Arctic Sea Ice Up 60 Percent in 2013 Tuesday, 10 Sep 2013 03:29 PM
By Melanie Batley
An unusually cold Arctic summer has resulted in almost a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice compared to the same time last year, bucking predictions that global warming would result in the disappearance of the ice cap by 2013.
According to the MailOnline, Arctic sea ice averaged 2.35 million square miles in August 2013 compared to the low point of 1.32 million square miles recorded in September 2012.
"We are already in a cooling trend, which I think will continue for the next 15 years at least. There is no doubt the warming of the 1980s and 1990s has stopped," Anastasios Tsonis of the University of Wisconsin told the Mail.
A 2007 BBC report predicted the Arctic would be ice free in 2013, the Mail reported.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, however, continues to insist that global warming has been caused by human greenhouse gas emissions as opposed to natural variability, but according to the Mail, there is mounting evidence that Arctic ice levels are cyclical.
The development has cast doubt on the validity of modeling and predictions of intensified global warming which has already been the basis of recent debate within the scientific community, the Mail reports.
Poster Comment:
Looks as if things are not what they had seemed. ;)