Climate alarmists contend the earth’s near-surface air temperatures of the past decade were unprecedentedly high relative to the warmth of the entire past millennium, due primarily to human carbon dioxide emissions. They also claim this warming has been most strongly expressed throughout the Arctic, which they often describe as the planet’s “canary in a coal mine,” for the planet as a whole.
Working with an ice core that retrieved from the Akademii Nauk (AN) ice cap (~80°31’N, 94°49’E) of the Severnaya Zemlya archipelago (which is located in the central Russian Arctic between the Kara and Laptev Seas), scientists used oxygen isotopes to reconstruct temperatures covering the period 1883-1998. After confirming “good correlations and similarities” between their oxygen isotope data and 15 temperature stations distributed throughout the Atlantic and Eurasian sub-Arctic, the scientists reported the oxygen isotope data “show pronounced 20th-century temperature changes, with a strong rise about 1920 and the absolute temperature maximum in the 1930s,” the scientists reported. Accordingly, the data show there was no net warming of the Atlantic and Eurasian sub-Arctic over the entire last 80 years of the 20th century.
The findings, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Glaciology, cast doubt on alarmist assertions of alarming recent global temperature rise given the Arctic is expected to be the first place on the planet to exhibit anthropogenic-induced global warming, and is expected to exhibit that warming more strongly than other regions of the globe.
The study is available online at http://www.igsoc.org/journal/55/189/j08j062.pdf.
Craig D. Idso, Ph.D. ([email protected]), is lead author of Climate Change Reconsidered, published by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). An earlier version of this article appeared on the NIPCC Web site. Subscriptions to the NIPCC email distribution list are free of charge and can be ordered at http://www.nipccreport.org/about/emailsignupform.html.
Dr. Idso is the founder, former president, and currently chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change.
