A remarkably silly headline appeared last week in the Daily Mail stating: ‘Shocking Antarctica discovery sends climate change deniers into mass celebration.’ It appears that 100 gigatonnes of ice has been added to the Antarctica ice sheet in a 21-month period to December 2023. Quite how joy will be unconfined in the ranks of the ‘deniers’ over an increase, or decrease, of 0.00041% is not clear. The amount is an ice sheet rounding error and it would be scientifically accurate to refer to it as zero. Even if the figure was a loss, it would take nearly half a million years for all the ice in Antarctica to melt and that does not include any allowance for glacial periods or indeed a new ice age. Unsurprising, in the haste to stick ‘denier’ into the mix, a far more important finding about Antarctica ice was missed. A recent paper undergoing peer review has calculated that around 2,546 gt of ice has been added every year since 1960 to the surface on Antarctica. This would almost certainly have been enough to stabilise any natural losses and it is possible that the ice sheet has been stable or even growing slowly over this period.
The figures for Antarctica’s overall ice mass are difficult to calculate. They must include losses from ice calving and melting and they are thought to total around 2,000 gt a year. Driving ice accumulation in Antarctica is snowfall and there is some evidence that the area is receiving more precipitation than previously thought. The paper led by Dr Christiaan van Dalum of Utrecht University suggests heavy recent accumulations of ice in Antarctica that appear to outweigh any losses at the coast. There is said to be increased precipitation in the mountains of West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula.
It is not always clear in scientific papers just what the authors are comparing. The Daily Mail story arises from a Chinese group whose work on the Antarctica ice sheet appears to concentrate on just four eastern glacial basins. The Chinese findings suggest little or no change while van Dalum points to increases over the entire continent even allowing for significant losses due to natural events. Nevertheless, the key to understanding climate change lies in the length of the observations. Drawing celebratory conclusions over less than two years’ supposed growth is junk science, possibly designed to boost clicks and impress potential advertisers. Assessing results over 60 years as the Dalum paper does offers greater understanding of the dynamics of polar ice.
Try going back not two years but two thousand. Back to the time of the Roman warming period where temperatures were likely higher than they are today. Recent evidence suggests that the limit of Antarctic sea ice was 2,000 kilometres further south between 2,500 to 1,000 years ago than it is today. A paper published recently in Nature notes that DNA remains confirm the presence of elephant seals off Cape Hallett at 72.3°S. Elephant seals breed in sub-Antarctic ice-free waters with the largest colony now resident on Macquarie Island at 54.5°S. The Nature authors note that reduced sea ice extent between 2,500 and 1,000 years ago allowed the seals to breed further south and attain large local populations before facing an extirpation event as the ice grew northwards.
The science blog No Tricks Zone notes a 2019 paper that found evidence of elephant seal remains even further south than Cape Hallett with breeding sites on Inexpressible Island and Marble Point (79.4°S). “Land-fast ice and multi-year sea ice has become much more pronounced in coastal settings over the last millennium,” the paper states.
Perhaps it would be as well not to tell the Daily Mail that gets very excited on behalf of ‘deniers’ about a few months of possible ice movement. Or Clive Cookson of the Financial Times who suggested a couple of years ago that a cyclical downturn in Antarctica sea ice meant the area “faces a catastrophic cascade of extreme environmental events… that will affect the climate around the world”. Shortly afterwards he gave us an hysterical story headlined: ‘It looks like we’ve lost control of our ice sheets.’ Mass celebrations, it might be suggested, broke out among the ranks of mainstream alarmists at the time with headlines around the world trumpeting “mind blowing” low amounts of Antarctica sea ice. Alas, the mind blowing quote came from Dr Walter Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Centre, who seemed to forget that he had been part of an earlier team that unlocked 1960s Antarctic ice records from early photographs taken by Nimbus weather satellites. These revealed similar highs and lows to those of a couple of years ago, and Meier observed at the time that such variations “are not that unusual”.
In a commentary on recent polar ice academic work, the distinguished science writer Roger Pielke Jr. noted that catastrophising climate change based on the most extreme claims leads to scepticism when the promised apocalypse fails to occur. Climate research is not a scoreboard in a Manichean debate, he added, but instead offers certainties, uncertainties and even areas of total ignorance.
But of course that does not support Net Zero – a politicised fantasy world where the scientific process goes to die, the science is ‘settled’ and imaginary ‘deniers’ go wild over 90 weeks of barely measurable ice growth near the South Pole.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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