Arctic Ice Cap Story Is a Hoax
by Laurence Hecht, Editor-in-chief,
21st Century Science & Technology
May 2, 2007 (EIRNS)—A non sequitur and a fallacy of composition are the essence of scare stories circulating on major wire services today, which report on a new study of the extent of Arctic sea ice melt.
The study, published in the May 1 issue of Geophysical Research Letters, reports an historical review of satellite and other data which indicates that the extent of Arctic sea ice at the end of the summer melt season in September has been declining since 1953. The news stories twist this statistical fact into scare stories, the one circulated by Agence France Presse claiming that the sea level will rise by seven meters.
In fact, as anyone who observes ice melting in a cold drink can determine, when floating ice melts, the water level remains the same or falls very slightly. The claim of a rise in sea level is thus a non sequitur. It is justified on the basis of a wild fallacy of composition—the claim that the melting of the Arctic sea water will inevitablily lead to the melting of the entire Greenland glacier.
Never reported is the fact that the last major study of the Greenland ice sheet [Zwally, et al. Journal of Glaciology (2005)] showed a slight increase in ice mass from 1992-2002. The one- to two-mile thick Greenland ice sheet was thinning at the margins but growing by a greater extent inland.
Polar specialists know well that the Arctic climate is highly variable and very sensitive to small changes in local temperature. As Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu of the Alaska Arctic Research Center in Alaska noted, the extent of Arctic sea ice melt in the 1920s was greater than today (with far less contribution from human-produced carbon dioxide), and was followed by a period of thickening. Akasofu called Al Gore's movie "science fiction." (See interview.)

Dr. Akasofu earned a B.S. and a M.S. in geophysics at Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan, in 1953 and 1957. respectively. He earned a Ph.D in geophysics at UAF in 1961. Within the framework of his Ph.D. thesis he studied the aurora. His scientific adviser was Sydney Chapman. Dr. Akasofu has been a professor of geophysics at UAF since 1964.
Akasofu was director of the Geophysical Institute from 1986 until 1999, during which time the Alaska Volcano Observatory was established and Poker Flat Research Range was modernized. He went on to become the first director of the International Arctic Research Center (IARC) upon its establishment in 1998, and remained in that position until 2007. The same year, the building which houses IARC was named in his honor.

Posted on Mon, 06 Oct 2008 10:47:37 GMT at http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?...737AAq0Tsa