warming in the North ended abruptly in the 1960s, when Arctic currents took over again, and brought the sea ice back.
Go back a bit further, and we can see how sea ice around the Barents Sea fluctuated backwards and forwards:
And go back 3000 years, and we can see that current sea ice extent to the north of Iceland is near historical highs.
It should not take Harrabin more than a few minutes to check this out for himself. So why does he continue to peddle every bit of junk science he is fed?
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Harrabin gets paid (by Telly-Tax payers) by the word, not by the accurate word.
If only climate change drove some of some species to extinction.
Harrabin gets paid to specifically put a climate panic connotation onto any weather event he thinks suitable. It is BBC policy which it refuses to admit.
Ps: Western Antarctica lies over an active rift which must be exuding a fair bit of energy.
Well why don’t people stop paying it!!!!!!!
Perhaps his input is suggested to be R&D paid for by the EU?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36149789
Because the BBC pay him heap big money to do so.
Having totally destroyed the fatuous claims, your last line question, although clearly rhetorical, is important. As with all of the doom-merchants, any excuse to cry “we’re all doomed” is god-given: facts and truth are of low importance to the greater cause. What is unforgivable is that their outpourings are neither criticised nor corrected by their sponsors when proved to be untrue.
‘A rapid climate shift under way in the Barents Sea could spread to other Arctic regions, scientists warn.’
Oh, my! How many people will be killed by this?
We are very concerned about it in Virginia. Hardly a day goes by that we are not discussing fluctuations of the ice content of the Arctic.
We seem to have cycles of buzz words. “Tipping point” was used for about everything a few years ago and then hardly at all. Looks like it is time for the “Tipping Point” scare to fire back up.
Well I suspect that the use of ‘tipping point’ increases until, well, there’s a tipping point, and it becomes a runaway platitude.
Then a decline and, well you get the point.
‘And that’s allowing warm, salty Atlantic water to rise to the surface.
In what’s known as a feedback loop – the more the layers mix, the warmer the surface gets. And the warmer the surface gets, the more the waters mix.’
They’re correct that there’s a feedback, except that instead of being positive, which would result in a tipping point, it’s negative. Long wave radiation more readily leaves the Earth in the polar regions. By allowing the warmer waters to reach the surface, more energy can escape, which leads to a cooling of the system until a point is reached where it freezes over again.
Some one should explain to “Professor” Harrabin that there are two kinds of feedback loops. One positive that reinforces error and one negative that corrects errors. It is nature’s way to select out the former and develop the latter.
Reblogged this on Climate Collections.
It occurs to me that now the Anti-Technology Religion has latched onto CO2 and such as reasons to stop any form of industry they have compltely forgotten about their old rantings about acid rain and the acidification of the land. Odd that?
Incidentally can I claim to be a “Vegan once removed” — I only eat animals that are vegitarian. (Not so sure about the fish).
Love it! A little teatime merriment! Thankyou.
I’m going to steal this and use it in the pub. Thank you.
The BBC bosses tell their environment and “science” correspondents to produce at least one alarmist climate change (man-made global warming) scare story every day.
And then underneath each item they have the item “Why you can trust BBC News”. What a joke the BBC propaganda is.
They want to keep their army of useful climate idiots topped up with the latest fake scares.
Reblogged this on WeatherAction News and commented:
why does he continue to peddle every bit of junk science he is fed
Because he dares not blaspheme
The BBC’s story amounts to nothing but assertion, hearsay and fake news unless the underlying scientific papers are referenced, if indeed they actually exist. BBC policy appears to be that of brainwashing a lay audience whom it thinks is to too stupid to ask basic intelligent questions.
It is time the BBC charter was either overhauled or withdrawn.
Charter –
“The Royal Charter is the constitutional basis for the BBC. It sets out the BBC’s Object, Mission and Public Purposes. The Charter also outlines the Corporation’s governance and regulatory arrangements, including the role and composition of the BBC Board.”
As I said on another Thread, if you listen to the Swedish girl at Davos, if she is telling the truth then what the BBC, MSM, climate scientists & activists are doing is Child Mental Abuse.
If you believe this kid she really does think that the world is going to end unless we all do something now.
It is absolutely disgusting.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/business/teenager-takes-climate-change-fight-direct-to-world-leaders-zhfzbb6d2
The whole argument is emotional twaddle. Where is the one legged refugee? The fact they resirt to such stunts telks you what is going on in this house of cards.
Meanwhile Arctic sea ice extent and volume are busily freezing away happily in spite of Harrabin’s hot air.
Meantime Tony Heller has something to say about this latest scare here
https://realclimatescience.com/2019/01/arctic-sea-ice-volume-increasing-towards-ten-year-highs/
It is easy to see here that there is little ice north and west of Norway, but no shortage of ice elsewhere.
As Paul Homewood points out – natural variation and nothing to do with CO2.
They KNOW that cold is coming. They worry that it will challenge their view of AGW so they have to double down on the scare. Before we know it they will be claiming that the cooling to come is all part and parcel of AGW. They have very little time and nothing of truth on their side. I hope Harrabin has a miserable rest of his career. He has no credence.
Our kid’s pet goldfish has forgotten more science than Horrorbin will ever likely know.
Of course we expect to ser these kinds of changes in interglacials. Climate is not static. But it is wrong and frivolous to arbitrarily describe all observed changes as undesirable, to attribute them to fossil fuel emissions, and to claim that they can and that they must be moderated by cutting emissions.