Whisper it quietly, but Antarctica ice is not making a comeback – because it never went away in the first place. Estimates of gains and losses vary in the scientific world, but NASA recently suggested the continent was losing 147 gigatons a year. Since there is an estimated 26,500,000 gigatons of ice lying about on the continent, this works out at an annual loss of 0.0005%. At the current ice melt it will all be gone in about 200,000 years. It might be argued that the current level of melting seems a tad on the slow side for a planet emerging from an ice age.
Obviously something must be done, instanter. On Radio 4 next week, the BBC’s green activist-in-residence Justin Rowlatt presents five short programmes updating us on the latest Armageddon climate scares. On Thursday, he will ask if Antarctic changes “will flood coastal cities for centuries to come”. What century, would seem a reasonable question to ask. In September 2021, Rowlatt reported that pre-pandemic he had flown over Antarctica and witnessed “an epic vision of shattered ice”. He continued: “It felt like I’d reached the frontline of climate change: a place where the equilibrium that has held our world in balance for thousands of years was slipping and crashing.” We are “overwhelming” the ice, he claimed. Of course a plug for the command-and-control Net Zero project is always at hand. “Needless to say,” continued Rowlatt, “this acceleration is a result of us humans polluting the air with greenhouse gases.”
As I noted recently, Reuters ran a story saying scientists had attributed the “disintegration” of an ice shelf to a period of “extreme heat”. It turned out the ‘heat’ was based largely on a computer model, and was gone within four days.
So back in the real world, what is actually happening in Antarctica? In October 2015, NASA reported that increases in Antarctica snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago were currently adding enough ice to outweigh any losses. According to an analysis of its satellite data, there was a net gain of 112 gigatons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001, slowing to 83 gigatons to 2008. However in March last year, NASA seemed to change its approach and said that Antarctica had shed an “average” of 147 gigatons between 2002 and 2020. But as always in the geographical record, different parts of the vast continent show diverging patterns of gain and loss.
As we have previously reported, the Arctic ice record shows much wider variations. The recent small rise in temperature of about 1°C, as the planet emerged from a ‘little ice age’, has impacted the northern hemisphere more than the south, due to the presence of much larger land masses.
As we can see in the above graph, Antarctica remains a very cold place with little discernible trend in temperatures going back 60 years.
According to the satellite data from the University of Alabama, seen in our second graph, there has been no warming at the South Pole since at least 1978. Last year, mainstream media largely failed to report that the South Pole recorded its coldest six-month winter since records began in 1957. Reuters ‘fact checked’ social media commentary on this event and found it was “missing context”. A six-month period was “not long enough to validate a climate trend”, it said.
It might be thought that there is very little mileage in promoting climate Armageddon by using examples from Antarctica. But many of the scares revolve around the ice that forms in the sea around the continent. Due to different geographical circumstances, less ice survives in the summer in Antarctica than the Arctic, and over the last few years there has been more variability in cover.
According to the climate writer Michon Scott, Antarctica’s sea ice level since 2013 has exhibited the highest and lowest extents on record – highest-ever winter maximum in September 2014 and lowest-ever summer minimum in February 2022. A recent collation of scientific sources by the No Tricks Zone climate science site suggested that the short-term changes may have been due to natural processes. Overall, Scott notes, the long-term trend is nearly flat. “The satellite record spans over four decades, and although the ice has shown increasing and decreasing trends over portions of that record, few of those trends have been statistically significant,” he said.
That sea ice can be tricky. In 2013, the Australian climate change professor Chris Turney led an Antarctica expedition on the MV Akademik Shokalskiy to retrace a 1912 voyage and gauge the extent to which climate change had affected the continent. Turney had told journalists that he wanted to collect data that could be used to improve climate models. Two weeks later, the rescue call went out as the ship was trapped by thick ice.
A statement was subsequently posted: “We’re stuck in our own experiment.”
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor
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Time to lean even harder on the loud pedal of my six litre Bentley then
Well, if it saves just one penguin …….
Enjoy it while you can. Probably nothing to worry about you can get an even more powerful electric version. Shame about the loss of engine growl though.
Lies, damned lies, and the BBC environmental correspondent.
BBC Top Environmentalisf takes an aeroplane trip through the pristine skies above Antarctica and still can’t discover where they’re mining the Irony.
Antarctica is half as big again as the entire USA. How much of it did he ‘fly over’ in a small plane to reach his Damascene vision..
His producer told the pilot to fly him over some broken ice and his fevered imagination did the rest.
I’m sure a lot of data was “tortured” to get these results.
imagine his utter fit of apoplexy if say just a few 100 people a day had the cheek to do just what he did. i wonder just how many Carbon Dioxides (haha) were released by all his efforts involved in that endeavour. “remember kids, do as I say but ignore what i actually do”
How very dare you spoil the party after 20 years and a trillion dollars spent propagandising the myth CO2 is the climate devil.
Don’t you realise how important it is to have a single centrally administered global taxation system as a pre-requisite for a single global WEF corporate fascist-feudal government? Shame on you for thinking independently and not being brainwashed by the omnipresent mass formation psychosis.
….oh well, mustn’t grumble
Rowlatt is a hacktivist. He’s employed precisely because he’s an on-narrative fanatic who looks the part, can generate florid prose on demand, and deliver it to camera. Ultimately he’s just a useful idiot for Greenscam Industries.
Just checked outside my front door. Still no sign of the corpse-strewn, boiling waters of the Atlantic lapping away at my doorstep. In fact everything looking and feeling pretty much the same as it always has.
Think I will continue carrying on as normal.
The only thing that’s changed for me there’s a sodding big petrol generator in my back garden in preparation for the next several winters of power cuts.
Hope you can access the petrol. A steam engine might be a good fallback…
Are they using Neil Fergusons computations? If so we needn’t worry as he has been wrong about everything.
Ice shelves shatter – it is what they do. They grow, usually pushed out into the ocean by glacial action, and eventually they become so big that bits break off. It is nothing to do with thermodynamics and everything to do with mechanics (not the car repairer type!).
Trouble is whole climate crisis thing has become a career, business & power opportunity.
‘…NASA recently suggested the continent was losing 147 gigatons a year.’
Suggested.
It is -40C or lower in the Antarctic and ice used to melt above 0C when I went to school, so how exactly is it suggested Antarctic ice is melting?
There are glaciers on the Antarctic Continent which behave like gainiers everywhere, they slowly move to the sea… melting on the underside because of heat generated by pressure, so nothing to do with near surface temperature.
Plus: rotation of the Earth and currents in the upper atmosphere move moist air to the polar regions where that moisture falls as snow and ice to be fixed on the surface.
So as Antarctic ice is lost into the sea, it is replaced from the air. And… since ‘global warming’ is increasing the amount of atmospheric water vapour, thus fixation of water as ice at the Antarctic will increase.
Of course NASA have computer models and experts – and we know we can trust experts, who never lie.
The liitle ice age led to global famine and decreased the average human mortality in effect mass starvation.
Warm = good for humanity, Cold = bad.
The major logical flaw in alarmist “Climate McScience”, right there.
Almost all great civilisations have flourished during warmer periods, and declined as the planet cooled.
Most of the Cathedrals across Europe began construction during the Medieval Warm period.
One principle reason for this was found to be that because of warmer weather, working age men were relieved from the chore of grubbing an existence to keep their families fed. With increased warmth, crops were easier to grow and more plentiful, allowing men to seek paid employment.
The wealthy Church put this excess of labour to good use by building monuments to themselves, many taking 100 years to complete.
In many ways, as the world emerged from the Little Ice Age, modern man has done the same thing by building cities and infrastructure, whilst crop production has improved and made more efficient with technology.
Antarctica is the fifth largest continent on earth, almost twice the size of Australia.
If every bit of sea ice surrounding it melted from warming oceans we know from schoolboy science it wouldn’t raise sea levels one bit.
That being the case, assuming the land mass is a merely few feet above sea level, how do the warmer oceans reach the remaining 26,500,000 gigatons of ice?
Scott’s fated journey to the south pole was conducted in the Antarctic summer. It was estimated the temperature was -40C when Scott and his two remaining companions died.
If the oceans can’t reach the continent bound ice it would require an atmospheric temperature increase of some 40C before that ice began to melt.
With SE England then ‘enjoying’ peak summer temperatures of 70C compared to today, I would be worried long before the Antarctic continental ice began to melt and raise sea levels.
A small point Chris but your percentage calculation is a factor of 10 out – 5 parts per million (i.e. 1 year out of 200,000) is 0.0005%.
The climate scaremongers: Why no windfall tax on wind farms, Rishi?
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-climate-scaremongers-why-no-windfall-tax-on-wind-farms-rishi/
Paul Homewood
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I wish the people believing all this propaganda about “climate change” and the knock-on emerging catastrophe of “NetZero” would be sufficiently educated and discerning to understand the “science, statistics, and engineering” used to refute the claims by scientists, activists, and gov’t about “climate change” and “NetZero”. They just aren’t. So using science in this way is not to be avoided, but something more required.
Prince William pushes climate agenda at Platinum Jubilee
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc2VVcReYsw
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