Forget coral reefs and polar bears – they are so yesterday’s climate scare stories. The real big one, the tipping point du jour, is the collapse of the West Antarctica ice shelf and the prospect of global flooding on a biblical scale last reported in the times of Noah. It’s in rapid retreat says every scaremonger from Sir David Attenborough to the BBC’s resident green activist Justin Rowlatt. It is in retreat – a natural process as the Earth slowly moves out of an ice age. But now, new scientific work has found the process at the huge Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica – nicknamed the ‘Doomsday Glacier‘ for the supposed approaching catastrophe of its swift demise – is much slower than in the recent past.
The Thwaites Glacier has long been of interest. It is the second largest ice stream in West Antarctica and occupies an area the size of Florida. A group of oceanographers, led by Dr. Alastair Graham of the University of South Florida, has mapped part of the floor once occupied by the glacier, and discovered it was retreating at twice the rate in the past than that now indicated by the satellite measurements made between 2011-2019. The earlier rate of retreat was said to be “exceptionally fast”. Work is in progress to establish when that fast retreat occurred, but it is almost certain it pre-dates the 1950s, could be about 180 years old, and possibly dates back several centuries. What is completely clear, however, given the timing, is that human-caused climate change was not a factor in the faster retreat.
The results were obtained by using autonomous submersibles to map an area of the sea floor where markings were discovered representing the retreating glacier. Mapping 13 square kilometres, the researchers found a series of ridges caused by the moving glacier hitting the sea floor as it rose and fell with the tides. It was found that during the daily tidal cycle, the glacier retreated around 6-7 metres a day, although sometimes reaching 10m. Over about five months of data, the glacier retreated 2.1 kms a year, twice the current rate measured by the satellites.
The ridges were discovered on a ‘bump’ in the sea floor that had helped pin the glacier. It was found that over a 5.5 month period, the average spacing of the ridges increased upstream from 5.8m to 6.3m. This 8% increase accelerated the annual retreat rate from 2.13km to 2.3km. The results are said to indicate that the movement across the area to the present day position was “probably rapid”. The scientists note: “Our results indicate that the rate of retreat from the bump was double the average estimated for the period 1996-2009, and about three times faster than a location immediately inland of the bump between 2011 and 2017.”
Two years ago, another group led by glaciologist Professor Julian Dowdeswell of Cambridge University measured similar tidal wedges under the Larsen continental shelf in the western Weddell Sea. Grounding line retreat rates of 40-50m a day were discovered, equivalent to 10kms a year. The scientists concluded that this retreat occurred 14,000 years ago and was 100 times faster than the rate over the past 10,000 years.
This is all fascinating scientific work that gives us more information about the natural processes that shape the Earth. But it will be largely ignored in the mainstream if such findings are seen to cast doubt on the ‘settled’ science of human-caused global warming. In March 2020, the BBC’s Justin Rowlatt took a camera crew to the middle of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, an area he called the “front line of climate change”. The equilibrium that had held our world in balance for tens of thousands of years was beginning to slip and crash, he claimed. The “epic forces” at work were like a “scream of anguish”, he continued. “The glacier is being torn and shattered.” The acceleration in melting that affected the entire West Antarctica ice sheet was, “needless to say”, the result of the global warming gases our lifestyles produced. The emotional tosh continued: “A colleague interviews me for a programme we are making and I burst into tears. It takes me days to process my emotions.”
Humans may have a part to play in a climate that has always changed. Considering the massive forces at work in the natural world, many only partly understood, it is probably minor or even insignificant. But the move to declare the science around the subject ‘settled’ is harming our efforts to better understand the natural forces that shape the planet. It is certainly harming our ability to have a reasoned conversation about it. Vast sums of money are being diverted into a command-and-control Net Zero political agenda designed to radically alter the lifestyles and economic prospects of every single human on the planet. Only science that supports this political narrative gets a hearing in the mainstream media, and when politics is involved, emotion is never far from the controlling message.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Interesting news. Not that you’re likely to hear it anywhere else…
I was watching a Simon Reeve travelogue last evening. He seemed to be having a great time travelling South America to find mistreatment of indigenous peoples, evidence of colonial nastiness, and capitalists raping the natural world. What was obvious was that this has all been woven into ONE story, where there is one problem and one solution, rather than being able to separate it out into its constituent parts, and deal with the issues one by one. There is an over-arching idealist mentality that stops people with Social Justice views from seeing the wood for the trees, or forming pragmatic solutions for opposing view (Islam and homosexuality for example) as it were.
Anyway, he had a lovely holiday, which also strengthened his views of social justice for all, so it was well worth it in the end.
Nobody can make a documentary these days without insinuating climate change, slavery, colonialism, pollution into it somehow either jointly or severally.
I recently watched a documentary on I K Brunel, which inevitably had to involve slavery because the Clifton Suspension Bridge and Great Western Railway require Bristol to be mentioned and thus we need a lesson on the ills of slavery involving that port over 200 years ago.
It would presumably help a lot if people who are so neurotically ashamed of their British heritage that they can’t really talk of anything than (rather common-place) sins against what they believe to be present day morals British people in the past unknowingly committed would get a therapy instead of a job at the BBC. Especially if they also suffer from serious historical delusion: With respect to slavery, the remarkable thing about Great Britain is not that it was once a slave-owning society but that it spearheaded the abolishment of slavery after thousands of years during which it had been common practice everwhere around the globe.
One of the other facts about the slave trade that is never mentioned is that slave traders brought their slaves from local people who had captured them from other tribes, either as part of inter tribal warfare or on slave raids. Therefore a lot of black Africans participated in and profited from slavery. Should their decendents feel a sense of collective guilt the way we’re meant to feel guilty?
One of the facts about the slave trade which is really never mentioned is that it never existed in its proposed form: Slavery has been an integral part of human societies since prehistoric times. Eg, from Roman times to about the Napoleonic wars, states around the Mediterranian operated fleets of galleys which were rowed by the proverbial galley slaves (in Napoeonic France, people were nominally convicted to the galleys for certain crimes, eg, indebtedness or desertion, but since the French state didn’t operate real galleys anymore, they spent the remainder of their days in chain gangs used to do all kinds of physically hard labour).
That the so-called the slave trade was something special is just the typical navel-gazing of Americans blissfully unaware of anything except their own history (and their world wide hordes of fans).
You find any slave descendants in the Arab World even though they did indulge in slavery….Because they castrated them all. Not much outrage about that these days is there? But ofcourse facts like that are not useful in the war on the West
Peoples losing a war of conquest are usually mistreated by those who won it. That’s not specific to wars in exotic locations woke dimwits are especially interested in (because there’s still some nature there they’d like to preserve as its remote from any place where they could possibly want to park a car or build a subsidized wind turbine on). Eg, the Aztecs erected a (stone age) empire in present day Mexico because their culture relied on constant warfare in order to gain captives which would then be sacrificed to the gods (by slowly skinning them alive until they died from that).
Odd that non of the eco-loonies note that there is massive geothermal activity under said part of Antarctica….
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/high-heat-measured-under-antarctica-could-support-substantial-life/
“Temperatures on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet can plummet below –50 degrees Celsius in winter. But under the ice scientists have found intense geothermal heat seeping up from Earth’s interior. The heat production that they measured is nearly four times the global average—“higher than 99 percent of all the measurements made on continents around the world,” says Andrew Fisher, a hydrogeologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who worked on the project. This excessive heat could melt up to 35 cubic kilometers of water off the bottom of the West Antarctic Ice sheet each year, according to results reported July 10 in Science Advances.”
Facts eh? Truly troublesome, facts…
And it is obvious to the BBC that the “excessive” Geothermal heat is a direct result of you driving your Austin Allegro to work every day.
Simples!
It seems to me that there are a great many indications, willfully ignored, that the changing climate (of course it changes, always has, always will) is not having a detrimental effect on the human race. I simply cannot understand the mindset of adherents to AGW who cry in alarm at what they see, because I simply cannot see it. On a local level we could do with a very wet winter, but apart from that, what I do notice is how well all the trees look (is the extra CO2 making them grow more quickly?), how benign the weather is, how blue the sky and fresh and clean the winds. I don’t see climate tragedy anywhere that is outside the regular experience of humanity. There will always be floods, hurricanes, tornadoes etc. What is different is the ability of the stupid to film unremarkable and commonplace weather events (say a cloudburst and thunderstorm) and call it climate change.
And so what if the temperature rises by a few degrees? How could that possibly cause the end of life on earth? It would be more sensible to take advantage of it, like the Romans did with their vinyards in Northern England, and the Greenlanders who were massively into cultivation, rather than pulling ones hair out and insisting we are all going to die.
It’s all a load of old baloney, but I feel I will be talking into a void forever.
Your mention of healthy trees made me wonder whatever happened to acid rain. I found this article : –
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/what-made-the-acid-rain-myth-finally-evaporate-1.900603
Interestingly, it pretty much backs up what you have written.
Do any of the Climageddonosts know that the Antarctic is on average -40C and ice only melts above zero?
I thought that glaciers moved from higher ground to lower because the huge mass puts such pressure on the undersurface as it tries to move because of gravity, and sold of the energy is converted into heat thus turning a thin layer of the undersurface to slush and acting as a lubricant. Once on the move the glacier moves down towards the sea, in some climes becoming rivers, in others like Antarctica stil ice but breaking off as they reach the ‘warm’ sea water.
If this be so, global warming – surface air temperatures – can play no part in the speed of movement and melting of the glacier.
Have any of these studies considered that a reduction in snowfall to feed the glacier has contributed to their retreat? i.e. it’s not all about the temperature.
Is increased snowfall one reason why some of them are growing?
Just made myself watch the Attenborough propaganda on West Antarctica. No context, no data and baby penguins freezing in heavy rain. Naturally the Thwaites piece doesn’t mention the studies referred to above that show a retreat in the ice shelf pre-dating any possible human influence.
Well, that seems pretty conclusive, because we all know the science is settled.
We have to be eternally grateful that the Swedish truant wasn’t born in 1976.
You are referring to the Useful Idiot in Chief?
Great news! That’s stopped me having to rush out to my local supermarket and pour pints of milk all over the floor to save the planet. Phew.Thanks Daily Skeptic.
Yet again we find that actual facts do not bear out the doomsday results predicted by the modelling that scientists who advocate manmade climate change rely on. Meanwhile the BBC continues to make lying documentaries designed to frighten people. I just hope nobody is watching and taking them as gospel,especially young kids.
“A colleague interviews me for a programme we are making and I burst into tears. It takes me days to process my emotions.”————-All faith and emotion, no facts or reason.—————– In the world of climate change armageddon politics played by governments (except the Trump one) and their compliant media buddies at BBC SKY etc they already decided what was true 20 or 30 years ago, then they try to bend every storm or flood or bit of melting ice to fit in with that in their ongoing confirmation bias exercise. When everything that ever happens in the world is due to your theory you are no longer dealing in science. Science has been abandoned in favour of “Official Science”