Posted on 27 August 2025 by Ken Rice

This is a re-post from And Then There's Physics

It seems that a slowdown in the melting of Arctic sea ice is now being used to suggest that climate science is melting. This is very silly and is remininsence of the claims of a pause in global warming that dominated much of the discourse in the 2010s.

Arctic sea ice is a small part of the climate system and it’s well known that variability can easily mask long-term trends on decadal timescales. Arctic sea ice extent was particularly low in 2012, so maybe it’s not that surprising that there’s been an apparent pause since then. A strong El Nino in 1998 that led to a record warm year was one of the main reasons for the subsequent suppposed pause in global warming.

You’d hope that skeptics would have learned by now to not use short-term variability to claim that climate science is somehow broken, but that would be naive. This isn’t about genuinely trying to understand the climate system, it’s just about constructing a narrative that suits their ideology.

I do have a small vested interest in this. The only climate bet I’ve taken is that the average of the 2026/27/28 Arctic sea ice minimum would be smaller than the average of 2011/12/13. It’s not looking all that good for me at the moment, but there’s still a chance, it’s only for a pint and me losing a climate bet doesn’t somehow undermine our basic understanding of climate science.