Sierra Snowpack 1000% Of Normal; Svalbard Polar Bears Enjoy Above Average Ice; + “The World Won’t End If It Warms By More Than 1.5C,” Says New IPCC Head

Sierra Snowpack 1000% Of Normal

The past winter/spring was truly historic, and it is still giving. Snowpack in the Central and Southern Sierra Nevada Mountains is holding 1,000% of the norm for the time of year (late-July).

Such percentages can be exaggerated in summer, given the low baseline, but 1000% clearly jars with those catastrophist promises of ‘no more snow’.

It has been 12 years since similarly large accumulations lingered into a Sierra Nevada summer. Back in 2011, late-spring storms paired with intense snow all season made for the previous significant late-summer pack; 2017 and 2019 were also impressive, but they haven’t a patch on 2023 which saw at least 19 ski resorts across the Western U.S. post their snowiest-ever seasons.

Even now, “skiing remains fantastic,” reports snowbrains.com. Mammoth Mountain, for example, is not only open for skiing and riding through August 6, but they’re also still reporting a 36-inch base at The Summit and a 12-inch base at the Main Lodge.

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Svalbard Polar Bears Enjoy Above Average Ice

Sea ice around Svalbard, Norway is holding above average this summer:

As reported by polarbearscience.com, the Barents Sea polar bear subpopulation region still has large volumes of concentrated pack ice to the north and around Franz Josef Land in the east:

This is a substantial increase from recent years.

Greenland, too, continues to see its ice sheet hold above-average after a solid season of SMB gains:

The polarbearscience.com article continues: As for polar bear numbers around Svalbard, the Norwegian scientists who monitor the situation still haven’t updated the MOSJ website with spring 2023’s data. Last year’s data was published by May 31, and it isn’t clear what’s causing the delay.

Perhaps the news is too good to publish?

The global polar bear population has increased in recent decades, from an estimated 5,000 – 10,000 individuals in the 1960s to the 22,000 – 31,000 bears thriving today. This reality, once again, counters alarmist doom-and-gloom proclamations, and tellingly, you may have noticed that the polar bear has was dropped as the global warmster’s poster child.

Arctic and Greenland ice are doing just fine, as is the biodiversity that calls these regions home. In turn, mainstream attention has been diverted to the Antarctic where sea ice is, admittedly, taking a proverbial beating this season, but only this season — the overarching trend, for at least the past 45-years, remains one of inconvenient growth:

Additionally, the Antarctic continent has been posting all-time record low temperatures in recent years.

Two years ago it logged its coldest-ever coreless winter (April-Sept), and since then has noted far more below-average months than not. Even this year, even this month, Antarctica went and set Earth’s lowest temperature since 2017 (-83.2C/-117.8F):

Antarctica Plunges To -83.2C (-117.8F) — Earth’s Lowest Temperature Since 2017; Record-Challenging Cold Sweeps Europe; + South America And South Africa Cool

Ipso facto, this year’s struggling sea ice extent at the bottom of the world cannot be tied to temperature, that correlation simply doesn’t exist. Rather, it is wind patterns, ocean currents and an uptick in submarine volcanic activity that appear to be the determining factors down there–frustrating realities that the establishment refuse to contend with, not wanting to muddy their world-reshaping agenda with inconvenient facts.

As geologist Ian Plimer recently said of the AGW Party (on Sky News Australia): “Every single prediction they’ve ever made has been wrong … They still haven’t, after 30 years, shown us that human emissions of CO2 drive global warming.”

Extreme Lows And Snows Hit Southern Africa

Across much of Southern Africa, including SA’s Western Cape, anoamlously-cold and wet weather have been lingering.

Icy conditions have hit many-a higher elevated spot, and there’s substantial snow on the mountains in Ceres, in the Matroosberg, and central Karoo, according to local forecaster, Surprise Mhlongo.

Temperatures have plummeted to 3C in many parts, a feat Surprise says is due to “yet another cold front” making landfall over the Western Cape province.

The intense cold isn’t confined to South Africa, it’s sweeping the likes of Namibia and Botswana, too. In Namibia, rare snowfall is expected this week, as are low temperature of -10C (14F) or below, which will challenge the national record (-10.5C/13.1F).

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“The World Won’t End If It Warms By More Than 1.5C,” Says New IPCC Head

The newly appointed head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jim Skea, is off to a poor start. Rather than ratcheting up the fear, Skea is playing down that much-drummed-in 1.5C threshold. Intruiging.

Perhaps he’s acknowledging how absurd putting a temperature threshold on disaster is. What did 1.5C above the pre-industrial average ever mean or achieve, other than simplify The Narrative for the factory schooled ordinaries. Akin to news bulletin during the COVID days when the daily death toll figure was ‘BONGED’ into every household, ‘1.5C’ is just another fear-tactic, no more.

Or is Skea’s downplaying a precursor to the IPCC’s temperature charts showing a rip above and beyond 1.5C, and so when nothing inevitably happens, when the world keeps-on turning and folk aren’t seen spontaneously combusting on the streets, the agency has saved some face.

Speaking to two major German news outlets soon after his appointment to the role, Jim Skea warned against laying too much value on the international community’s current nominal target of limiting global warming to 1.5C.

“We should not despair and fall into a state of shock” if global temperatures were to increase by this amount, he said.

“If you constantly communicate the message that we are all doomed to extinction, then that paralyzes people and prevents them from taking the necessary steps to get a grip on climate change. The world won’t end if it warms by more than 1.5 degrees” which is news, I’m sure, to the orange paint-tossers among us, but surpassing that air-plucked benchmark would, continues Skea, lead to “many problems and social tensions” but it “would not constitute an existential threat to humanity.”

Skea needs to get with the program. And quickly. Just last week UN secretary general António Guterres was spouting these little knee-trembling nuggets: The era of global warming has ended and “the era of global boiling has arrived … “Climate change is here. It is terrifying. And it is just the beginning.” Uh-huh. Tellingly, and as is always the play, Guterres then dangles the carrot, promising that the worst global boiling has to offer can still be avoided “but only with dramatic, immediate climate action” which, of course, means further poverty-inducing energy policies and a continuing of the seismic wealth transfer from us proles to the 0.01%.

James “Jim” Skea is a physics graduate born in Dundee in Scotland who did his doctoral thesis in energy research and has worked at Imperial College London since 2009. The 69-year-old, who has been involved with the IPCC since its foundation in the 1990s, was named its new chairman last Wednesday. Below are few other quotes lifted from his first interviews since becoming the new head:

“Every measure we take to weaken climate change helps.” Expanding renewable electricity production is also becoming “ever more cost-effective”. Skea also seeks to make progress during his tenure on how and where money was sent and spent to tackle the problem globally. “There’s enough money in the world, the challenge is getting it to flow to the right places”. Uh-huh.