Ice, ice baby

It is just too easy to mock former Vice President Al Gore, over the continued collapse of his global warming alarmist canon. However, the damage that his acolytes continue to do under his misguided spell makes the idea of simply disgracing him through humor to be akin to giving Charles Manson a three-year suspended sentence.

Whatever punishment might be meted out, the Oscar-winning climate advocate has more than a few problems with his faltering theory — the most glaring being that the climate isn’t doing what he warned us it would do.

Not only isn’t it warming the way it is supposed to, the ice in both the Arctic Sea (where it is summer) and Antarctica (where it is winter) are stubbornly refusing to play along as well. In the Arctic Sea, the ice is more than half a million square miles above the levels observed on the same date in 2012.

{mosads}The Daily Mail quotes climate satellite monitoring expert Professor Andrew Shepherd of Leeds University and University College, London, as saying, “It is clear from the measurements we have collected that the Arctic sea ice has experienced a significant recovery in thickness over the past year.”

So not only is the ice covering an increased area, but it is also thicker, making it able to have more staying power during warmer air temperatures.

It appears that the much speculated about Northwest passage through the Arctic Sea will need to wait a few more years as Gore’s apocalyptic vision of an ice-free Arctic Sea by 2014 is shipwrecked in an ice extent increase about the size of the state of Alaska. To be fair, something the “An Inconvenient Truth” producer would never personally stoop to, the Arctic ice is still well below what scientists have deemed its historic norm, but the predictions of its demise are certainly contradicted by the facts.

Flipping to Antarctica, sea ice remains at a daily record high, and 1.19 million square kilometers (459,000 square miles) above the 1981 to 2010 average. While there are those who have struggled to explain why their computer models did not predict this stunning and massive increase in ice levels, there is a consensus developing that the answer is found in the ocean.

While every schoolchild learns that only 10 percent of an iceberg is above the surface of the water, this fact apparently skipped the climate change model producers, who have only recently figured out that water temperatures play a major role in ice formation. It is this well-known, but suddenly rediscovered fact that has caused the bumbling climate government grant seekers to use ocean temperatures to explain the failure of their computer models. This revelation of a titanic blunder in the climate change predictions would send nonpolitical ideology-driven hypotheses sinking into ignominy.

However, too much is at stake in terms of redistributing the world’s wealth away from Europe and the United States to allow the man-made climate change idea to die the death it deserves. So, rather than slinking away, Gore will just continue pushing his modern snake-oil sales wagon around the world, preying on fears and providing an elixir which is harmful to our nation’s economic health. P.T. Barnum famously summed up why someone like Gore hasn’t been shamed into silence, saying “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

Manning (@rmanning957) is vice president of public policy and communications for Americans for Limited Government. Contact him at rmanning@getliberty.org.