Sea ice around Antarctica has “slowly increased” since the start of continuous satellite recordings in 1979 with any changes caused by natural climate variation. In a paper published earlier this year, four environmental scientists further state that any sign that humans are responsible for any change is “inconclusive”. Not of course for mainstream media that have been crying wolf about the sea ice in Antarctica for decades to promote the Net Zero fantasy. Last year there was a reduced level of winter sea ice and this caused the Financial Times Science Editor Clive Cookson to exclaim that the entire area “faces a catastrophic cascade of extreme environmental events… that will affect climate around the world”.
Over the satellite record, the scientists note there was a “prolonged and gradual” expansion of sea ice to around 2014 followed by a short period of sudden decline from 2014-19. Growth was then resumed, although there was a temporary downturn around 2022. These variations, which can also be observed before 1979, were caused by a number of natural atmospheric and oceanic factors. All of this is known of course, with the EU weather service Copernicus admitting recently that sea ice extent as a whole “shows large year-to-year variability and no clear long-term trend since 1979”. At the other end of the Earth, Copernicus correctly states that the cyclical decline in Arctic sea ice “has levelled off since 2007”.
It must all be very bewildering for narrative-following journalists. Confusion no doubt reigned supreme in their unquestioning ranks when they chanced upon the comments last year of Dr. Walter Meier of the U.S.-based National Snow and Ice Data Centre. He was in full activist mode when he claimed the 2023 winter sea ice dip was “so far outside anything we’ve seen, it’s almost mind blowing”. But not perhaps as confused as Dr. Meier himself who 10 years earlier was part of a scientific team that cracked open the secrets of early Nimbus photographic data. These revealed significant Antarctica sea ice variability in the 1960s, including a high in 1964, not seen again until 2014, and a low in 1966, similar to the recent dip. At the time, Dr. Meier commented that extreme ice highs and lows “are not that unusual”.
During the Great 2023 Antarctica Ice Scare, the BBC said that it showed a worrying new benchmark for the region “that once seemed resistant to global warming”. Still does, those striving for accuracy might note. Antarctica has hardly warmed in the last 70 years.
One by one the appalling scares that have been used by Net Zero fanatics to promote mass climate psychosis in human populations are being exposed as wishful junk thinking. Over the last few decades, alarmists have taken their cue from the ozone hole scare that started in 1974. At this time, two scientists claimed that the widespread industrial use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) was destroying the protective ozone layer in the atmosphere. Subsequently, an annual appearance of an ozone hole was discovered over Antarctica and CFCs were banned by international agreement in 1995. The two scientists received the Nobel prize for their work, and activists claimed it was all a great triumph showing what could be achieved when humans acted in concert to protect the planet. The Nobels were accepted and the activists moved onto other scares and proposed bans. What happened to the ozone hole, you ask? Well that kept on expanding and contracting as it has always done, and this year the hole is as large as it has been for the last 30 years. Whisper it quietly – natural variation seems to be at work here.
As readers will no doubt be aware, there is gathering excitement about the prospect of another ‘hottest year evah’ for 2024. There has been a little extra warmth recently following a near nine-year temperature pause with scientists looking at a number of natural variations seen often in the past.
Hottest year claims are produced from woefully incomplete temperature records that are barely 100 years old. In the case of sea temperatures, accurate and complete global records stretch back less than 20 years. The temperature data itself, as we have seen in many Daily Sceptic articles, have been homogenised/reanalysed/invented/adjusted on an almost constant basis. Most individual temperature recordings around the world have been corrupted by urban heat, while in the U.K. the Met Office seems inordinately proud of a national high set in 2022 as three Typhoon jets were landing at a RAF airbase. If we consider the proxy record, it seems likely that temperatures were as high in Roman and medieval times, while 8,000 years ago the great northern ice sheets started to melt helped by temperatures at least 3°C higher than those experienced today. Again it is difficult not to conclude that natural variation plays the dominant role in controlling the climate thermostat.
Thoughts and prayers are also the order of the day for those who set great store in all the coral disappearing. Three years of record growth on the huge Great Barrier Reef put an end to that headliner. Polar bears are just as bad and keep breeding to top up new Arctic highs. Satellites keep discovering vast colonies of penguins in Antarctica, and mainstream media seem shocked into complete silence to report that the eyes in the sky have detected a vast recent plant greening of the Earth. There is a growing trend to debunk any ‘extreme’ weather claim – the great citizen journalist Paul Homewood even writes a book about the BBC’s more egregious climate howlers, every year no less, such is the volume to process.
The Net Zero project is starting to crumble around the world as citizens make their feelings known with votes, and sometimes with rocks. Nobody can or wants to live in a world without hydrocarbons. Crucial to this trend is an emerging understanding that the scientific process when it comes to climate has been trashed for decades and replaced with an increasingly laughable junk ‘settled’ science narrative.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Surely floating ice displaces its own mass of water so does contribute to rising sea levels?
If ice mass has increased that means it has formed from refrozen water evaporating from the seas.
Land ice melts, goes into the sea, raises level, water evaporates, lowers level, reforms as ice back on land.
It’s almost as if there were a phenomenon known as the Water Cycle.
Ice displaces its own weight of water, but only if it is floating in the water.
If the snow/ice originates from the dry land, above sea level, which it can in the Antarctic, it won’t have been floating, so it will raise the sea level. It will be the same result as if it had just rained and flowed down a river into the sea, after an unspecified pause, or just rained into the sea. Also, ice built up on land will lower sea levels.
However, any ice melting or freezing will (eventually) change in sea level will be across all oceans, so it won’t rise or fall as much as might be expected.
There was an ice sheet across North America and, when it melted, sea level rose several hundred feet.
Actually sea displaces more than it’s own weight in water (by about 10%), which is why it floats. It becomes less dense than the surrounding ocean. So increasing sea ice wouldd actually cause sea levels to rise. But given the earth is a sphere, a 3D shape, and the sea is effectively an outer coating on it. Every unit of sea level rise requires steady increasing amounts of water by tye cubed rule, which makes “runaway sea level rises”, or falls pretty unlikely.
Er, the [sea] ice is ‘the water’ frozen or not.
Antarctic ice is a combination of sea-ice (floating) and land ice (on the ground). Antarctica is a continent in its own right … there are fossilised trees there. If all the ice melted, global sea level would rise. The Arctic is, however, a floating mound of ice and, if it melted, global sea level wouldn’t change that much. Both Polar ice-caps are doing pretty well at present (as are Polar Bears in the North) and you can ignore the scare stories.
There’s a simple experiment you can do at home: take a glass and partially fill it with water, and add an ice cube as well; mark the level of the ice and water on the glass; leave it for a few hours (or as long as it takes for the ice cube to fully melt; then check the water level.It will be the same.
However, this does not exactly translate to the actual effect when floating sea ice melts as the fresh water from which the ice is made has a lesser density than the salt water into which it merges. It therefore tales up slightly more volume than the sea water it displaced when it was floating. So there will be very small increase in overall sea level; but so slight as to be of very little significance.
I think the continued existence of the ‘ozone hole’ despite the near-complete ban on CFC production is hardly evidence for or against the Rowland-Molina hypothesis. CFCs are so stable it’s been predicted they will remain in the troposphere for thousands of years.
So where is the evidence that the ban worked?
Like I said, it’s not evidence either way. And I don’t suppose there will be the evidence for a while yet. CFCs are very stable in the troposphere. Luckily, post-Montreal Protocol, CFCs could be replaced in most of their roles with alternatives, with minimal disruption. I’m fairly sure CFCs don’t occur in nature – that’s why Lovelock was able to use them as an indication of anthropogenic air pollution in the 70s. So, the whole situation is very different from the war on CO2.
It’s the Sun wot done it!
Global ozone loss following extreme solar proton storms based on the July 2012 coronal mass ejection
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-40129-1
It’s satisfying to reuse an old headline
The entire eco socialist fraud of climate change in support of a wealth redistribution agenda emanating from the UN/WEF is full not only of huge uncertainty, but of adjusted and manipulated data, lies and exaggeration all in support of the agenda. There is no evidence that CO2 is causing or will cause dangerous changes to climate, but there are extremists in the Green Movement who want to lock people up for saying that, or for questioning any aspect of this fraud.
there are extremists in the Green Movement who want to lock people up for saying that
It’s a decadent and nihilist anti-human secular religion founded on hate. The police will be visiting them any day now to discuss their multiple non-crime hate incidents. Any day now …
Not holding my breath……
…. and adding to Carbon (Dioxide) emissions!
“In a paper published earlier this year, four environmental scientists further state that any sign that humans are responsible for any change is “inconclusive”.
Odd that. 4.5 billion years of geological data showing natural variation is “inconclusive”.
That Humans control the climate is the ultimate unfalsifiable claim.
Note to “scientists” : you have to prove Humans are to blame for everything, we don’t have to prove we are not.
You have to remember that to avoid death threats to them and their families and to keep their jobs and funding, the scientists can’t rule out an anthropogenic signal even if they know they can’t see one. What we can be certain of is that after decades of ‘research’ and £$billions in funding, nobody has produced a paper that proves anthropogenic global warming. And we also know that no prediction that the ecofascists and warmists have made has ever come true.
One thing I noticed this week was the forecast for cold weather next week. It’s being reported as “below average for the time of year”. Yet when hot weather is reported in the summer, it is “higher than normal” which implies that there is such a thing as a “normal temperature” rather than the longer term average. All helps push the narrative.
Ignore the text, it’s the picture that’s worth a 1000 words:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/11/16/ed-miliband-doomed-net-zero-dream-labour
It is a big place depends on where you’re looking at. The elite are buying up land in west Anrarctica. The Russians and Chinese are building an arctic sea route to bypass the Suez Canal. Even the proles in Russia talk about the coming pole shift and yet we hear nothing about it. It isn’t good news for the British Isles but you still want to know about it just like you want to know if you have cancer, especially the turbo variety.
The UN told us what the Climate Change narrative is about. So …. were they lying then, or are they lying now?
The FACTS show that they are lying now with their hysterical scaremongering about climate change, against all the evidence which demonstrates that their claims are bunkum.
“‘Global warming’ is not about the science.”‘Climate change policy is about how we redistribute the world’s wealth’
U.N. climate chief Christina Figueres pointedly remarked, the true aim of the U.N.’s 2014 Paris climate conference was “to change the [capitalist] economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”
https://www.climatedepot.com/2017/05/24/global-warming-is-not-about-the-science-un-admits-climate-change-policy-is-about-how-we-redistribute-the-worlds-wealth/
There is a lucrative ‘Climate Change’ industry and those benefitting from it will create reports saying that we are in a Climate Change crisis.
Otherwise there would be noi need for them.
It’s about their job retention.