Today’s question of the week, from Reuters Sustainable Switch (and no, in 2024 they still haven’t figured out how to post their newsletters online but here’s the news story): “Has Antarctica hit a point of no return?” It’s the sort of thing alarmists regularly ask and the answer is always yes, film at 11. Lots of ominous background rhetoric but no actual disaster. And of course the story says (drum roll please) “Antarctica is changing, faster than expected” meaning science doesn’t understand the phenomenon but activists and journalists do. Especially since the story blurts out, without apparently grasping the significance, that this sort of warming has happened repeatedly over the last 20 millennia so it’s natural unless someone time-traveled with a mess of SUVs and we weren’t told. And now juxtapose this boilerplate with a Daily Mail report from a quite different region that “A patch of the central equatorial Atlantic began cooling at record rates in June/ Scientists can’t identify a good reason to explain this sudden temperature shift”. The fact is, climate is complex, unstable and poorly understood. Even if it’s almost always presented as a crystal-clear baffling harbinger of doom.

There’s a grating predictability about these stories, from their cyclical reappearance to their prose. No prize if you guess everything the Sustainable Switch newsletter said, from “There were first-hand accounts from researchers about heavy rainfall, intense heat waves and sudden Foehn (strong dry winds) events that led to mass melting, giant glacier break-offs and dangerous weather conditions with global implications” to “Scientists wondered whether these events meant Antarctica had reached a tipping point, or a point of accelerated and irreversible sea ice loss from the West Antarctic ice sheet” to “While some say the climate changes are already locked in, scientists agreed that the worst-case scenarios can still be avoided by dramatically reducing fossil fuel emissions”.

This notion that the science is settled but uncertain, and things are bad but definitely worse than we thought, is also an infuriatingly persistent condition, a kind of mental athlete’s food known as alarmist brain.

Hence the New York Times suddenly erupts that:

“Canada’s Wildfires Were a Top Global Emitter Last Year, Study Says/ The blazes produced more planet-warming carbon than almost any country, researchers found. That could upend key calculations on the pace of global warming.”

OK, so in one short burst of agitated headline-writing we learn that a natural phenomenon, wildfires, which were much more prevalent two centuries or more ago during the um Little Ice Age, has a far bigger impact on emissions than we do, that if the former were true there’d be natural tipping points in fiery years, and that the science and policy calculations were a complete muddle. Conclusion: the science is settled and it’s all humans. (And again no points for guessing that no mention was made of the quiet 2023 U.S. wildfire season and its cooling impact, or the fact that 2024 in Canada has not reflected that “Canada has been warming at about twice the global rate, and last summer’s extreme temperatures were behind much of the exceptional weather patterns that fueled fires” in 2023.)

By the same token, SciTechDaily suddenly shrieks at us that:

“Analysis of Pacific Ocean sediments shows doubling atmospheric CO2 might raise Earth’s temperature by up to 14 degrees, exceeding IPCC predictions, with historical data indicating significant future climate impacts. Doubling the atmospheric CO2 levels could raise Earth’s average temperature by 7 to 14 degrees Celsius (13 to 25.2 degrees Fahrenheit), according to sediment analysis from the Pacific Ocean near California conducted by researchers from NIOZ and the Universities of Utrecht and Bristol.”

What, despite all the historical evidence ECS is now between 7 and 14, dramatically upping the ante without doing anything about the range of uncertainty? (Incidentally this piece also slaughters the “hottest day ever” rubbish from the summer, stating blandly that “The average temperature 15 million years ago was over 18 degrees Celsius (64.4 degrees Fahrenheit): 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than today and about the level that the UN Climate Panel, IPCC, predicts for the year 2100 in the most extreme scenario.”) And of course it blows the “settled science” out of the boiling water, quoting “Professor Jaap Sinninghe Damsté, senior scientist at NIOZ and professor of organic geochemistry at Utrecht University” that:

“The clear warning from this research is: CO2 concentration is likely to have a stronger impact on temperature than we are currently taking into account!”

OK. Your models are worthless, everything you’ve said with dogmatic certainty was wrong and thus we must listen to you because now you know exactly what might be going to happen unless it doesn’t.

Now here’s the really weird part. The Reuters story turns uncertainty into certainty in exactly the wrong way. It says:

“‘There’s uncertainty about whether the current observations indicate a temporary dip or a downward plunge (of sea ice),’ said Liz Keller, a paleoclimate specialist from the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand that led a session about predicting and detecting tipping points in Antarctica.”

As we mentioned in our July 31 newsletter, Roger Pielke Jr. recently made the vital point that when trying to separate out signal from noise in processes that fluctuate a great deal whether or not they are undergoing a trend change, you often need to gather data over decades or even centuries to get a meaningful result. Which is not reassuring if, say, you need to know in short order. And to make matters worse, complex and technically “chaotic” processes, such as climate, can undergo dramatic shifts because of a confluence of apparently minor changes that don’t show up as a trend until they hit really hard.

The author in question tries to square that circle:

“While it’s tough to determine whether we’ve hit a ‘point of no return,’ Keller says that it’s clear the rate of change is unprecedented. ‘You might see the same rise in CO2 over thousands of years, and now it’s happened in 100 years,’ Keller said.”

Now on the face of it that statement is false. The proxies simply don’t capture fluctuations in atmospheric CO2 over a scale as short as a century so we have no idea. But it gets worse, because “rate of change” implies things like ice melt, not just atmospheric CO2 that, some say, is the driver of ice melt.

Including this piece. But inexplicably, since it goes on that:

“Mike Weber, a paleooceanographer from Germany’s University of Bonn, who specializes in Antarctic ice sheet stability, says sediment records dating back 21,000 years show similar periods of accelerated ice melt.”

What? If true, it means what’s happening now is not unprecedented and is not man-made. What do they teach them in journalism schools?

As mentioned above, such natural processes can be disconcerting. And one of the things wrong with the current discussion of climate is the built-in assumption that all natural processes are benign and all man-made ones dangerous. As many have said, if the Holocene ends for natural reasons and the glaciers return, we’re in a heap of icy trouble. Or if the opposite happens. As the story continues:

“The ice sheet has experienced similar accelerated ice mass loss at least eight times, Weber said, with acceleration beginning over a few decades that kick off a phase of ice loss that can last centuries, leading to dramatically higher sea levels around the world. Weber says ice loss has picked up over the last decade, and the question is whether it’s already kicked off a centuries-long phase or not. ‘Maybe we’re entering such a phase right now,’ Weber said. ‘If we are, at least for now, there will be no stopping it.’”

Which rather argues that even mitigation is futile, rather than that business about “scientists agreed that the worst-case scenarios can still be avoided by dramatically reducing fossil fuel emissions”. Also, if there’ve been eight such episodes since the last glaciation began to wind down, it rather implies that it has often been warmer than today. And that these things happen naturally. And that climate science is uncertain.

Which it is. According to the Daily Mail piece on the Atlantic:

“From unexplored trenches to the Bermuda Triangle, the world’s oceans are filled with unsolved mysteries. But one of the strangest questions is why a vast patch of the Atlantic Ocean has suddenly begun to cool at record speeds.”

It’s no mystery to the usual suspects why the ocean warms: humans did it and we are all going to die. Cue “Doomsday Glacier” stories, sea level rise and a wildfire for good measure. Although the sudden warming of a particular different part of the Atlantic in 2023 was, to get all technical, neither predicted in advance by the settled science nor explicable in any sort of detail when it did happen.

As the Mail adds:

“Until March, the central Atlantic had been experiencing its hottest warm weather event since 1982, hitting highs of 30° (86°F). However, this was followed by a dramatic temperature swing, with surface water temperatures plummeting below 25°C (72°F) - and scientists still don’t know what has caused it. Michael McPhaden, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) told Live Science: ‘We are still scratching our heads as to what’s actually happening.’”

Let’s find someone at NOAA to say such a thing if something warms. Including, oh, say, the waters around Antarctica.