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Today we turn our attention to the increase in Arctic sea ice. First we learn from Steven Goddard;

Earth has gained 19,000 Manhattans of sea ice since this date last year, the largest increase on record. There is more sea ice now than there was on this date in 2002.

Barbara Hollingsworth from CNS News puts that in Algore perspective.

A 2007 prediction that summer in the North Pole could be “ice-free by 2013” that was cited by former Vice President Al Gore in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech has proven to be off… by 920,000 square miles. In his Dec. 10, 2007 “Earth has a fever” speech, Gore referred to a prediction by U.S. climate scientist Wieslaw Maslowski that the Arctic’s summer ice could “completely disappear” by 2013 due to global warming caused by carbon emissions.

Gore said that on Sept. 21, 2007, “scientists reported with unprecedented alarm that the North Polar icecap is, in their words, ‘falling off a cliff.’ One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another new study to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week warns that it could happen in as little as seven years, seven years from now.”

Maslowski told members of the American Geophysical Union in 2007 that the Arctic’s summer ice could completely disappear within the decade. “If anything,” he said, “our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer… is already too conservative.”

The former vice president also warned that rising temperatures were “a planetary emergency and a threat to the survival of our civilization.”

However, instead of completely melting away, the polar icecap is at now at its highest level for this time of year since 2006. …

WSJ OpEd by Matt Ridley covers more ground.

Later this month, a long-awaited event that last happened in 2007 will recur. Like a returning comet, it will be taken to portend ominous happenings. I refer to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) “fifth assessment report,” part of which will be published on Sept. 27. 

There have already been leaks from this 31-page document, which summarizes 1,914 pages of scientific discussion, but thanks to a senior climate scientist, I have had a glimpse of the key prediction at the heart of the document. The big news is that, for the first time since these reports started coming out in 1990, the new one dials back the alarm. It states that the temperature rise we can expect as a result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide is lower than the IPPC thought in 2007.

Admittedly, the change is small, and because of changing definitions, it is not easy to compare the two reports, but retreat it is. It is significant because it points to the very real possibility that, over the next several generations, the overall effect of climate change will be positive for humankind and the planet. …

Forbes had a piece too. Although heavy on sarcasm, it is worth including.

… When you click on this New York Times article, you also aren’t seeing what you think you see, because global warming alarmists apparently told us last year the 2012 Arctic ice season was unlikely to be repeated in 2013.

According to our collective hallucination in the September 19, 2012 New York Times:

“‘The Arctic is the earth’s air-conditioner,’ said Walt Meier, a research scientist at the snow and ice center, an agency sponsored by the government. ‘We’re losing that. It’s not just that polar bears might go extinct, or that native communities might have to adapt, which we’re already seeing — there are larger climate effects.’”

“Now, some scientists think the Arctic Ocean could be largely free of summer ice as soon as 2020,” the Times continued, according to our collective hallucination.

“Scientists said Wednesday that the Arctic has become a prime example of the built-in conservatism of their climate forecasts. As dire as their warnings about the long-term consequences of heat-trapping emissions have been, many of them fear they may still be underestimating the speed and severity of the impending changes,” the Times apparently never reported. …

Bjørn Lomborg, author of the Skeptical Environmentalist writes for WaPo this week trying to get everyone to cool their globalony jets.

One of the most persistent claims in the climate debate is that global warming leads to more extreme weather. Green groups and even such respectable outlets as Scientific American declare that “extreme weather is a product of climate change.”

And the meme seems irresistible as a political shortcut to action. President Obama has explicitly linked a warming climate to “more extreme droughts, floods, wildfires and hurricanes.” The White House warned this summer of “increasingly frequent and severe extreme weather events that come with climate change.”

Yet this is not supported by science. “General statements about extremes are almost nowhere to be found in the literature but seem to abound in the popular media,” climate scientist Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies said last month. “It’s this popular perception that global warming means all extremes have to increase all the time, even though if anyone thinks about that for 10 seconds they realize that’s nonsense.”

Global warming is real. It is partly man-made. It will make some things worse and some things better. Overall, the long-run impact will be negative. But some of the most prominent examples of extreme weather are misleading, and some weather events are becoming less extreme. …

Steve Hayward at Power Line sums up.

With two weeks to go until the slow rollout of the next IPCC climate science report begins, there’s a fresh embarrassment for the climateers from right inside their own camp: a Nature Climate Change article entitled “Overestimated global warming over the past 20 years.”

The article is dry and dusty in the usual way, but there’s no understating the devastating effects of certain passages like this:

The evidence, therefore, indicates that the current generation of climate models (when run as a group) do not reproduce the observed global warming over the past 20 years, or the slowdown in global warming over the past fifteen years. . .

In other words, the “current generation of climate models” is crap.  The authors offer some explanations of why this glaring anomaly could be consistent with the general warmist hypothesis, but ultimately repair to the “wait and see—we’ll still be right” argument.

It is going to be very interesting to see how the IPCC report handles this problem in its forthcoming report. …