by Alexis FitzGerald
I consider myself to be left-wing on virtually every political topic: I am a socially-liberal social democrat who believes in a strong social safety net, high-quality public healthcare for all, robust environmental protections (including shifting to renewable energy sources immediately and protecting half of the globe for nature), restorative justice, legal abortion and reducing inequality and corporate influence over politics. I despise Donald Trump and believe Brexit was a huge mistake. I am firstly presenting my political biases in order to dispel the caricature that has emerged of lockdown sceptics as being all right-wing, Trumpian Brexiteers. I think this labelling has been very unfortunate and misguided, as I too believe that the lockdown policy in response to Covid-19 has been an utter and complete disaster, and that most of the left have gotten this issue completely wrong. I will argue that the position of the lockdown sceptic really should be a more naturally left-wing cause to adopt, and those on the left should not be distracted by the reflexive partisan politics and virtue signalling that has taken over so much of the debate around lockdowns.
The left should be interested in protecting working class and marginalised people and shielding them from economic hardship and exploitation, first and foremost. However, by many reasonable projections, these lockdown policies are delivering us into the worst economic depression in world history, and this will certainly negatively affect working class and marginalised people more than anyone else. Small businesses are being swallowed up by the thousands by large multinational corporations like Amazon (very much like a novel virus, sweeping through our populations and killing off the weakest among us), and automation has now taken on a whole new impetus for these companies. There will be few jobs left to return to for those furloughed by this lockdown, and there will be no resources to invest in worthy left-wing causes such as better public healthcare and vaccines, renewable energy systems, public transport, universal basic income, upskilling of the workforce, etc. We have developed complete tunnel vision on one cause of death, and forgotten or relegated all of the other causes of human death and suffering. We are now casually discussing the possibility of new famines in Africa and India and of economic bailouts three times the size of the 2008 economic crash, after just one month of lockdown. These outcomes are by no means guaranteed by the appearance of Covid-19 itself. This is the shocking result of lockdown policy, and a stark reminder of how disastrous public policy can be in the wrong hands. The economy is not just some toy for the ultra-rich (although aspects of it can be, e.g. stock markets), it is also crucial to the continued prosperity and flourishing of average working families. Therefore, the flippant dismissal of economic concerns by some on the left is a massive mistake, the consequences of which will be suffered for generations, and the weight of which will fall particularly on the shoulders of young people like myself. This has never been about life versus money, it has always been about life versus life.
In our current media climate it is not often mentioned that national and international lockdowns in response to a virus outbreak are completely unprecedented in world history, and that this is for good reason. Not even in war time did Western governments impose such severe restrictions on citizens’ personal liberties (churches and schools largely stayed open in the United Kingdom during World War II). And it is not just our liberty that we are losing, but our livelihoods and our young people’s futures. It will be young people and struggling working-class families who will bear the burden of the economic aftermath of this policy and who will have to pay back these forced Covid-19 subsidy loans that are being thrust upon us after being forced out of work by government fiat, through economic depression and inevitable austerity over many years. Multi-billion dollar socialism for mismanaged corporations and banks will certainly continue unabated, and ordinary people will be made to foot the bill once again, just as we did in 2008. If we continue with varying levels of lockdown until the end of the summer (and perhaps beyond), we are guaranteed to have destroyed generations of human potential. We on the left should have seen this coming months ago, and we should actively be resisting the lockdowns which caused it.
Given that national lockdowns have never before been attempted and are so extreme in nature, the onus falls upon governments implementing them to provide overwhelming and inarguable evidence and data to justify this policy and to prove its efficacy beyond any reasonable doubt. However, it is clear that governments and public health officials have completely failed us in this regard. You just have to take a look at the Worldometers data for Covid-19 that anyone can access in order to make comparisons between different countries to see how our governments and public health officials have failed. However, there are other scientists and scholars presenting this with more sophisticated statistical analyses which I highly recommend reading, such as Wilfred Reilly’s recent articles on the topic. For example, Sweden had 2,763 infections per million, and 343 deaths per million as of 12th May 2020. These statistics are quite similar to my own country, the Republic of Ireland, with a much higher 4,739 infections per million and a similar 303 deaths per million, also as of 12th May; yet Ireland has been in full lockdown for some seven weeks at this point – a fellow European country with a similar population, similarly dense cities, similar age profiles in the population and similar sizes and densities of nursing homes. Sweden never introduced a national lockdown, but rather maintained strong recommended (rather than government-mandated) social distancing measures while attempting to shield the most vulnerable. Sweden kept its economy open and kept its populace as calm and rationally-informed as possible in the face of this crisis, and has recently been praised by the World Health Organisation for their efforts in tackling the crisis in a long-term sustainable fashion. Sweden also has a much lower death rate than Belgium, Spain, Italy, UK, etc. Those who like to point out that other Scandinavian countries have lower deaths per million seem to forget that Sweden is simply further along the infection curve than these neighbouring countries, and thus that they have not saved any lives but rather delayed the death sentences of those vulnerable people in their populations by a mere few weeks or months – a delaying strategy which could be considered to be socially destructive in itself. And all the while, detractors conveniently forget all those European countries that have fared the same or much worse than Sweden according to the numbers.
This is replicated virtually everywhere when you compare countries or US states in lockdown to those non-lockdown, social-distancing countries or US states such as South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Nebraska, Wyoming, etc. Therefore, social distancing appears to be doing almost all of the work for us in terms of controlling the spread of the virus. These are live experiments that we are witnessing before our eyes which show us that lockdown is not even working well in terms of our public health, and for some bizarre reason governments and their health advisors are completely ignoring them and not learning any lessons from them. Every week of lockdown that goes by is digging us further into a deep hole of economic turmoil which will take us years to get out of. The evidence for the efficacy of lockdowns is simply not forthcoming, and therefore the policy is utterly unjustified – however much we may imagine it to be. Lockdowns were first instituted when we had no hard evidence to hand, only models (which have since turned out to be wildly out of sync with reality), and the policy has not been re-evaluated in any serious scientific way since this time.
For some strange reason, many people (particularly on the left) appear to want the Swedish model to fail, and the bizarrely-negative media coverage they receive should simply be ignored. In normal times, Sweden is held up as a model country on the left for virtually everything from health care to prisons to immigration policies. Suddenly, they are now viewed as the pariah of the world, being run by semi-fascistic leaders who should be (as one Twitter user noted) “carted off to the Hague” – presumably for crimes against humanity. This level of irrational ire could only be caused by those who are frustrated that the Swedes have not panicked and have instead taken a smart, long-term, balanced, middle-ground approach and have thus succeeded by the numbers while respecting their citizens’ basic liberties and livelihoods, which are also essential to living a decent life. And I really think we should be doing the same.
Furthermore, the lockdowns are almost certainly bad for our public health. Covid-19 is not by any means the only thing that kills people. Many people are now too scared to go to hospitals to get important treatments, tests and surgeries that are certainly losing us lives to undiagnosed cancers, heart issues, etc. Where our healthcare systems cannot cope with Covid-19, we should immediately have funded and expanded our capacity (e.g. with temporary hospitals) rather than locking down society. Our mental health problems, stress, addiction and abuse levels are increasing. Furthermore, it is a well-known sociological phenomenon that suicides – particularly amongst men – increase when a recession puts them out of work for extended periods of time. And our immune systems are weakening. We are a social primate, and our immune systems evolved over millennia to be kept strong by continual exposure to microbes via social contact and being outdoors, thus developing in us an immunity from many different diseases. Therefore, being inside our homes for weeks or months, away from other people and dousing every surface with bleach and sanitiser is almost certainly detrimental in the long term for our immune systems. There are guaranteed to be many novel microbes and diseases other than Covid-19 to which we need to develop an immunity as a species through continued social contact. When lockdowns are finally released, we may see a surge of new infections of various kinds due to this weakening of our immune systems. Recently we have seen that 66% of new Covid-19 cases in New York are of people who have been locked down for weeks, according to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. This indicates that either the virus is much more widespread in New York than was previously thought, and/or that the weeks of lockdown have significantly weakened locked-down New Yorkers’ immune systems, making them much more vulnerable to the virus – and other illnesses.
Furthermore, if the economic collapse continues, we may expect new famines in Africa and India that could threaten many tens to hundreds of thousands of lives, if not more. And this is not to mention the fact that we are losing vast sums of tax money and borrowing power every day by paying large proportions of our national populaces to stay home. This is money that we could be investing in our public health care systems in order to increase capacity, improve treatments and facilities, fund new government vaccines and antibiotic development programmes, etc. So it is very likely that with all these added “lockdown deaths” and the catastrophic loss of public money to spend on health care and vaccines, we are producing a significant net loss of life which will by far outweigh any lives that one might claim to have been saved by the lockdowns (which is a questionable claim at best, as we have seen). Surely it cannot now be the case that Covid-19 deaths are the only deaths that matter any more? Looking at all causes of death and suffering in this world together, an intelligent person should conclude that lockdowns are definitively a net-negative policy for our society and for the globe.
One might think that – at the very least – this lockdown experience would have dramatically improved our sense of national societal solidarity, reflecting the tired and facile comparisons with war time conditions. But even this has been dealt a serious blow by the lockdowns. We are now being primed by our governments, media and public health officials to behave like misanthropic, obsessive-compulsive hypochondriacs who are to regard any other person as a potential viral infestation to be avoided at all costs. Just picture the viral force-field that surrounds people in public health infographics on social distancing. The most basic activities of a social primate like us are now considered to be forms of contagion-ridden, death-spreading evil. I must point out that no such moralising inanity around viruses is entertained when it comes to influenza, which spreads through social contact and kills many tens of thousands worldwide every year. This is because contagion is usually understood to be an inescapable part of life as a social primate and not something one can feasibly control beyond a reasonable degree, such as by staying at home (and/or wearing a mask) when one feels sick, and by maintaining basic hygiene. Things other than life itself are indeed valuable to us – including social contact – and we often take minor risks with our lives for this very reason. Living one’s life is simply inherently risky.
I wish I could say this were hyperbole, but unfortunately I cannot. Barriers that are usually lowered between citizens in times of collective crisis are in fact being raised higher, both physically and emotionally. The invented two-metre distance must be maintained at all times, and in my experience people don’t smile at, or talk to each other lest they are breached by the viral force-field around each human infestation. International solidarity is also waning. We are being told to consider anyone arriving from abroad as a potential disease vector who must lock themselves away for two weeks, despite the obvious logical interjection that you are just as likely to get Covid-19 from your local supermarket (in virtually every major country in the world now) as you are from someone arriving from Brazil or South Africa or Nigeria or India or Turkey – with the possible exceptions of those two global hotspots, New York and northern Italy. A recent protest occurred in late April 2020 at a port in Dingle, Co. Kerry, in the south-west of Ireland, by Irish fishermen who were outraged that a boat originating from Spain would arrive on our shores bringing us our seafood dinner, lest they also bring us their contagion. So to add insult to injury, the lockdown measures have been disconcertingly well designed to accentuate the worst misanthropic aspects of our character, undermining our national and international solidarity and exacerbating base xenophobia.
We have to start thinking much more reasonably, rationally and maturely about the death rate from Covid-19 and the kinds of risk levels that different people and age groups experience. The death rate for the virus is simply far lower than we originally believed it to be at the beginning of the crisis. Randomised serology testing studies carried out in multiple countries in Europe and in the US have shown that from c.4–15% (and even 30% in some cases, depending on the study) of our national populations in Europe and the US either have Covid-19 or have had it recently. And it is becoming increasingly apparent that the virus has been around for quite a bit longer than we previously believed: France recently reported a confirmed case of Covid-19 from December 2019. Any honest analysis of the statistics around this virus (rather than self-serving and scaremongering anecdotes about the tiny number of younger people who have died from this disease) will show that it is an exceptionally ageist one. If you are under 65 and without any major pre-existing conditions (such as obesity, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, etc.), your chances of dying from Covid-19 are extremely slim; and for people under 30, your chances are infinitesimally so. If nursing homes had been adequately protected from Covid-19 in Ireland, our death rate would be one third of its current rate. Therefore, keeping the entire work-force and all schoolchildren – children are almost entirely immune to this virus – locked up at home is a completely crazy strategy to adopt. As Lord Sumption has pointed out, we are all perfectly capable of assessing our own personal levels of risk based on our age, health, who we live with, etc. and of adjusting the way we live our life accordingly. Some may want to keep working from home or staying isolated or cocooned, while some vulnerable people may want to take a risk with their own lives by ending their isolation because they value things other than life itself, such as being able to spend time with their loved ones. We don’t need an incessantly-intrusive nanny state telling us which friends we can and cannot meet, when and where we can go outside, whether or not we are allowed to exchange goods and services between consenting parties, etc. This sense of fundamental personal liberty – which I had hoped would be strong on the left – appears to be depressingly absent, and in its place there exists a kind of docile supinity and subservience to state power and lab coats. All but forgotten is Benjamin Franklin’s stark warning to us from 260 years ago, that “[t]hose who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety”. This is more relevant than ever today. Some governments are using this lockdown as an excuse to undermine democratic institutions and norms, and in some countries even to seize full dictatorial-decree powers (such as Viktor Orban’s government in Hungary), while others are using it as an opportunity to loosen environmental protections (such as in Slovenia).
Ultimately, the decision as to whether or not we prolong the lockdown is not a scientific or public health decision. It is a political, public-policy and economic decision. Public health science can – and should – inform these decisions, but they are ultimately political ones, and politicians hiding with cowardice behind public health officials will eventually be seen for what they are. Now more than ever, we need politicians who are willing to show leadership and a steady, rational hand in a crisis – something that has been noticeably absent throughout this period.
Some like to claim that all of these negative outcomes would have happened naturally in any case because of the virus itself, but this could not be further from the truth. Lockdown policy, combined with panic-inducing, clickbait-oriented and scaremongering media coverage, has caused much of the damage we are experiencing. This is a government- and media-induced insult to add to the injury of the virus itself. My biggest fear is that governments and citizens will continue to defend the lockdown policy (operating on a kind of sunk costs fallacy) and will never realise or admit how much damage it has done (ascribing all the damage to the virus rather than to the lockdown policies), and will then repeat this policy ad infinitum every time a new outbreak of Covid-19 or some other contagion occurs. We simply cannot survive as a civilisation in this way. Governments should step forward and admit honestly that the lockdown policy was a mistake, and that they were simply acting as best they could without available evidence at the time – evidence which, increasingly, we have at our finger-tips. These governments should shift immediately to a Swedish or similar model – for instance with a policy of mandatory mask-wearing in public or crowded spaces – and those of us on the left (as well as those in the centre who are still supporting the lockdowns) need to realise this necessity. At the very least, even if we do not have the wisdom and rational forethought at this time to end these lockdowns as soon as is humanly possible, then I sincerely hope that we will regain enough of our collective rational minds in the coming months in order to realise how destructive these lockdown policies have been, and to make certain that we never again repeat this strategy. Three similarly-sized pandemics were experienced by humanity during the 20th century, and we will continue to face this challenge in the future. Lockdowns were never implemented then. They were wise to avoid it, and we would be wise to learn from them.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
I’ve just read a article on rueters about Italy, the alps and Venice apparently there’s not enough water in the sea causing drought and empty canals in Venice but sea level rise is a disaster at the same time! and theres not enough snowfall in the alps causing drought in Italy, oh and at this time, antarctic ice is at an all time low but not changing! This is all getting bloody stupid!
And climate change is increasing due to continuing global warming despite there having been no increase in the rate of warming since just after 1996 (and the end of El Niño) and a slight net decline.
The temperature increase for the last 100 years is between 0.65C and 1.12C depending where your dart lands.
As I noted the other day it takes a special kind of logic to think that a rise from -57c to -55c will cause the ice to melt…
Since there are only a handful of weather stations on the West (warmer) coast and none in the interior, temperatures are ‘estimated’ thanks to triangulation, algorithms and everyone’s favourite… computer modelling.
By curious coincidence, most global warming is ‘happening’ in Polar regions.
My “Contingency Theory of Climate Change”
Everywhere on the planet is very slightly different. So:
Climate change is the net result of all local, regional and global climate change variables, and CO2 is NOT the planet’s temperature control knob.
CO2 is just one of many climate change variables, including:
1) Earth’s orbital and orientation variations towards the Sun (aka planetary geometry)
2) Changes in ocean circulation. Including ENSO and others
3) Solar energy and irradiance, including clouds, albedo, volcanic and manmade aerosols, plus possible effects of cosmic rays and extra terrestrial dust
4) Greenhouse gas emissions (of which CO2 is one, and water vapour the most abundant)
5) Land use changes (cities growing, logging, crop irrigation, etc.)
6) Unknown causes of variations of a complex, non-linear system
7) Unpredictable natural and manmade catastrophes
8) Climate measurement errors (unintentional errors or deliberate science fraud)
9) Interactions and feedbacks, involving two or more variables.
——
So it is a soup of pretty much whatever flavour you like somewhere.
I think you can apply that very sound logic to pretty much any social phenomena. There is enough of everything going on somewhere that you can create any impression you like by taking the subset of events that supports your story and report those.
I have no doubt that is exactly what happens.
Yes, I started years ago with the contingency theory of management on an MBA course – sometime in the last century.
—
Anyway.
There has been a generation or more taught or rather indoctrinated that the climate doom is all caused by the trickster devil/god carbon dioxide. This is so patently not the case that I look at adults who spout it as if they were saying they still believe in Father Christmas, or God.
The current cooling in The Antarctic (and other places) whilst there is warming elsewhere at the same time seems to show how versatile the magic carbon dioxide molecule is. So I feel rather generous in crediting it with any role.
Every bit of extreme weather from anywhere in the world gets beamed straight to our living rooms. This might give the impression that everything is getting worse. But actually, that is all it is.——-An impression. Because in reality there is no increase in floods, droughts, storms, wild fires, or any other type of weather related events. So where you have a reason for getting masses of people to believe something and to come onboard with an idea then it is easy to cherry pick a bunch of data or facts the seem to support that agenda or idea. And that is exactly what is happening with climate. So then you need to ask yourself WHY. My brother once said to me “Why would they say there is global warming if there isn’t any”? ——–A good question, and to understand why you need to know something about the politics involved. If you let yourself think it is all just about science, then you are missing most of it. Climate Change is a highly politicised issue, and a moral economic and social one as well. It is not purely about science. Infact the science is very weak and often the facts do not fit the theory, and in any case it mostly emanates from climate models, which to this point have all been totally wrong. —–Real science rejects it’s theory when the facts do not fit the hypothesis. In politics you seek “consensus”, which as someone once pointed out is “the last refuge of scoundrels”.
“It recorded its coldest six-month winter since records began in 2021…”
I think the year is a typo.
Just not clearly written methinks – should read ‘ In 2021 it recorded its coldest six month winter since records began’ or something similar.
Excellent article, just a small chip out of the climate change/net-zero wall but we must keep chipping away. Covid and climate change have seen a reversal in the normal way things work, usually we have technological innovations and scientific findings and then society subsequently adapts and develops to make best use of the technology and the science. With climate change and with covid we seem to have started with a diabolical and sinister narrative and then insisted that science and technology come up with answers and developments to fit the desired narrative.
Increasingly with climate change the evidence is lacking, whether it is high level scientific measurement or just looking out the window and noticing that over my three score years and ten, the climate has not noticeably changed very much and the sea has not risen very much. However the global tyrants and megalomaniacs have now got so much political, power, money and capital tied up in this net-zero scam that is going to be very hard to get them to climb down at all.
Many ordinary people who are busy with work and family life switch on their 6 o’clock news expecting that the TV News channel has done it’s homework and knows something about the issue they are reporting on. Nope. What they do is repeat what officialdom like the IPCC WEF and politicians and bureaucrats PRONOUNCE. ——-But pronouncements are not science. And computer models that do not reflect what the real world is doing are evidence of NOTHING. ——What we are all presented with is reporting on “official science” in support of a political agenda by a bought and paid for media. Most people do not have time to investigate every issue and they rely on NEWS programs to inform them without bias. ——–In that regard mainstream media have failed, and they fail deliberately in support of the political agenda called “Sustainable Development”
Meanwhile the BBC reports that there is a shortage of fruit and vegetables in the UK and Ireland “largely the result of extreme weather in Spain and north Africa, where floods, snow and hail have affected harvests.”
Where’s Global Warming when we need it?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-64718823
Ah, but they’ve got you every which way. Whatever the weather, whether hot or cold, dry or wet, extremely sunny or extremely cloudy, its all down to ‘climate change’. Many people seem so brainwashed by, principally, the msm, especially the BBC, they can no longer just accept weather as weather, but as some portent of forthcoming doom. It seems a shame when many people can no longer enjoy a crisp winter’s day or a warm summer’s evening without niggling fear that the end is nigh. Their loss though.
The earth’s climate has been changing naturally for at least the last few hundreds of millions of years.
It would be abnormal for the earth’s climate not to be changing.
There is no evidence that the current climate change is caused in any significant degree by humanity.
Computer models are not evidence.
Grantham, Mayo, van Otterloo &Co. As well you know.
Ask – Who gains by the constant state of ‘crisis’, not just for climate but other areas too?
Who gains?
What do they gain?
Why?
Greta Thumberg RIP
Government is apparently less trusted than ever before. On every issue no-one believes a word they say. On the economy, on immigration, on education, foreign policy etc etc etc. Yet when they speak of the “climate emergency” most people do believe it. Maybe on sites like this they don’t, but if each person who visits this site thinks for a second about all their family and friends, how many of them simply believe most if not all of the “climate crisis” stuff. They think Polar Bears are in serious trouble, they think the planet is warming dangerously. They think weather is getting more extreme by the week. They will mostly believe all of that stuff because they see it on TV news and because they think it is all about “science” and people by and large will tend not to want to question anything that they consider to be “science” because they think they cannot possibly know more than a scientist.———- So if you have ever told them that Polar Bear numbers have increased 5 fold in the last 60 years, or that there has not been much in the way of warming of the planet for about 20 years, despite CO2 increasing all the time. Or that there is no increase in the frequency or intensity of any type of weather event, many of you will have noticed that those family members or friends will suddenly become like a rabbit in the headlights. They will look at you like you are from Mars.Most of the time when people get new information their reaction would be “Oh, is that right. I never knew that”, but on politicised issues where there has been powerful PR (propaganda) they cannot accept any new information. Propaganda works, and government knows it. The bought and paid for media know it as well. Despite almost everything we hear about the climate being a smidgeon of the truth elevated into a planetary emergency with zero evidence to back it up, the people still mostly accept it as ultimate truth and that reveals only one thing. —–The power of propaganda.
I’ve just read an item in the Times (01/07/23) – headline: ‘Antarctic ice melts to “shocking” low.’ Of course it looks authoritative, but I’d be grateful if anyone out there could help me see why it might be bullshit. If I can’t find that evidence, I’ll have to read Chris Morrison’s articles with more circumspection, despite my general feeling that he hits the nail on the head over and over again. Direct contact with me on this would be very welcome; my email is illman.clive@gmail.com. Many thanks. The Times article reads:
Antarctic sea ice has fallen to a “shock ing” record low for the end of June, with the missing mass equivalent to an area about five times the size of Britain. The loss comes as scientists warn that the Greenland melt has been “off the chart” as the area faces a heatwave.
“Despite the South Pole heading into winter, the Met Office said that the extent of Antarctic sea ice was at 11.8 million sq km on June 29, 1.3 million sq km below the previous record low. It is more than 2.5 million sq km below the average for this time of year.
Ed Blockley, of the Met Office Polar Climate Group, described the levels as “extraordinarily” low. The figures come after record sea ice lows in the Antarctic summer earlier in the year and a slow start to growth heading into winter in the southern hemisphere. Ice growth in May was 2.87 million sq km, far below the usual 3.25 million sq km for the month.
Blockley said it was too early to say if records would be broken when Antarctic sea ice reaches its maximum extent, usually in September, but he added: “We are concerned.”
The loss of such huge expanses of sea ice matters for the wildlife of the region and because it speeds up climate change. Ice reflects more of the sun’s energy into space than dark sea water.
One reason why Antarctic sea ice bas vanished this year appears to be that the region is up to 4C warmer than usual in some places.
The records this year come after about seven years of low sea ice extent in Antarctica. Previously the sea ice had been expanding for decades, but that appeared to flip in 2016 losses occurred linked with a weather cycle called the El Nino-Southern Oscillation.
Blockley said such natural weather cycles could be enhanced by global warming. “As we get this climate warming, the extremes are becoming more extreme,” he said. The world ha already warmed by about 1.2C since the Industrial Revolution.
This month science agencies in the United States the world had entered an El Nino phase, typically linked with years that are hotter than average. Blockley said that was likely to exacerbate Antarctic sea ice losses.
The losses in the Antarctic come as Greenland records temperatures 10C above average. Jason Box, a glaciology expert, said the melt rates were “punching off the charts”.