Six years ago, the BBC cited climate scientists in predicting that the Arctic would be ice-free in summer by 2013.
Instead,
Arctic ice this August covered nearly a million more square miles of
ocean than in August 2012 — an increase of 60 percent.
This has led
Britain's Mail on Sunday to report: "Some eminent scientists now believe
the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until
the middle of the century — a process that would expose computer
forecasts of imminent catastrophic warming as dangerously misleading."
The newspaper also asserted that global warming had paused since the beginning of 1997.
The pause is
"important," the Mail stated, because predictions of ever-increasing
global temperatures "have made many of the world's economies divert
billions of pounds into 'green' measures to counter climate change.
Those predictions now appear gravely flawed."
Arctic ice
now extends from Canada's northern islands to Russia's northern shore,
blocking the Northwest Passage, and more than 20 yachts that had planned
to sail it from the Atlantic to the Pacific have been left ice-bound.
Professor
Anastasios Tsonis of the University of Wisconsin, who has investigated
ocean cycles, said: "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."
The Mail
article, which has been criticized and even dismissed by some global
warming proponents, points to evidence that Arctic ice levels are
cyclical. There was a massive melt in the 1920s and 1930s, followed by
an intense re-freeze that did not end until 1979 — the year the U.N.'s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the shrinking of Arctic
ice began.