The recent findings from a group of environmental meteorologists will cast further doubt on the unproven hypothesis that humans have caused recent changes in the Arctic climate. In a highly detailed paper, the scientists show that the climate changes can be attributed to natural variation caused by two significant air currents.
The scientists report a significant jump in Greenland's near-surface air temperatures (T2m) around 1994, with relatively stable temperature in the periods before (1958-93) and after (1994-2020). In a crucial finding, the scientists state: "Large scale atmospheric circulation variability can effectively explain this interdecadal variability of Greenland T2m." These are caused by the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the Greenland Blocking Index (GBI). The NAO is caused by latitudinal differences in air pressure, while the GBI is a ridge of northern high pressure that leads to troughing in the jet stream. The correlations of temperatures with movements in the NAO and GBI were found to be "highly significant". Against the background to the sudden 1994 rapid warming, the observed shift in both NAO and GBI was noted to be "critical to the sudden warming in Greenland since the mid-1990s".
The key set of temperature graphs is shown below.
The evidence presented in this paper undermines the 'settled' science dogma that blames all or most recent changes in global temperatures on the properties of just one trace atmospheric gas. A gas, carbon dioxide, for which humans themselves are only responsible for 4% of annual atmospheric emissions. MIT Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen has long argued that temperature changes are caused by dynamic heat flows in the atmosphere and oceans caused by latitudinal differences. Changes in average temperature "are primarily due to changes in the tropic-to-pole difference and not to changes in the greenhouse effect", he says. Over millennia, the temperature at the tropics has remained little changed, a situation observed in the current record.
The Arctic has warmed in recent times at a rate faster than the rest of the planet, although as we can see, in the case of Greenland, the average is almost entirely due to one annual jump 29 years ago. This warming has been leapt on as incontrovertible proof of anthropogenic climate change. It is of course no such thing, not least because there is increasing evidence that such warming is caused by natural forces. The global warming hypothesis that it is all caused by humans remains unproven, without a single credible scientific paper to say otherwise. Professor Lindzen puts it more bluntly, noting that the present "absurd scientific narrative" leaves us with a quasi-religious movement with a constant "Goebellian repetition by the media of climate alarmism".
It is unlikely that the mainstream media will stop catastrophising climatic conditions in the Arctic any time soon, since it remains a formidable scare tactic in the collectivist push towards a command-and-control Net Zero agenda. But it is becoming an increasingly difficult hunting ground. Arctic summer sea ice stopped declining 12 years ago, while the Greenland ice sheet might have increased in size to August 2022 if allowance is made for margins of error.
In her latest polar wildlife report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the evolutionary biologist Dr. Susan Crockford notes that life at both the top and bottom of the Earth is "thriving". Arctic sea ice has long been known to be cyclical. There was a downturn beginning in 1979, but that has been broken by a largely unpublicised slow recovery from around 2010. Crockford noted that less summer ice has led to more food for all animals. Polar bears, seals, whales and penguins in Antarctica have all increased in number in recent years.
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