Antarctica- Confusing the Alarmists

Antarctica, the continent that covers Earth's south pole contains more frozen water than all other deposits of glacial ice on the planet combined. It's quite huge; 42% larger than the entire United States in size. Every few years there appears a spate of articles and even TV reports that the ice of Antarctica is about to disintegrate and drown us all. The collapse of the Antarctic ice shelves, causing oceans to rise and all sorts of climate mayhem, is a favorite theme of climate alarmists everywhere. Unfortunately, for the alarmists, new reports tell a different story. It seems that the Antarctic Peninsula has actually cooled over the past two decades. Moreover, all the hoopla about this being the hottest year ever is contradicted by findings from Antarctic ice cores that during the Eemian, the last interglacial (130,000 to 115,000 years ago), global climate was warmer than today and global mean sea level was 6-9 m higher, reports Doug Hoffman. ¹

Gains in ice accumulation in East Antarctica outstripped the losses in West Antarctica

Turner and colleagues report that the Antarctic Peninsula has actually cooled in the past two decades. ² As Joanne Nova notes, “This study wipes out 20 years of panic about West Antarctic Peninsula. All these years while people were crying about penguins, it turns out that the place was cooling rather than warming. Mankind has emitted a third of all its CO2 pollution ever from 1998, and there was no discernible effect on Antarctica. Indeed, the study quietly finds that even the bigger, longer warming that has happened in the last century was not unprecedented in the last 20000 years.” ³ In addition, the Antarctic ice sheet is growing in mass and lowering sea levels in modeled projections and also in observational studies. According to NASA, during the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century (1992-2008), the gains in ice accumulation in East Antarctica outstripped the losses in West Antarctica, leading to a net gain of about 100 billion tons of ice per year on the West Antarctic ice sheet during this period.⁴

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Final words on the 'collapsing ice shelf'

Tom Sheahan reports on this topic which often appears in today's media involving the West Antarctic Ice Shelf (WAIS), a region comprising about 8 percent of the ice covering Antarctica. Within that region, there are two glaciers that are sliding down to sea at a steady pace, as glaciers always do. They constitute about 10 percent of WAIS, less than 1 percent of the total Antarctic ice. Their descent has been in progress for several thousand years and is neither new nor man-caused. This is the 'collapse' we hear about. Unfortunately, the media overlooks the distinction that 'collapse' is a specialized geological term and they extend generalizations from the two specific glaciers and apply those claims to the entire WAIS, to Antarctica in general, and even to the entire planet, and make it sound like it will happen very soon. Scientists who rightly point to the relatively small glacier size and volume of ice and the time frame are brushed aside in a rush to produce a headline or a flamboyant sound bite that will keep viewers tuned in. ⁵ References

1. Doug Hoffman, “Stay Frosty Antarctica,” theresilientearth.com, August 17, 2016
2. John Turner et al., “Absence of 21st century warming on Antarctic Peninsula consistent with natural variability,” Nature 535, 411, July 21, 2016
3. Joanne Nova, “Backflip: Antarctic Peninsula, poster child of Polar disaster, has been cooling not warming,” joannenova.com, July 23, 2016
4. “NASA study: mass gains of Antarctic ice sheet greater than losses,” nasa.gov/feature, October 30, 2015
5. Tom Sheahan, “Media twists specialized meaning of science words,” Environment & Climate News, July 2014