Scientists are scrambling to explain why the continent of Antarctica has shown Net Zero warming for the last seven decades and almost certainly much longer. The lack of warming over a significant portion of the Earth undermines the unproven hypothesis that the carbon dioxide humans add to the atmosphere is the main determinant of global climate.
Under ‘settled’ science requirements, the significant debate over the inconvenient Antarctica data is of necessity being conducted well away from prying eyes in the mainstream media. Promoting the Net Zero political agenda, the Guardian recently topped up readers’ alarm levels with the notion that “unimaginable amounts of water will flow into oceans”, if temperatures in the region rise and ice buffers vanish. The BBC green activist-in-chief Justin Rowlatt flew over parts of the region and witnessed “an epic vision of shattered ice”. He described Antarctica as the “frontline of climate change”. In 2021, the South Pole had its coldest six-month winter since records began in 1957, a fact largely ignored in the mainstream. One-off bad weather promoter Reuters subsequently ‘fact checked’ commentary on the event in social media. It noted that a “six-month period is not long enough to validate a climate trend”.
A recent paper from two climate scientists (Singh and Polvani) accepts that Antarctica has not warmed in the last seven decades, despite an increase in the atmospheric greenhouse gases. It is noted that the two polar regions present a “conundrum” for understanding present day climate change, as recent warming differs markedly between the Arctic and Antarctic. The graph below shows average Antarctica surface temperatures from 1984-2014, compared to a base period 1950-1980.
The scientists note that over the last seven decades, the Antarctica sea ice area has “modestly expanded” and warming has been “nearly non-existent” over much of the ice sheet. NASA estimates current Antarctica ice loss at 147 gigatons a year, but with 26,500,000 gigatons still to go, this works out at annual loss of 0.0005%. At current NASA ice loss melt, it will all be gone in about 200,000 years, although the Earth may well have gone through another ice age, or two, before then.
Most alarmist commentary centres around the cyclical loss of sea ice around the coast and some warming on parts of the west of the continent. But sea ice cover is running at levels seen around 50 years ago, as the graph below shows. Small rises and falls in the early 2010s have been followed by a reversion to the mean.
The warmth to the west, seen in the first graph, could have been caused by any number of natural localised events including warmer oceanic waters and the effects of under-water volcanic activity. It has, of course, attracted widespread alarmist interest – in particular, the fate of the Thwaites ice stream, also known as the ‘Doomsday Glacier’. However, recently a group of oceanographers discovered that Florida-sized Thwaites had retreated at twice the rate in the past, when human-caused CO2 could not have been a factor. The retreat could have occurred centuries ago and is said to have been “exceptionally fast”.
Much of climate science today seems to suffer from confirmation bias. Few grants are available to those who don’t start with the premise that the climate is changing mostly, or entirely, due to humans burning fossil fuel. But many present, historic and paleo climate observations fail to establish a clear connection between temperatures and CO2 levels. In the past, the life-enhancing gas has occupied a space in the atmosphere up to 20 times higher, without evidence of huge temperature rises.
Singh and Polvani’s explanation for expected warming in Antarctica is the depth of the continent’s ice. To this end, they use two climate models that purport to show that the “high ice sheet orography” robustly decreases the climate sensitivity to extra CO2, and that “a flattened Antarctic ice sheet would experience significantly greater surface warming than the present-day Antarctica ice sheet”. This conclusion comes from computer models, but later in the paper is an admission that they fail to agree on significant matters. It is revealed that one of the models predicts less sea ice retreat in a flattened Antarctica when CO2 doubles, and the other one, more retreat.
In the science blog No Tricks Zone there has been an interesting debate on the lack of Antarctica warming. It was noted that NASA also tends to support the role of higher elevation of the ice as an explanation. For the rest of the world, states NASA, “the greenhouse effect still works as expected”. The average ice thickness in Antarctica is about 2,160 metres and compares with Greenland at around 1,600. The fact that Greenland has warmed of late might lead to the cynical observation that Antarctica has the wrong type of ice. One correspondent summarised the paper as the “lack of warming in spite of greenhouse gases is the wrong conclusion. The lack of warming is because of the increased greenhouse gases.” Another sighting, it would appear, of the old chestnut, “global cooling is caused by global warming”.
The science, as always, must be out. Attempting to connect every natural variation in weather and long-term climate to just one trace gas produced by humans leads to some unconvincing explanations, not least when climate models are involved.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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“15-minute cities” the cure form non existent climate change is spreading through England.
Cornwall has signed up for this for those think Cornwall would be a great escape. Reading has also signed up for this, for anyone living near me.
Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near Everyman Cinema & play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
Who cares about truth, facts and observable science when you’ve got Justin Rowlatts “epic vision of shattered ice” to rely on?
How would plant food, 95% emitted by Gaia, 98% reused and recycled, affect 85% of the world’s ice by volume in one location, in a linear one-cycle loop with no feedback or negative loops with no other variables at play (Antarctica)? Oh but wait. Trillion$ for $cience is $loshing around to pu$h the cata$trophe greenhou$e $tory. Now we get it.
Probably means that the North has some warming and melting ice as result of natural variations, like winds and ocean currents etc, but ofcourse when you decide what is true first and then try to make reality fit into your truth, you are are going to get yourself into a spot of bother. And that is what has happened with almost every aspect of the alleged global warming. It is all a smidgeon of the truth elevated into a planetary emergency for which no evidence exists, and where real world observations do not match the pronouncements masquerading as “science”. Recently we saw feeble attempts by warmists to insist that all of the missing global warming that had not appeared as projected must have lodged itself into the deep ocean, and no doubt similar absurdity will be put forward from the “Official Science” Department of Climate Change that Antartica has not warmed, but only because the warming is hiding deep under the snow where temperatures actually get to minus 60 in winter———If the facts don’t fit the theory then————-Change the Facts
But climate change IS hiding… the computer models say so! According to NASA projections, its just lurking beneath the sea bed ready to spring up and get us at any moment. It’s what lies beneath!
Yes, it’s like Boris Johnson’s ‘invisible mugger!’
“There are but two ways of forming an opinion in science. One is the scientific method; the other, the scholastic. One can judge from experiment, or one can blindly accept authority. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all important, and theory merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything and facts are junked when they do not fit theory laid down by authority” – Robert A. Heinlein
Lifeline. Heinlein is generally a source of wisdom in many respects.
The only good thing about recent years is that I have coma across many great thinkers that have had to address exactly the same problems.
Another quote I particularly like would be Shall I cut this guy into pieces which are small enough to hide them, sister? (Metusaleh’s Children).
The story is also interesting in that it describe how unscrupulous politicians create a mass hysteria targetted a certain group of people claimed to selfishly act to the grave detriment of all others. The pandemic of the unvaccinated and related events naturally come to mind here.
a “six-month period is not long enough to validate a climate trend”.
A couple of hot days last year seemed to be enough.
Ah yes, “Attribution Science” – a brand new field of “science” invented out of whole cloth to help the tired old Global Warming show limp on a little longer.
As well as “Attribution Science” there is “Feels Like Science”. You ask people how hot it feels, attribute an entirely new meaning to the word “hot” then measure the astonishment level of a group of weather experts and predictors, then feed the results into a Daily Telegraph Climate journalist.
Antarctica is not a “significant portion of the Earth” to Climate Science. That honour goes jointly to RAF Coningsby and Heathrow Airport, according to the Met Office. However, I believe the honour bestowed on Bandar Marshar (a highly significant 72 °C) was quietly revoked after voter irregularities and malfunctions in the Dominion machines surfaced.
Scientists are scrambling to explain why the continent of Antarctica has shown Net Zero warming for the last seven decades and almost certainly much longer?
Ans. (simplified).
From my old geology teachings, we never had ice ages (or permanent ice caps) when land-masses are absent from the polar regions. Antarctica moved into position 33-38MYA when there was…funny enough a global temperature drop from 25degC to 10degC!
Oh, forgot to add. Sea-based ice-melt makes squat-diddly difference to water levels.
Somewhat entertaining read:
https://www.science.org/content/article/rising-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide-actually-cools-part-antarctica
This is really just handwaiving, pointing out differences between Antarctica and other parts of the world (eg, It’s covered in ice! No shit, Sherlock.) and asserting these must be the reason why the greenhouse effect wouldn’t work there. When a scientific theory, like global warming because of the greenhouse effect, is contradicted by reality, this means the theory is wrong.
I was interested by Chris’s mention of underwater volcanic activity potentially being the cause of localized warming. I found a Guardian article from 2017 announcing the discovery of 91 underwater volcanoes around the coast of Antarctica. Here’s the link:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/12/scientists-discover-91-volcanos-antarctica
The map included plots the location of some of these, predominantly around the west coast, a couple of kilometres below the surface. Looking at the location of these compared to the graph above (warming trends over the past 70 years), it looks INCREDIBLY likely that the only warming that has occurred is due to the sporadic activity of several of these volcanoes.
The warming areas (in red) line up almost precisely with the dots on the Guardian map!
It’s because it doesn’t have any airports to put the thermometers in.
That’s probably actually the cause: While there are temperature measurement stations in the arctic, the trick of distributing temperature recordings from heat islands evenly accross the county via averaging can’t be applied: There are no heat islands in Antarctica.
’… with the notion that “unimaginable amounts of water will flow into oceans”, if temperatures in the region rise and ice buffers vanish.’
Since the warmest the Antarctic gets is -40C in Summer, that’s going to take some considerable temperature rise.
(The Grauniadistas do know ice only becomes liquid at 0C – or maybe not?)
Doubt it, chemistry not their forte.
Climate Science appears to be the ‘skill’ of taking global average temperatures and putting these through a computer (perhaps ‘super’) that then ‘calculates’ what the global average temperature will be in 2050, or 2100. The numbers that are generated are then presented as if fact.
“If there is something very slightly wrong in our definition of the theories, then the full mathematical rigor may convert these errors into ridiculous conclusions.” – R. Feynman
“We live in an unscientific age in which almost all the buffeting of communications and television-words, books, and so on-are unscientific. As a result, there is a considerable amount of intellectual tyranny in the name of science.” – R. Feynman
“Global Average Temperature”—–????. What is that and how is it calculated? You will find that some things lose their meaning when you average them, and temperature is one of those things. If we record temperatures all day in one location (let’s say Brisbane) and all day in another location (let’s say Iceland) and we then take these two temperature readings and do some kind of averaging, let’s say we add them both together and divide by two. The number we get is NOT a temperature. It is just a mathematical construct. It is just a statistic. The number we get is NOT the temperature of anywhere. But supposing the number we get when we do some kind of averaging is actually the temperature of earth at a given point, then we would need thermometers at every point on earth over a very long period of time taking readings. We do not and have never had that. The thermometer record of earth has always been very sparse. The thermometers were mostly in wealthy western countries, and even then they were plagued with inaccuracy problems from Urban heat Island effects etc. Plus 70% of the earths surface is ocean, where there were no thermometers. The satellite record only goes back to 1979. ——So if anyone talks of the global average temperature having risen by x in the last hundred years, they are talking nonsense. ———Climate science uses anomalies in any case, not absolute temperatures. ————You are ofcourse correct to quote Feynman, and as you imply, computer models are not science and they are not evidence of anything.
I dont struggle to understand it!
The earth’s climate has gone up and down up and down up and down!
We measure it for the blink of an eye in temporal space, and claim to know its idiosyncrasies!
I say cobblers! We’re not that clever.
According to the present quasi-religious/quasi-scientific dogma, global climate changes rapidly to high temperatures, which may (or according to the proponents, will) cause man-made and hence avoidable disaster in the near future. It is easily demonstrated that earth went through series of warming and cooling events in the last 800,000-2,5000,000 yrs, the magnitude of which was much greater than the present trend. Hence the point is not magnitude but rate, with sources quoting rates of X10 to X30 of the past warming events. Scary, isn’t it? The entire argument for man-made global warming catastrophic hypothesis hinges on two crucial points: 1. Robustness of the relationship of proxy data to actual temperatures; 2. Time resolution of the proxy data. While our confidence in the relationship between the proxy measurements and the actual events is very good in terms of centuries BP, the more we look back the less reliable the measurements. When we include necessary modeling component of the paleo-climate science, the correlation is far from robust. Apparently the best proxy data employ measurements of oxygen isotopes in gas bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice-sheets. The above article makes one seriously doubt the validity of the theory and models. If we cannot explain the lack of effect of the present global warming for the last 70 yrs, how sure we can be of the same correlation 650,000 yrs ago? As to rates, the data are at a very high resolution (of years to one-hundred years, according to hundreds thousands of serial samples). It might seem impressive if one disregards the fact that the calculated temperature estimates have a ~150 year resolution at best. This means comparing and verifying rates at abysmally poor resolution indeed.
All this does not mean that one should not limit carbon footprint and control emissions. If nature works against us, why help it? But all the dire prophecies of doom should be tightly packed and used to plug the now-defunct hole in the ozone layer and coated with now-defunct swarms of killer bees and fire ants. One can add some Corona Virus particles to the mortar.