Debunking the Liberal Myth: Canadian Conservatives are not jeopardizing Christmas

The current warming phase is a short-term reprieve from the long term cooling trend.

NASA ice penetrating radar study of Greenland’s icefields.

Canadians have endured over a decade of climate elitism by socialist political parties at federal, provincial and municipal levels, who preach to follow the science and like our former federal minister of health Mark Holland who argued that without a heavy tax on fuel, families would be tempted to take their children on a summer road trip and thus be guilty of letting the planet burn.

The most over-the-top comment from former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, which serves as the motivation for this article, was The climate denialism of the Conservative Party of Canada is putting future white Christmases at risk. And that's why on this side of the House, we stand for Christmas.

Here in this article, I will show that the Liberal Party of Canada is guilty of gaslighting to the extreme when it comes to the known historical record of the Northern Hemisphere’s cryosphere.

Exhibit A that kick starts this expose is the NASA’s extensive airborne ice penetrating radar study that peered deep inside Greenland’s ice sheets and produced a data-set that, like with the rings on a tree trunk, was used to generate a timeline that extends back over 130,000 years ago to the previous interglacial (warm) period called the Eemian. The residual Eemian ice (red) is shown in the cover image to exist along the ice field bottom, indicating that the previous interglacial period nearly melted all of Greenland’s ice fields.

It was during the Eemian Interglacial that hippos were last known to exist in Britain.

NASA’s airborne radar also revealed that nearly half of Greenland’s current ice field is an artifact of the Last Ice Age (blue), which covered most of North America and Europe up until around 12,000 years ago as the Earth transitioned into the Holocene Interglacial (warm) Period. The fact that there is much more blue than red ice in the cover image, adds to the evidence that the peak temperatures of the Holocene Interglacial were significantly lower than then those experienced during the Eemian Thermal Maximum.

The most fascinating observation from NASA’s airborne radar surveillance study is the fact that approximately half of the uppermost ice in Greenland, has formed since the Holocene Thermal Maximum ended and the Earth transitioned into a long term cooling trend called the Holocene Neoglacial approximately 4,000 years ago. The paleo-record shows that the Sahara and Gobi deserts also began to form as Greenland’s ice fields began to form once again following the return of the Earth into its current neoglacial trajectory.

In other words, the Earth is well into its long march towards its next glacial maximum, where North America and Europe will once again be buried under a mile of ice.

No alarmist ever acknowledges this fact of history when they talk about evidence of minor glacial melt in Greenland over the last decade of the 20th century and the early stages of the 21st century.

While NASA’s Greenland study in and of itself forms a conclusive enough to body evidence to suggest that the political narrative of climate alarmism in Canada is without scientific merit on matters relating to the cryosphere, I will go well beyond this study to show just how weak the argument is that our use of hydrocarbons is causative in the minor measured changes in Northern Hemisphere ice and snow over the Holocene Interglacial and into the current Neoglacial sub-epoch.

Figure 1. Holocene sea ice variability in eastern Arctic Ocean.

Next, I wish to bring into the light of day the pivotal work of Stein et al shown in Figure 1, which used geochemistry from ocean sediment collected in the Chukchi and East Siberian seas in the Arctic Ocean to serve as proxies of changes in summer season sea ice extent.

As with NASA’s airborne ice penetrating radar results, this study also shows that this region of the Arctic Ocean experienced sea ice only on a seasonal basis throughout the Holocene Thermal Maximum (i.e., winter) and that the approximately 2,000 years ago this region has been tracking towards year around ice (aka perennial). According to Stein et al, sea ice extent in this region of the Arctic has been at a maximum since the Little Ice Age (last 200 - 500 years).

This data-set also shows the neoglacial transition in this climate zone occurred around 4,000 years ago and that this transition intensified about 0 A.D.

Today’s climate alarmists ignore this data, as it does not support their narrative.

Figure 2. Number of global glacier fluctuations over the past 2,000 years.

We will now begin to examine paleo-cryosphere data at increasingly shorter time scales.

Figure 2 shows the number of global glacier fluctuations over the past 2,000 years - note that I added the embedded text to highlight when the Roman (RWP) and Medieval (MWP) Warm Periods, together with the recent Little Ice Age (LIA) occurred. Note that while there was a gradual increase in the number of glacial advances between the RWP and MWP, there was a large increase for 800 years following the latter and an even larger decrease after glacial advances peaked during the LIA.

I argue that this time series of gradual glacial advance and retreat is simply a part of the natural neoglacial transition.

Now we begin to focus on the cryosphere data from the 20th century.

Collectively, Figures 3 to 5 show that there has been two periods of warming in the Arctic Ocean over the past century and that the peak in the warming seen in the 1930s was mirrored in the late 20th century - early 21 century. The Barents Sea data highlights that the greatest expansion of ice free summer conditions occurred prior to the 1950s, which does not support the claim that warming is caused by human use of hydrocarbons.

Likewise, the reduction in the extent of ice free conditions from the 1950s to the early 1980s is found in both the northwest Pacific and Arctic Oceans and this too, does not support the claim that these dynamic changes are attributed to human use of hydrocarbons.

Figure 3. Changes in ice free area in the seas of Okhotsky and Barents over the 20th century.

Figure 4. Changes in August extents of Arctic sea ice during the 1930s and late 20th - early 21st century.

Figure 5. Calibrated summer sea ice extends over the Arctic Ocean during the 20th century using regional air temperature records.

When we examine either the Arctic sea ice extent or volume estimates in the last 15 years, we find that a period of stability has emerged. Figure 6 shows estimates of Arctic sea ice volumes using two different surveillance platforms between 2011 and 2024. Likewise, Figure 7 illustrates sea ice extents across the entire Northern Hemisphere, which clearly shows the controlling influence of the Seasonal Cycle (i.e., orbital dynamics) and the lack of any longer term trend over the past two decades.

So much for Al Gore’s prediction that summer sea ice in the Arctic was facing imminent demise.

Figure 6. Two estimates of the volume of Arctic sea ice - 2011 to 2024.

Figure 7. Daily extent of Northern Hemisphere sea ice - 2005 to 2025.

To further demonstrate the failure of models that claims human use of hydrocarbons is causative in altering the Northern Hemisphere cryosphere, I introduce recent work from R. Connolly et al, which compares changes in snow coverage by season (e.g., spring vs summer) versus what climate models predict when using rising CO2 as the causative agent. Note that Figure 8 shows that climate models (e.g., CMP5) predict a linear reduction in snow cover across the Northern Hemisphere, while observations show anything but a linear response.

Specifically, Figure 8 shows snow cover extents in the spring and summer have declined since the 1960s, they have also returned to their 1960s highs during the fall and winter seasons. In other words, it appears that both spring and winter arrive earlier in the Northern Hemisphere in the early 21st century.

This may be part of the reason that there is no change in sea ice extent across the Northern Hemisphere on a year-over-year basis in the opening stages of the 21st century.

Figure 8. Comparisons of climate model (CMP5) prediction versus observed changes in Northern Hemisphere snow coverage by season.

In conclusions, I will simply state that there is little to no evidence that observed changes in the Northern Hemisphere’s cryosphere over the 20th and 21st centuries are either exceptional or positively correlating with our use of hydrocarbons. We must reject baseless pseudo-scientific claims by politicians and public relations experts that human influence is an existential threat to the cryosphere, simply because surveillance techniques measure an environmental change - evidence of change is hardly proof of causation.

September 4th addition - to demonstrate that current high SATs seen in the Arctic are equivalent to those also seen in the 1930s-1940s.