Ted Cruz Challenges John Kerry Over Resurfaced 'Arctic Summer' Claims

Texas Senator Ted Cruz challenged statements made by John Kerry, the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, about the effects of climate change on Arctic ice.

Cruz responded to a clip of the then-senator for Massachusetts, a Democrat, claiming in 2009 that in five years' time, the Arctic was predicted to experience its first summer without ice, tweeting late Saturday: "Does anyone care that this was wildly, spectacularly wrong?"

The Republican senator's tweet, which has since been viewed 1.9 million times, has prompted a mix of climate denial and support for the sentiment of Kerry's ultimately erroneous prediction.

It comes as Cruz's home state is suffering a prolonged and intense heatwave, with much of late June and July spent with temperatures regularly over 100 degrees Fahrenheit and unusually hot lows in the night.

Newsweek reached out to Kerry's office in the Department of State via email for comment on Monday.

Texas is just one of several states in the southwest experiencing similar weather, as well as parts of Europe that have been subject to vast wildfires. Meanwhile, the northeast remains clouded by wildfire smoke from Canada, and Vermont is recovering from a period of intense flooding.

Those areas under heat alerts are already seeing the extreme temperatures affecting crops and cattle, as well as the death of a 71-year-old man after being exposed to 121 degree heat in Death Valley, California.

Speaking on the floor of the Senate on June 25, 2009, Kerry says in the video: "You have sea ice which is melting at a rate that the Arctic Ocean now increasingly is exposed. In five years, scientists predict we will have the first ice-free Arctic summer."

According to MIT, the Arctic has gone through periods with no ice, but around 5,000 years ago a continual ice shelf developed—one that is now shrinking at a faster rate than at any time in the last 1,500 years.

Since 2009, the Arctic has yet to spend any period of time ice-free, but scientists expect that there will be a summer in the coming decades when it disappears completely. A study published in 2009 in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters predicted a "nearly sea ice-free Arctic" by 2037, while more recently in 2021, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggested it would happen at least once before 2050.

The IPCC report also said with high confidence that a "practically sea ice-free state will become the norm for late summer by the end of the 21st century" if high carbon dioxide emissions remain the norm.

In December 2009, former Democratic presidential candidate and climate advocate Al Gore made the same claim as Kerry, citing Dr. Wieslav Maslowski as having given the prediction a 75 percent likelihood.

However, The Times reported that Maslowski said he "would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact" as had been claimed, and that he had given a six-year projection for 80 percent ice melt.

Many of the Twitter users who responded to Cruz's question made light of the climate crisis, with some describing claims of melting ice as "rhetoric," a "political ploy" and a "lie." Others, however, noted recent reports and scientific modeling showing a receding Arctic.

Research by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in October 2022 found that overall, the Arctic had lost an area of ice equivalent to South Carolina on average every year between 1979 and 2021. It also found that the ice shelf is tending toward being "thinner and more fragile."

According to the World Wildlife Fund, the more ice that melts at the poles results in less solar heat being reflected off the Earth's surface, bringing heatwaves with greater intensity—all while raising sea levels.

But the warmer weather also destabilizes the atmosphere's Jetstream, pulling colder, bitter air further south from the Arctic—as seen during a freak cold snap in Texas at the end of last year.