North Pole to remain frozen

Another Warmist prediction fails

Santa can rest easy. It’s looking like the ice at the North Pole won’t melt to water next month, as had been feared. It would have been the first time in thousands of years that the most northerly place on the planet would have been ice-free.“It’s quite unlikely at this point,” Walt Meier a research scientist at the University of Colorado’s National Snow and Ice Data Center, said today.

The ice in the Arctic Ocean is at near historic lows, and breaks records every couple of years due to human-caused global warming, the scientists at NSIDC say. This spring, it was looking like the ice might retreat so far that the North Pole itself would be ice-free for at least a day in September – the height of the ice-melt season. The chances were great enough that the scientists at NSIDC were laying almost even odds on it in an office pool.

But while global warming is playing an important role, seasonal variability does, too. And this summer turned out to be a little cooler than last summer, when the record for ice retreat was set, Meier said. “We only have about two or three weeks more of ice melt, and it’s not going to make it to the North Pole,” Meier said.

The Arctic Ocean has two types of ice. One type is the seasonal ice that starts forming in late September, typically reaches 10 to 15 feet thick, and may or may not survive the summer’s heat. The second type is the perennial ice that lasts year after year -- at least it has until the last couple decades when so much of it has melted.

NSIDC scientists got interested in a possibly ice-free North Pole this year when they noticed that that perennial ice had retreated south of the North Pole. That left only the seasonal ice. But the season was cooler than expected, so the seasonal ice is holding. “We’re not going to set a record every year,” Meier said.

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