Henry Pollack's book A World Without Ice reviewed in the journal Nature

Not everyone writing for Nature is a warming alarmist. Take Johannes Oerlemans, professor of meteorology at Utrecht University’s Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, who takes a stick to Henry Pollack, author of the latest scare-book:

A World Without Ice opens with a strong foreword from Al Gore: the science has been done — now we must act. .... Pollack’s patchwork assessment of the science of ice and climate ... gets off to a bad start by adding drama. Writing in his preface that “Throughout most of Earth’s history, ice has been an indomitable force of nature”, Pollack sidesteps the consensus view that for the majority of Earth’s past there was little or no ice…

Similarly, he cites mountain glaciers as the direct source of water for almost a quarter of the world’s population, when in reality the bulk comes from rain and seasonal snow…

In his investigation of the regional effects of global warming on ice, snow and permafrost, Pollack adopts a fearful tone, suggesting that any change in the environment should be interpreted as a local disaster. He lists the many locations where glaciers are retreating, sea-ice coverage is shrinking, permafrost thawing and ski areas declining. And he cautions
that “in only a few decades the Arctic Ocean may be ice-free in the summer, for the first time in 55 million years”.

Yet he forgets that, during the Holocene climatic optimum about 9,000 to 6,000 years ago when summer temperatures in the subarctic regions were 2–5 °C higher than today, the Arctic Ocean in summer was probably ice-free on a regular basis…

Again, his discussion of the ice sheets and sea-level rise is too dramatic: for example, it has not been established that the Greenland ice sheet will melt away in a few centuries once we pass the ‘tipping point’....

For example, it is clear that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is currently losing mass, but there is abundant evidence that the shrinkage has been happening for the past 15,000 years, mainly in response to rising sea levels initiated by deglaciation in the Northern Hemisphere.

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/overheating_detected_in_arctic/

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