‘Unexpected’ Slowdown in Arctic Sea Ice Melt Stuns Researchers
Despite this data, the climate crisis narrative must be preserved. So the authors of this report bitterly cling to the idea the planet is going to warm…even harder.
A group of researchers is stunned to find a 20-year slowdown in the melting of Arctic sea ice.
However, as the scientists used computer modelling and are inclined to support the pseudoscience of man-caused climate change, they also assert that the melting will speed up once “natural climate variations” end.
Scientists say this is a temporary slowdown that may continue for a further five to 10 years and, when it ends, is likely to be followed by faster-than-average sea ice decline.
In a new study, they investigated changes in observed Arctic sea ice cover, using two datasets collected with satellite measurements from 1979 to the present day. “Minimal Arctic sea ice loss in the last 20 years, consistent with internal climate variability” is published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Focusing on September, when ice cover is at its annual minimum, the researchers found sea ice between 2005 and 2024 declined by 0.35 and 0.29 million km2 per decade respectively.
The longer-term rate of decline for the period 1979–2024 was 0.78 and 0.79 million km2 per decade (depending on which dataset used), making the slowdown a 55% and 63% reduction.
This was the slowest rate of loss for any 20-year period since the start of satellite records in 1979, and four to five times slower than the peak 20-year period of 1993–2012.
Did you know the Arctic stopped melting 20 years ago? Now you do.
“The melting of sea ice in the Arctic has slowed dramatically in the past 20 years, scientists have reported, with no statistically significant decline in its extent since 2005.”
Dramatic slowdown in melting of… pic.twitter.com/tr9FnxAaxr
— Dr. Matthew M. Wielicki (@MatthewWielicki) August 20, 2025
Despite this data, the climate crisis narrative must be preserved. So the authors of this report bitterly cling to the idea that the planet is going to warm…even harder.
The finding is surprising, the researchers say, given that carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning have continued to rise and trap ever more heat over that time.
They said natural variations in ocean currents that limit ice melting had probably balanced out the continuing rise in global temperatures. However, they said this was only a temporary reprieve and melting was highly likely to start again at about double the long-term rate at some point in the next five to 10 years.
The findings do not mean Arctic sea ice is rebounding. Sea ice area in September, when it reaches its annual minimum, has halved since 1979, when satellite measurements began. The climate crisis remains “unequivocally real”, the scientists said, and the need for urgent action to avoid the worst impacts remains unchanged.
In the conclusion, the authors (M. R. England, L. M. Polvani, J. Screen, A. C. Chan) state that their computer models are completely consistent with the presence of this pause in melting.
- The pervasive slowdown of Arctic sea ice loss is robust across the choice of definitions, observational data set, and season.
- This observed pause in ice loss is simulated relatively frequently (a nearly 20% chance) in climate models, and is thus to be expected even under high emission scenarios.
- If model simulations are accurate, the recent pause may plausibly continue for an additional five to 10 years. However, this pause also heightens the risk of a more rapid decline in sea ice cover in the coming years.
- Nearly all models analyzed suggest an important role for internal climate variability in slowing the anthropogenically-forced sea ice loss.
Wait until you find out about climate models. https://t.co/CEbbu2QRUx
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) August 21, 2025
I did some digging on the authors. Mark England is a climate scientist who, among other things, is investigating near-term climate benefits of methane mitigation. Per his biography:
I have been funded to lead MethaneMIP, a model intercomparison project to investigate the near-term climate benefits of methane mitigation.
L. Polvani is a professor at Columbia University, whose research is funded in part by the NOAA Climate and Global Change Program. Climate scientist James Screen has contributed to several reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
I assert that the authors do not have a neutral position on the reasons for temperature changes, and they are filtering their data through a narrative science lens.
Narrative science is harmful to all living things. pic.twitter.com/WJwYp1qrlR
— Leslie Eastman ☥ (@Mutnodjmet) August 21, 2025
I believe that their data clearly shows that modeling the climate with computer programs has very limited practicality because Earth’s climate system is extremely complex, involving countless interacting factors that are difficult to fully understand or measure. To make simulations possible, models use simplifications and approximations, which lead to inaccuracies and distortions that can be used to support any incorrect hypothesis or undermine reality-based theories.
Finally, I would like to introduce you to the “Winter Gatekeeper Theory“, a climate science proposal suggesting that changes in how energy and moisture are transported from the tropics to the poles (especially during Northern Hemisphere winter) are a main driver of climate change.
The Winter Gatekeeper hypothesis proposes that changes in the meridional transport of energy and moisture are the main way the climate changes now and in the past. Meridional transport variability has many causes and forces that act simultaneously and in different time frames on the climate system. They integrate into a very complex poleward energy transportation system. Among these are multidecadal ocean-atmosphere oscillations, solar variability, ozone, stratospheric-reaching tropical volcanic eruptions, orbital changes, and changing luni-solar gravitational pull. Meridional transport is therefore an integrator of internal and external signals. It is not the only way the climate changes, but evidence suggests it is the main one.
https://t.co/XLhgpMo549 https://t.co/ee8XsXxFSE
— California Lowdown (@CAlowdown) August 20, 2025
I’m not saying that “Winter Gatekeeper” is a perfect theory, but it sure is nice to have an option that doesn’t blame mankind or cows.
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Comments
This gargantuan climate grift need to end NOW!!!
Monetize the Science!
If Biden had been a scientist instead of a politician, his son Hunter would’ve already monetized it by now.
Climate researchers certainly are stunned a lot here lately. It’s as if many of their assumptions are full of bovine excrement.
I suggest that we need a new theory. Since man’s activities are obviously contributing to global warming, if that heat is going somewhere else than melting ice, perhaps it is being stored internally in the earth, only to be released over the next million years in ever more disastrous volcanoes. So we need to budget for climate change activities for thar long. /s
People are using too much sunshine. It is going to have a dire effect on the planet. I urge everyone to conserve.
Glaciation ended a few millenniums ago. We have been warming since they retreated. The glaciers will come back. It’s settled science. It’s happened many times over the last 200 million years. As soon as we reach the point of warming stopping. It will begin to cool again resulting in another glacial period. The only benefit will be that Chicago, Minneapolis, NYC and Canada will be under mile high glaciers.
Actually the warmest period since the glaciers retreated was 7000 years ago. The earth has cooled off somewhat since then until recently when it started warming up again. The CO2 hypothesis, though, is crock. It works a little bit in the lab, but not in nature. The earth’s climate is chaotic, and it appears to me that the climate modeled given the current state of knowledge. On this, the warmunistas are doing their best to impoverish us by trying to eliminate fossil fuels.
“I believe that their data clearly shows that modeling the climate with computer programs has very limited practicality because Earth’s climate system is extremely complex, involving countless interacting factors that are difficult to fully understand or measure.”
Translation:
For every complex problem there is a simple solution. It’s wrong, but it’s simple.
Which they will in about five billion years.
Good to know, thanks. No matter how much I’ve been suspicious of the endless propaganda suggesting arctic seals and polar bears, with dwindling places left to breed and rest, may go extinct, it still leaves a mark.
If the Obamas really thought the Arctic was going to melt, they wouldn’t have bought beachfront mansions in Hawaii and Martha’s Vineyard.
The Obamas melted my heart with their public display of love and affection and for the first time in my adult life I was proud of my country.
We didn’t need new climate regulations, we just needed a new president.
Their data starts in 1979?!
I still have clothes I wore in 1979. This is a ridiculously short span of time. These conjectures are even more ludicrous than normal for climate crisis actors.
I do, too. Don’t know why, I don’t fit in them.
They did this to themselves by their ceaseless promotion of the most dire predictions being produced by their models. Had they been more honest with the public concerning the margins of error and the probabilities of certain predictions, they wouldn’t have this PR mess on their hands now. But admitting that they’re in any way unsure of the accuracy of their predictions creates doubt about them (although it would be as honest a representation of their theories as is possible for a pile of lies) and the narrative has no tolerance for doubt.
Only the “experts” were surprised.
There are hundreds of computer models. Every one predicted an enormous amount of warming if CO2 levels increased – which they did. Observed temperature data did NOT.
If you want the computer models to resemble observed data, all you have to do is zero out their assumed increases in temps from CO2.
And yet they cling to their disproven theory like the cultists that they are. If they were “following the science” the comprehensive failure of ygeir theory to predict anything whatsoever would have required them to scrap it entirely decades ago.
Data-blind models are nothing new. When the ‘hockey-stick’ model leaked, skeptical researchers fed it modern data and got a hocky stick graph as a projection into the future. Then they fed it random numbers and got a hocky stick graph. Then fed it tweaked numbers showing a major cooling trend and it produced a hocky stick graph. Turns out the model was hard-coded to ignore anything except rising numbers in the future. (I was shocked. Really.)
Well, they’ve given themselves a five to ten year window to adjust their models, dream up new explanations, collect more grant money, and add on another five to ten year window to repeat the entire process. It’s a great gig.
Climate change scientists are like the doomsayer religious zealots of the past that continually predicted the end of the Earth and then when it didn’t occur they moved the date of destruction to a new date in the future. Eventually they lost their followers and disappeared. Let’s hope the same happens to the climate change
zealotsscientists.The doomsayers say we should study why the dinosaurs became extinct. The dinosaurs ruled the earth for 250 million years. Maybe we should study why they lasted so long.
Yep.
Global warming caused the slowing of Arctic sea ice.
MELTING.
Oops..
Like Mulder,
They want to believe.
The climatologists who have been pushing the ‘climate change’ narrative for two decades are thus highly invested in seeing arctic ice melt, to ‘confirm’ just how smart they are. Now that the ice is not melting as they have predicted, they are in panic mode, and need to find excuses to deflect from this annoying fact; such as “the melting will speed up once “natural climate variations” end.” These people WANT the polar ice caps to melt; they WANT to see oceans rising. They will never ever admit that they may have been wrong to completely ignore the climate scientists who have disagreed with their predictions from the start.
Reality over “religion”!
Why are argentina ski resorts always complaining about lack of snow, while chili gets dumped on?
Any data set can be massaged to produce what you want. Maybe and just maybe the sensors used on the satellites are more accurate than what they’ve been using. Example; the removing of the old NOAA satellites and the use of more precise instruments in the newer Japanese satellites give a much better picture of weather patterns that develop tropical storms/hurricanes. When you have new precise data it is much harder to fudge your numbers to get the results you want, thus the “surprise” of the scientists. Plus how CO2 could be so harmful when it’s what plants crave.
And electrolytes.
Not a problem. In another few years they’ll have “adjusted” the data, and the cooling trend will go the way of the Medieval Warm Period.
Lately, I have taken to asking people fretting about carbon emissions a single question: what is the percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Answer: about .04 percent.
What these climate demagogues have managed to do is handicap our young adults with a neurotic sense of inevitable doom, similar in some ways to what us older folk experienced growing up with the omnipresent expectations of imminent nuclear obliteration. We managed to figure out a way to get through it despite the doomsayers, and owe it to our young to help them figure out a way to detox from this pseudoscience before they abandon hope in ever getting to grow up.
You can never be wrong…if your prediction is so far in the future that you are dead.
But you will get funding NOW if it helps a left-wing politician think he will be top dog, give a Federal or government parasite, aka employee, control, or a corporate leech make money.