“The Arctic is screaming,” said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the government’s snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colo.
Just last year, two top scientists surprised their colleagues by projecting that the Arctic sea ice was melting so rapidly that it could disappear by the summer of 2040,
A blip or an ominous sign?
This week, after reviewing his new data, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: “At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions.”
“We see a tipping point occurring right before our eyes,” Hansen told the AP before the luncheon, “I’he Arctic is the first tipping point and it’s occurring exactly the way we said it would.”
Hansen, echoing work by other scientists, said that in five to 10 years, the Arctic will be free of sea ice in the summer,
Longtime global warming skeptic Sen, James Inhofe, R-Okla , citing a recent poll, said in a statement, “Hansen, (former Vice President) Gore and the media have been trumpeting man-made climate doom since the 1980s, But Americans are not buying it.”
But Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., committee chairman, said, “Dr. Hansen was right, ‘Twenty years later, we recognize him as a climate prophet.”
“Junk science has been forcing a reckoning among scientific and medical researchers for the past year, leading to thousands of retracted papers.
Last week, scientific publisher Wiley decided to shutter 19 scientific journals after retracting 11,300 sham papers. There is a large-scale industry of so-called “paper mills” that sell fictive research, sometimes written by artificial intelligence, to researchers who then publish it in peer-reviewed journals — which are sometimes edited by people who had been placed by those sham groups.”