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Arctic Ice Loss Driven By Natural Swings, Not Just Mankind, Says Study (reuters.com)
Alister Doyle, reporting for Reuters: Natural swings in the Arctic climate have caused up to half the precipitous losses of sea ice around the North Pole in recent decades, with the rest driven by man-made global warming, scientists said on Monday. The study indicates that an ice-free Arctic Ocean, often feared to be just years away, in one of the starkest signs of man-made global warming, could be delayed if nature swings back to a cooler mode. Natural variations in the Arctic climate "may be responsible for about 30-50 percent of the overall decline in September sea ice since 1979," the U.S.-based team of scientists wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change. Sea ice has shrunk steadily and hit a record low in September 2012 -- late summer in the Arctic -- in satellite records dating back to 1979. The ice is now around the smallest for mid-March, rivaling winter lows set in 2016 and 2015. The study, separating man-made from natural influences in the Arctic atmospheric circulation, said that a decades-long natural warming of the Arctic climate might be tied to shifts as far away as the tropical Pacific Ocean.
Finally a study that shows percentages.The politicals have have claimed that climate change is either 100% man-made or 100% natural, depending upon which side of the argument they were on. Reasonable people knew that it had to be a bit of both, but there never seemed to be any studies that showed what the percentages of each it was.
Ol' Rick Dawson had a farm EIEIO
The article doesn't need to prove anything, other than cite the study, because it isn't science. It is just news about the science. I am sure that the study itself, which was made by scientists and published in a scientific journal, would actually show their workings; otherwise they would not get published. But the fact that we haven't seen the study is not itself evidence that the figures were based on "no science what-so-ever".
If you walk into a room with your eyes closed, you cannot definitively say that there isn't a red ball in the room. All you can say is that you can't see a red ball. Similarly, if you haven't read the paper, you can't say that the percentages are unproven. All you can say is that you haven't seen the proof.
Should the original poster have read the study before discussing the percentages? If this were an academic discussion or an official policy document then absolutely. But this is just a forum on the internet, occupied by deniers who make no effort to prove their own claims. Regurgitating figures from the article is a step up for a lot of people around here who never get past reading the headlines.