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I’ve been wondering when the PIK would take off the muzzle they seemed to have put on Rahmstorf after a German court fined him for spreading untruths about a journalist who dared to contradict his science. On that read: Lubos here, court-certification here, and here.

Using the occasion of low Arctic ice, Rahmstorf now comes out swinging again, and looking at today’s performance, it probably won’t too long before he slips and winds up in court again. Talk about being debate-intolerant!

Today he has a guest piece in the lefty Süddeutsche Zeitung (South German Newspaper) titled: In the vicious circle of warming. And true to his style, he goes after the skeptics like a famished pitbull on red meat.

First Rahmstorf misleads the readers (surprise, surprise) and warns that all that melting ice in question up there (0.006% of the world’s ice) may very well have serious consequences for the entire planet. He quotes Jennifer Francis of Ruttgers University: “The question is not whether sea ice will impact global circulation, rather it is: How could it not?” Maybe because the sea ice amount in the Arctic is much too small compared to the sheer volume of the oceans?

Then he laments that the reduced albedo will lead to a vicious circle of accelerating ice melt and global climate collapse.

There’s enough ice on Greenland to raise global sea level by seven meters, and so the loss of just a fraction of that ice would have grave consequences.”

Well, we’ve been watching tide gauge data (and not crystal ball models) very closely and the observations are certainly clear – no accelerating sea level rise. And Mr Rahmstorf wonders why we are skeptical? Never mind that global temperatures have’t risen this century.

In his screed, Rahmstorf carefully cherry-picks, always citing the studies from the most alarmist warmists. Never does he cite from the hundreds of peer-reviewed papers that contradict his end-of-world claims.

In his piece, Rahmstorf tries to have it both ways, claiming that both droughts and floods, heat and bitter cold, are all evidence of man-made global warming climate change. For Rahmstorf, the distribution of weather measures are no longer Gaussian, rather it is now bathtub shaped – lots of weather at the extremes and nothing in the middle. Listening to Rahmstorf, you’d think he’s the marketing director at Munich Re reinsurance company trying to scare his clients into buying a insurance policy.

Turns out, he is connected to the Munich Reinsurer.

Throughout, Rahmstorf’s tone is frustrated and spiteful towards debate. Things are not moving quickly enough for him. In his view, the obstacles are clearly the skeptics. He’s annoyed that skeptics have the gall to question the differences in the various sets of Arctic sea ice data. He writes:

‘Climate skeptics’ have seen the differences as reasons for manipulation accusations – the pertinent websites serve a niche audience of conspiracy theorists. Already in 2008 there were accusations of manipulation, which back then had to be retracted. Back then the ‘climate skeptics’ polemicized: ‘The Arctic refuses to melt’. The occasion they used was that the record of 2007 was not broken the very next year.”

The troubling part about Rahmstorf’s position is that he is only open to the Arctic factor of “warming”. Nowhere does he show any degree of openness that other factors are at play…ocean currents, soot, storms spreading the ice, etc.. For Rahmstorf it’s only man, Co2 and imminent tipping points. He adds:

We’ll hear more of the same in the years ahead as well, because natural weather-dependent fluctuations are superimposed over the downward trend and so a new record cannot be expected every year.”

Yes, when it melts, it’s climate. But when it freezes, it’s weather. If it’s the Arctic, it’s climate. If it’s Antarctica, it’s weather. If it’s a hurricane, it’s climate, but if it’s a light spring shower, it’s weather. If it’s too hot, it’s climate. If it’s too cold, it’s weather. So is the science of Stefan Rahmstorf.

He ends by implying that we have to stop listening to the skeptics and that 0.006% part of the world’s ice is:

…now sending us a clear alarm signal – we can only hope that the people will no longer keep closing their eyes to it.”

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Stefan Rahmstorf is department leader at the über-alarmist Potsdam-Institute for Climate Impact Research and Professor at the University of Potsdam. He’s a member of Hans Schellnhuber’s (WBGU). Moreover he is also an author of the (IPCC), donates money to alarmist website Klimaretter and is associated with the Munich Reinsurer, which makes lots of money selling insurance policies to people who have concerns about storm damage.