What is happening in Antarctica?

What is happening in Antarctica?

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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.”

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.

Read the paper HERE

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 percent. 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.

C/O: The Daily Sceptic

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 COdoubles, 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.”

3 thoughts on “What is happening in Antarctica?

  1. We are in the dark about what’s happening. I get the impression that the Arctic is more important in that it interacts with the rest of the world (via the oceans) far more than Antarctica. But even ten years ago it was Peter Wadhams and a few others (on the ground, so to speak) against the modellers. And the one thing that is never, ever mentioned in the mainstream is geo-engineering which may (or may not) be working as intended.

    1. Apart from Margo’s excellent monitoring I feel in the dark and don’t know who to believe. In some ways life was simpler when I bought to Guy McPherson narrative.

  2. Perhaps the items to consider are the Sun’s changing characteristics (no longer yellow, but whiter, sun spot cycle, sun’s effects upon earth’s magnetosphere, earth’s moving magnetic poles, potential of upcoming pole reversal, etc).

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