An alert viewer sends us a video demonstrating that in the wacky world of climate alarmism even the best news is bad. This time it’s from Antarctica, which is of course going to melt and drown us all just as soon as it gets with the program. And it starts “Antarctica is getting bigger but wait. How is that possible? In a warming world where all we hear about is melting glaciers deep in the Southern Hemisphere, something impossible is happening right in front of our eyes.” Now pardon our naivete, but perhaps there’s an issue with the premises. Maybe even the “warming world” might be wrong, and maybe the reason all you hear about is melting glaciers is that you’re in an echo chamber. Ah but nay. Antarctica is melting even if it’s not, and if it’s not it just proves warming is coming for us.
As the video narrator admits, as of 2020 Antarctica started gaining ice after some years of allegedly relentless loss. But fear not. “The ice is actually melting faster than ever. So what’s going on?” Um yeah. Good question. You’re believing the computers not the data? Ah but nay. Instead “as our atmosphere warms” the dreaded atmospheric rivers (are they still a thing?) get more rivery and atmospheric due to a simplistic interpretation of the Clausius-Clapeyron equation in which just because the air could hold 7% more water for each 1˚C of warming it must even though measurement doesn’t say so.
Et voilà:
“Now, what that does is trigger snowfall surges so massive, they outpace the melting glaciers. In other words, Antarctica is still leaking ice, but right now it’s being buried faster than it’s melting by loads of extra snow essentially. But don’t let this growth fool you. This isn’t a recovery, sadly. It’s a symptom of a planet out of balance.”
Yes. Just as during the last advance of the glaciers at the end of the Eemian, the fact that more ice was forming than was melting didn’t mean we weren’t headed into another glaciation. Oh wait. It did.
Indeed, all glaciers are always melting at the edges. When they’re losing more ice from melting than they’re gaining from snowfall, they shrink. When they’re gaining more ice from snowfall than they’re losing from melting, they grow. But in the wacky world of climate alarmism, growing is shrinking and good is bad. Bad is also bad and shrinking is also shrinking. You can’t win. Saunter for the hills.
We issue this warning in particular because a New York Times feature on a scientific expedition to Antarctica to (all together now) explore how the Doomsday Glacier might let go and do us all in, whose description of the hardships makes us nostalgic for our own Arctic expedition, thunders:
“The team’s scientists knew that warm currents were eating away at this glacier, the Thwaites, from below. They also knew that, sometime in the coming decades, Thwaites could give out entirely, causing so much ice to heave into the ocean over several centuries that it might raise global sea levels by more than 15 feet.”
Over several centuries. During which if humanity cannot manage some combination of barriers, raising coastal communities and relocating inland at the blistering pace of, say, three inches a year, we will get an unwanted salt water bath.
The Times tried to create a sense of urgency, continuing:
“At other Antarctic glaciers, the ice’s retreat is too gradual to notice. “Thwaites, you can feel it,” Dr. Lee, 52, said. “It’s going to be gone, sooner or later. Not on centennial, millennial time scales. It might be within our lifetime, or the next generation.”“
It might. Unless it’s not. Because one big thing about Antarctica is that it’s cold. Duh, some may say without having “kept themselves going with tea, crackers and protein bars” as they “toiled for days through lashing winds”. But the thing is, according to climate alarmist orthodoxy Antarctica should actually be a lot warmer than it rather obviously is.
As Javier Vinós wrote in Solving the Climate Puzzle: The Sun’s Surprising Role:
“The Enhanced CO2 Effect hypothesis faces a major challenge in Antarctica. According to the Pleistocene CO2-temperature relationship, current CO2 levels should correspond to Antarctic temperatures 12°C (22 °F) higher than they are. However, as figure 34b shows, Antarctica has not warmed over the past 200 years despite rising CO2 levels. This discrepancy poses a serious problem for the hypothesis. While explanations have been proposed to account for this anomaly, the fact remains that if the CO2-temperature relationship does not hold now, it cannot be used to defend past causality or to predict future climate outcomes.”
Unless of course you just ignore it because it annoys you. Or see what you think should be there not what is.
As for instance when New Scientist thunders that:
“The ‘doomsday’ glacier’s giant ice shelf is about to break away/ The floating ice shelf of world’s widest glacier – Thwaites glacier in Antarctica – is detaching, with worrying implications for global sea-level rise”
What, again? Or rather, not again? Oh yeah. Golden oldie made new again:
“Antarctica’s most threatened glacier is about to be further destabilised, as the floating ice shelf in front of Thwaites glacier is set to break away. ‘Its final demise could happen suddenly, and to avoid being caught on the hop, we have already prepared an “obituary” press release,’ says Rob Larter at the British Antarctic Survey.”
Somewhat blurring the line between science and advocacy, one might say.
Meanwhile CNN, amplified by MSN, tells us:
“A ‘triple whammy’ of chaos has triggered a downward spiral in Antarctica, scientists discover”
Noooo! Not a triple whammy. We are all going to die die die! But how? Well, see:
“For decades, it seemed Antarctica might be insulated from the kind of rapid ice melting unfolding in the Arctic. But in 2015, that changed when the sea ice fringing this vast, icy continent stopped expanding and began to decline dramatically. Now, scientists say they have figured out why this happened – and their findings spell deep trouble for a region whose fate affects us all. Antarctic sea ice has been on a steep downward trend for nearly a decade. It reached a record low in 2022 and again in 2023, when it dropped to just 691,000 square miles, equivalent to an area of missing ice larger than Greenland compared to average levels. This year saw a higher amount of sea ice at the height of the Southern Hemispher summer, but it was still at its 16th lowest level in nearly five decades of record keeping.”
Aaaaaaah! Its 16th lowest. Of course the real story here is that despite what the computer models and shrill activists said, Antarctica wasn’t melting, being indeed remarkably immune to trends elsewhere as Vinos pointed out. There was a blip lasting eight years, but it seems to have stopped. But you don’t get grants for saying that kind of thing.
Or for pointing out that the whole thing about “chaos”, mathematically speaking, is that you can’t model it using linear algebra which means you can’t model it at all. Including that, as the story says:
“The chain of events began decades ago, when westerly winds around Antarctica started to get stronger, said Aditya Narayanan, a study author and research fellow in physical oceanography at the University of Southampton in the UK.”
Naturally they blame this change in the winds on you-know-what:
“The strength of these winds has been linked, in part, to the increase of planet-heating pollution from burning fossil fuels, as well as the hole in the ozone layer above the continent.”
But again, the truth is, we don’t have sufficient data on those winds over a sufficiently long period of time to have any idea how they naturally fluctuate let alone why.
Of course with climate alarmism, as noted, it’s all bad, and the bad things reinforce one another:
“The loss of sea ice has wide ripple effects. As it disappears, it leaves coastal ice sheets and glaciers exposed to waves and warmer ocean waters, making them much more vulnerable to melting and breaking up. Sea ice also acts like a giant mirror reflecting the sun’s energy away from the Earth and back into space. When it melts, it exposes the darker ocean beneath which absorbs the sun’s energy, increasing warming. Loss of sea ice could also destabilize currents that store heat and carbon in the ocean, accelerating global warming, the scientists said.”
Unless they don’t. Because if all the feedback mechanisms really were positive, Antarctica wouldn’t be 12˚C colder than the models say it should be. Which it is. See “lashing winds” etc. above.
P.S. The Independent has the gall to bellow “Researchers issue climate change warning as sea ice in Antarctica melts to record lows” and “Their findings indicate that human-induced climate change intensified winds, which, from around 2013, began drawing warm, saline water from the deep ocean closer to the surface…. Since 2018, the ice-ocean system has been trapped in a cycle where – with less ice to melt – the surface remains salty and warm so that ice cannot recover. The change has been so extreme that vast areas of ice equivalent to the size of Greenland have melted, leading to record-breaking lows in 2023, lead author and oceanographer Aditya Narayanan said.” Oh yes? And what about the recovery since? Not a word. See up is down in their world, and…
"Antarctica has not warmed over the past 200 years despite rising CO2 levels."
There are no accurate measurements for 200 years, but there are decent measurements for the past 50 years when Antarctica has not warmed. The reason for this is a negative greenhouse effect over most of antarctica which has a permanent temperature inversion. This is exactly what is expected from an increased greenhouse effect which warms the rest of the planet