Forget global warming, the Earth might be experiencing a global cooling after a new report claims nearly a million more square miles of ocean was covered with ice compared to the same time last year.
Arctic sea ice averaged approximately 2.35 million square miles in Aug. 2013, compared to a low point of 1.32 million square miles recorded during the same time span in 2012, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
The shocking news comes six years after the BBC reported that global warming would leave the Artic ice-free by the summer of 2013.
Just days before the yearly autumn re-freeze is expected to start, the Daily Mail reported that an unbroken sheet of ice stretches over half the size of Europe from the Canadian islands to Russia's northern shores.
"The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year," the Daily Mail said in a report released this week. "More than 20 yachts that had planned to sail it have been left ice-bound and a cruise ship attempting the route was forced to turn back."
The Daily Mail now reports that the world could be heading toward a period of "cooling" that won't end until the middle of this century, which if correct, would mean computer forecasts of global warming during the same time period would be completely wrong.
Original predictions have led to billions of dollars being invested to handle the effects of climate change.
"(An ice-free Arctic is) definitely coming, and coming sooner than we previously expected," Walt Meier, a glaciologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said to LiveScience. "We're looking at when as opposed to if."
The IPCC is set to report on the prediction change in October, according to The Daily Mail.
Long-term cycles in ocean temperature could suggest that Earth may be close to a similar cooling period experienced from 1965 through 1975, according to U.S. climate expert Professor Judith Curry.
"We are already in a cooling trend, which I think will continue for the next 15 years at least. There is no doubt the warming of the 1980s and 1990s has stopped," Anastasios Tsonis of the University of Wisconsin said to the Daily Mail this weekend.
The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific is currently blocked by ice, causing a number of ships to change course, according to The Telegraph.
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