The Arctic Ocean was nick-named the “upside down Ocean” by Fridtjof Nansen. Nansen was a famous Norwegian zoologists, oceanographer, and Arctic explorer as well as winner of the 1922 Nobel Peace Prize. During his failed expedition to reach the North Pole, his boat, the Fram, got frozen in Arctic sea ice but eventually was exported by Arctic currents, along with Arctic sea ice, into the Atlantic through what is now named the Fram Strait.
Nansen named the Arctic Ocean the “upside down ocean” because contrary to other oceans, the surface waters are the coldest, while between 100 and 900-meters depths the ocean is warmer due to inflows and storage of warm salty Atlantic waters. Sea ice cover prevents the ventilation of that stored heat. However, increases in open water allows more heat ventilation which has raised Arctic air temperatures 2 to 7 times faster than the global average. Open waters have been increasing due to changes in wind direction and currents. Open water is not proof of melting.
NASA estimates that globally added CO2 has increased downward infrared and added “a little over 0.8 Watts per square meter” of energy which their Just So stories claim melted sea ice. But researchers (e.g. Kim 2019) have reported that over open water more winter heat, about 2 Watts per meter squared, is being ventilated heat away more than absorbed. That suggests radiative cooling!
Is it a coincidence that a paper reporting the results of a no-news study on polar bears, but which predicts future starvation due to climate change, was published two weeks to the day ahead of a climate change marketing event made up by the activist organization Polar Bears International? I doubt it.
And do I think the high-profile journal Nature Communications would not only agree to publish such a useless bit of propaganda but also rig the timing to advance the climate change emergency narrative? Silly question. And the media worldwide are of course lapping it up, happy for an excuse to promote the perils of climate change, see here, here, and here using images of fat polar bears. Image above is from the BBC headline, 13 February 2024.
They believe this strategy is effective because they think the public is stupid, but they are deluding themselves. Most people are now laughing at their obvious acts of desperation.
Polar bears are highly specialize for consuming large amounts of fat that they get from Arctic seals, whales, and walrus. Only a few vocal researchers outside main-stream polar bear science insist that polar bears could ever survive year-round by eating terrestrial foods (e.g., Ilses et al. 2013; Iverson et al. 2014; Gormezano and Rockwell 2013a,b; Prop et al. 2015; Rogers et al. 2015; Tartu et al. 2016).
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La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
