By Jo Nova
Lesson #457 in how to lie with science
File this lesson away in the Decline and Fall of Enlightenment Science. Nature, formerly known as the esteemed science journal, is now achieving everything a captured tabloid industry sales mag could hope for. They’ve squeezed a disaster out of a tiny change in a short record, and from a good news story. Let’s not forget, for the last 100,000 years most humans would have been happy that a bit of Antarctica was greening.
“Lush”? The only people who call this lush are penguins:
To appreciate the Black Belt level of naked exaggeration going on here, consider the opening hyperbole:
A fast-warming region of Antarctica is getting greener with shocking speed. Satellite imagery of the region reveals that the area covered by plants increased by almost 14 times over 35 years — a trend that will spur rapid change of Antarctic ecosystems.
“It’s the beginning of dramatic transformation,” says Olly Bartlett, a remote-sensing specialist at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, UK, and an author of the study1, published today in Nature Geoscience, that reports these results.
All this shock and drama arise from an area of “less than a square kilometer” expanding all the way up to “nearly 12 square kilometers”. These numbers “shocked us” say the PR team, I mean, the scientists, who continue on in their best Agony-Aunt impression: “It’s simply that rate of change in an extremely isolated, extremely vulnerable area that causes the alarm.” Sob sob, and Boo hoo too. It’s a lonely peninsula. Can we find it a friend?
Everything about this shows the pathetic decay of Western Science. We’re talking about 12 square kilometers of more habitable land on a continent with 14 million square kilometers of ice. The horrible affliction of unexpected tundra now covers 0.00009% of Antarctica.
It could get worse, the mosses might make … soil:
The research is “really important”, says Jasmine Lee, a conservation scientist at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK. Other studies2,3 have found evidence that vegetation on the peninsula is changing in response to climate change, “but this is the first study that’s taken a huge-scale approach to look at the entire region”, she says.
Previous visits to the peninsula led the authors to think that most of the vegetation is moss. As mosses spread to previously ice-covered landscapes, they will build up a layer of soil, offering a habitat for other plant life, Roland says. “There’s a huge potential here to see a further increase in the amount of non-native, potentially invasive species,” he says.
It is, of course, due to climate change:
The researchers point to climate change as the driver of the landscape’s shift from white to green. Temperatures on the peninsula have risen by almost 3 °C since 1950, which is a much bigger increase than observed across most parts of the planet.
Nobody mention the 91 volcanoes they discovered there seven years ago which line up with the warmest parts of Antarctica. We sit on a ball of lava, and there is an edge of crustal plate under there. But really, it’s more likely the warming is caused by your Ford fiesta and those beef kebabs…
https://joannenova.com.au/2014/10/west-antarctica-more-evidence-it-was-the-volcanoes-that-melted-the-ice/
Quick, someone build a wind farm to kill off this feral moss!
Ardley Island is at latitude 62.2 S. The Antarctic Circle is further south at about 66 S. I’m sure that temperatures at Ardley Island get above 10C at times. I’d actually be surprised if there was no vegetation there at all.
The satellite record is not very long. A 35-year record only goes back to 1990. What happened before that? Oh, no-one knows and yet they are making sweeping claims about what’s recently happening?
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Volcanoes sometimes give life, they don’t always take it.
And do warmists ever wonder how coal was formed in Antartica? Or fossilised forests?
Ninety million years ago there were forests in Antarctica.
Despite continental drift, Antarctica was in about the same position back in the day 90 million years ago as it is now.
Warmists wouldn’t understand any of this because of their Aristotlean world view that the earth never changes, it always has been, it always will be….
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/196516/traces-ancient-rainforest-antarctica-point-warmer/amp/
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Do get a grip Jo – even climatistas can’t get huge “research” grants for volcanos or solar ejections which are clearly beyond human modification or responsibility.
They’ve got mortgages to pay, EVs to charge, holidays to take…
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And and and a seat at the Big Table at this year’s COPROLITE gathering of Masters of the Multiverse (MOM) in the Azerbaijani Republic. Just don’t mention the word oil – it’s known in cult circles as Black Gold – because colonisation… or the Beverly Hillbillies.
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Ardley island is not on Antarctica. It is a small island at sea level North of the tip of the Antarctic peninsula. So not at 10,000′ like most of Antarctica and at 62 South, quite outside the Arctic Circle. (90-22.5=67.5). It is only Antarctica legally and technically, not practically. It would be much more convenient to move the research to Tahiti.
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Some enterprising aspiring horror writer/director has a golden opportunity here to create a 21st century classic in the genre, along the lines of ‘The Fog’, or ‘The Mist’. ‘The Moss’ is sure to become a cult classic. It could even be used to launch a franchise of terrifying flora films, with sequels such as ‘The Grass’, ‘The Shrubs’, culminating in the terrifying conclusion … ‘The Trees’.
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An interesting quote from the Australian Gov Antarctic Div/Program website.
https://www.antarctica.gov.au/about-antarctica/ice-and-atmosphere/ice-sheet/
“The greatest known depression of bedrock – the Byrd Subglacial Basin – lies at 2,538 m below sea level. Only about 0.4% of Antarctica is not covered by ice.
Lakes occur in inland ice-free areas, some with water over 13 times more saline than sea water and freezing points as low as −18 C (seawater normally freezes at −1.8 C).
Some (Antarctic)lakes are warm with temperatures near the bottom as high as 35 C.“
Ahh,, so we have Antarctic lakes with temps as high as 35 degrees celcius at the bottom.
Hmm.. Ask yourselves a question.. How does a “warming” atmosphere of 0.0C localised temp, heat the bottom of an Antarctic lake higher than the surface temp?
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I didn’t just ask myself, I looked it up. Fascinating topic.
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Ice-free areas of Antarctica have been reported since the earliest explorers (some from aerial observation). And why wouldn’t they exist in areas of volcanic activity or other geothermal activity?
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Its clear to us that subglacial volcanic activity is a fact of life in West Antarctica,
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Remember in the 1970’s when taxpayer funding was being harvested for the “global cooling” scare, there were proposals to dump carbon powder on the ice caps to melt them?
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E.g. https://notrickszone.com/2021/08/02/in-the-1970s-climate-modification-proposals-included-purposely-melting-arctic-sea-ice-with-black-soot/
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Strictly speaking, Ardley Island is one of the Subantarctic islands because it is north of the Antarctic Circle. It would make more sense to compare it to other Subantarctic islands such as Macquarie Island.
And we’re cheering the re-greening of Macquarie Island, the recovery of its native vegetation after the introduced rabbits and rats were eradicated.
There are a few species of flowering plans native to the Antarctic Peninsula, all cushion-forming perennials not much bigger than the mosses. The recovery of their populations after the recent minimum would be a good thing too.
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The carbon from the carbon dioxide that mosses take in from the atmosphere to use for photosynthesis becomes fixed in the cells of the new growth. Because mosses are non-vascular plants, they don’t transport this carbon around the plant—it stays put in that layer of growth. As the moss grows, it lays down more and more layers, so as you go down the layers, you’re essentially going back in time.
Radiocarbon dating techniques can be used to date the moss. Mosses grow super slowly—just millimetres per year—and so even though they’re generally only centimetres tall, many of them are between 50 and 500 years old.
https://www.science.org.au/curious/earth-environment/amazing-antarctic-moss
Oohh, 500 years old?
So not due to petrol cars,cattle or people breathing out then?
Yes, mosses are sorta interesting.
Non vascular, inbuilt sunblocks, dessicate then rehydrate, sunbake to survive.
Probably friends with Tardigrades.
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Tardigrades do live in Antarctica and in the moss. Hence an alternative name, moss piglet.
https://www.rmit.edu.au/news/all-news/2019/jul/moss-piglet-tardigrade-antarctica
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I think trust in the science media (except JoNova) just dipped another 2 or 3%. Trust must be getting close to statistically non-existent.
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