Having, not exhausted, but laid a simple framework for building, my views on ‘Life, the Universe, and Everything’, including the role of God – The Good – which I may yet expand on, I am now free to say something more about climate.
I noticed during the previous year of 2023, a change occurring in the Arctic region which marks the end of and further clarifies my position – based on historical data – that there never was a climate catastrophe approaching planet Earth and that we have now reached the peak (or are within 1C of peak) global warming. And that we should now be looking for the beginning or continuation of gradual global cooling following the latest mini-cycle of 5-6C of warming since the end of the Younger Dryas freeze – which took us close to the long established bottom edge of peak cooling over the past 500 million years of Earth’s history. And which we are inexorably going to face again around another 120,000 years from now. Forget Anthropomorphic Global Warming, it was always a myth.
What I noticed last year, concerning Arctic annual sea ice, was that the previous four decade long slide towards steadily lower sea ice levels at Summer peak melt during September, appears to have stalled or halted in the three years of the current decade. See the current graph from NSIDC below as reference to that. Aside from the grey areas representing the values of all 42 years of satellite records since 1979 (which I include for comparison), I have chosen to show the data lines for the years 2021, 2022 and 2023, together with the smoky blue line representing the average values for the decade 2011 to 2020. Are there any surprises there? The darker blue line for 2024 can just be seen emerging on the left boundary of the chart. I would not be surprised to see a Winter ice-build of around 15 million square miles (I meant kilometres of course) during the current season. That would be somehow indicative of where things are going now.
Well, two of those lines are well above the average line for the previous decade and the third – for 2023 – said to be the hottest on record (in recent times at least) and with said to be “boiling oceans”, spent much of the year also above that average line. Only falling slightly below it mostly for about 1 month during late Summer. There were 2 years in that decade (2012, 2020) which fell well below the 2023 line, and a third, 2016, which equalled it. I have not shown those lines to avoid data cluttering but you can go to the interactive NSIDC web page (click on the chart) to see for yourself.
OK, I know that three years does not a decade make, and that we will need to wait another 7 years for the full picture to emerge, but all the signs are there that peak Summer ice melt has been reached and we should not be looking for more years of excessive melting like the freak 2012 event. I fully expect, though I may not be here to see it, a return to the greyed areas of past recordings within the next 2 decades.
Not Something Else 
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