More Climate Confusion From PowerLine

In his latest Green Loser Of The Week post, Steven Hayward calls Jay Zwally a loser for his 2007 comments regarding Arctic sea ice.

Very tough competition for this week’s Power Line Green Loser of the Week Award.  Are you ready for the complete disappearance of the Arctic ice cap this summer?   That’s what NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally predicted back in 2007.  From National Geographic:

This week, after reviewing his own new data, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: “At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions.”

Even though Dr. Zwally qualified his comments by saying “could be nearly ice-free”, he made the classic mistake of taking a short-term anomaly (2007 was an unusually warm year in the Arctic) and projecting it long-term. When you look at the data, you can see the dramatic drop in ice coverage in 2007 that prompted Zwally to make that statement.

From this graph, you can also see that the long-term trend of disappearing Arctic sea ice is still intact. 2011 saw the second lowest sea ice coverage of any year on record – 30% less than 1979. And when you look at the volume of Arctic sea ice, the loss is even more dramatic – it’s down about 75% from 1979!

Looking through the comments for this latest post, it apparently had it’s intended effect on many Power Line readers. They are more convinced than ever that Climate Change is a hoax. The data tell a different story.