Arctic ice isn’t shrinking; coral reefs are thriving. Does this mean the death of climate alarmism?
By Michael Shellenberger, Public News, Aug. 21, 2025
It’s been a bad couple of years for the climate apocalypse. In 2022, scientists announced that coral was at record levels on the Great Barrier Reef, after decades of claiming it would all die out. In 2023, Greta Thunberg moved on to battling Israel a year after making clear that she had viewed climate change as a tool to fight “the whole capitalist system.”
And last year, the New York Times was forced to acknowledge that 89% of atolls, like the Maldives, were either growing in size or not shrinking, after the media and alarmists had claimed, for years, that climate change would wipe them out.
On Aug. 20, the uber-alarmist Guardian newspaper wrote that “The melting of sea ice in the Arctic has slowed dramatically in the past 20 years, scientists have reported, with no statistically significant decline in its extent since 2005.”
It’s a particularly significant finding given that, in response to “fact checkers,”Facebook last year banned the newspaper Epoch Times for saying arctic sea ice wasn’t declining. In 2021, Facebook censored one of Australia’s leading coral scientists for accurately posting about record coral growth.
The scientists said in their paper that their climate models “reveal that such periods with minimal sea ice decline under increasing greenhouse gas emissions are not unusual.” There’s just a lot of internal variability in how much ice there is in the Arctic. “Overall, this observed pause in Arctic sea ice decline is consistent with simulated internal variability superimposed on the long-term trend according to the bulk of the climate modeling evidence.”
But the lead scientist confessed to the Guardian that he was, in fact, surprised. “It is surprising, when there is a current debate about whether global warming is accelerating, that we’re talking about a slowdown,” said Mark England from the University of Exeter.
The study does not mean that climate change isn’t happening, being caused by humans, or is nothing to worry about. The loss of ice could accelerate in the future.
Alarmists should be more modest in their claims
But it does mean that scientists, journalists, and activists should be far more modest and humble in their claims. In 2009, Al Gore said climate models showed “a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”
When asked by a reporter about that number, the person who created the model said, “It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at. I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”
The other lesson is that the public, policymakers, and social media platforms shouldn’t trust activist scientists and journalists, much less support censorship based on their claims.
We praised Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year when he announced he was ending Meta’s heavy censorship of political topics. It’s time for him to go further and apologize to everyone he censored. And the New York Times, Thunberg, and Gore should join him.