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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 […]
By Jo Nova
It’s just another scientific study doomed to disappear
A Norwegian whaler paid for 2,200 aerial photos of East Antarctica in 1937. Since then humankind has emitted 91% of all the emissions we’ve ever produced and the world is facing an extinction level catastrophe and yet satellite photos show this 2,000 kilometer long section of East Antarctica hasn’t changed — or at least, not in any way related to our uptake of coal power or planes, trains, airconditioners and cars. Basically the human race emitted 1,600 billion tons of carbon dioxide which was supposed to warm the poles twice as fast as anywhere else, but there is still nothing to see here.
Belated Thanks to Tallbloke for the first article I saw on this.
2,000 km of Antarctic ice-covered coastline has been stable for 85 years
Using hundreds of old aerial photographs dating back to 1937, combined with modern computer technology, the researchers have tracked the evolution of glaciers in East Antarctica. The area covers approximately 2,000 kilometers of coastline and contains as much ice as the entire Greenland Ice Sheet.
Compared to modern data, the ice flow speeds are unchanged. While some […]
While no one was paying attention, a Russian ship exploring Antarctica claims it has found oil and gas deposits that are ten times larger than the North Sea. Presumably quite a lot of countries would find this very interesting. At the moment Antarctica is supposedly protected by a piece of paper, but those who want to keep something so valuable to themselves will be needing more than cellulose.
It could take some fossil fuels to protect these fossil fuels
Hard to see any nation keeping control of this oil and gas field using sailing boats, solar powered ships and missiles running on palm oil.
Russia finds vast oil and gas reserves in British Antarctic territory
Johnathon Leake, Telegraph
Russia has found vast oil and gas reserves in the Antarctic, much of it in areas claimed by the UK.
The surveys are a prelude to bringing in drilling rigs to exploit the pristine region for fossil fuels, MPs have warned.
Reserves totalling 511bn barrels of oil – about 10 times the North Sea’s entire 50-year output – have been reported to Moscow by Russian research ships, according to evidence given to the […]
By Jo Nova
Where are the tears? Elephant Seals and Penguins were forced off the Ross sea 1,000 years ago because it got too cold
One thousand years ago Southern Elephant Seals were happily living in the Ross Sea of Antarctica. Likewise Adelie Penguins frolicked in the sun there during the “Penguin Optimum” of three to four thousand years ago. They had lived there on and off for thousands of years in the Holocene, but the glaciers came back and the cold times returned, and all the colonies were wiped out. All that’s left there now is just their rotting bones and fur as testament to the devastation of Global Cooling.
Thanks to Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone for his dedication in digging up these papers.
The Ross Sea is a part of Antarctica that is south of New Zealand, and in the pictures below the remains of the seals and penguins show that they had well established colonies in places where they are unable to live now. The red circles mark the seal colonies, and the blue stars show the penguins. The colonies ebbed and flowed but then were lost as the Little Ice Age began and have not […]
By Jo Nova
Despite the dreaded “polar amplification” and 1,000 new coal fired plants in China, apparently the fragile Antarctic ice shelves have barely changed in the last 40 years. Indeed, instead of fragmenting, they are melting slightly slower now than they were in 1980. Naturally, the researchers *know*, as only high priests can, that things will change any day now. The tipping point is just around the corner, hiding, ready to pounce.
Mankind has emitted fully 65% of our total carbon emissions since the year 1980 — and yet it has not done much at all to the melt-rate of the ice shelves of Antarctica. In fact, if anything, climate change is slowing the ice melting.
That’s 1.1 Trillion tonnes of man-made CO2, and no catastrophe to show for it.
The new study by Banwell et al used satellite microwave data and modeling of meltwater.
GRL
Note that the “small but significant decrease” in melting gets headlined as “a minor change”. Since when where significant warming trends reported as just a “minor change” of indeterminate direction?
Antarctic ice shelves experienced only minor changes in surface melt since 1980, study finds
The results show Antarctic ice […]
The Larcum Kendall K1 Watch — The most important watch you probably never heard of.
By Jo Nova
Oldbrew at Tallbloke’s Talkshop found a study showing that icebergs around Antarctica apparently haven’t changed much in the last few centuries despite an extra 2,000 Gt of CO2, and all that global warming. Remember climate change is going to hit Antarctica twice as hard as anywhere else.
As Oldbrew said: Probably not the result that was expected from this study.
Given the world warmed in the last three hundred years, it seems surprising that icebergs don’t seem to have changed. But if they had declined, this study would be a star of the news tonight. Instead I doubt many stations will report that if Captain James Cook returned today he might not see much difference.
Fascinatingly, Cook had a watch worth £450 so he could estimate longitude. To give some idea of just how fantastically valuable that watch was, ponder that the whole ship he commanded cost £1,800. The Larcum Kendall K1 watch was so prized Cook made sure “the commander, first lieutenant and astronomer were all present when it was used”.
It was modeled on the H4 clock, […]
The sun has just risen on South Pole after the coldest six month period on record since 1956. The last winter there was suddenly 2.2 degrees Celsius colder than the average for the last 30 years.
Remember when Polar Amplification meant Antarctica was melting?
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Thanks to NoTricksZone
South Pole Sees Record Cold Winter, Smashing 1976 Record …“Chill Was Exceptional”
Jason Samenow and Kasha Patel, Washington Post
The chill was exceptional, even for the coldest location on the planet.
The average temperature at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station between April and September, a frigid minus-78 degrees (minus-61 Celsius), was the coldest on record, dating back to 1957. This was 4.5 degrees lower than the most recent 30-year average at this remote station, which is operated by United States Antarctic Program and administered by the National Science Foundation.
One hot weekend in Miami is Climate change but the coldest six months in Antarctic records is a blip:
While impressive and unexpected, scientists characterized this record as a mere blip and curiosity as both Antarctica and the planet continue to rapidly warm amid escalating extreme weather.
Antarctica has been cooling for a […]
Forty years of global warming have made East Antarctic summers even shorter and more miserably colder than they already were. (Save the wilderness — burn coal now?)
Surface Air temperature over East Antarctica (presumably in summer) from Hsu et al 2021.
East Antarctica is the vast mass of the Antarctic plateau which was, in theory, going to melt. If that three kilometer thick block of ice isn’t going to melt in summer, when exactly will it?
Remember when the poles were meant to amplify man-made global warming?
Not much of Antarctica is warming in summer.
These graphs come from a paper that Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone found. The authors Hsu et al think the cooling trend has a natural explanation (but if it had been warming, of course, no one would have asked that question). Hsu at al estimate that 20-40% of the trend is due to the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO). And maybe it is, but they use climate models we know are broken. Curiously they predict the East Antarctic will keep cooling — which may be a first (for the models).
For what it’s worth the MJO is a massive convective atmospheric blob that […]
It was ten degrees below normal at Scott Base, in June, and usually July is the coldest month.
Pitch black, minus 81C and a howling wind.
Scott Base crew enduring near-record breaking Antarctica winter – 10C colder than usual
Spare a thought for the hardy crew who are wintering down in Antarctica, experiencing near-record breaking cold temperatures.
They’ve come very near to the coldest ever recorded temperature of -89.6C.
Cap Allon at Electroverse points out that some of that Global Warming has made it up to New South Wales where it had the coldest June day in 122 years two weeks ago.
A few weeks before that, Dunedin Airport New Zealand hit a record of minus 8.8C in May. It was the coldest day ever recorded there in any month since records started in 1963. One cold day doesn’t mean a lot climate wise, but if Antarctica was close to record warmth would most of the worlds media have barely said a word?
Remember the poles are warming twice as fast as the rest of the world.
ht Climate Depot and Electroverse
10 out of 10 based on 80 ratings […]
Adelie Penguins would probably benefit from a bit of global warming. When 175 were tagged and tracked it turned out that they ate more krill when there was less sea ice. This is not so surprising given that they swim better than they waddle, so long stretches of sea ice make it harder to get to the supermarket and back.
And Krill (dinner) apparently like less sea ice too. Phytoplankton bloomed when the sea ice was gone.
Penguins on sea ice. Photo by Danielle Barnes on Unsplash
Penguins may be an unlikely winner from climate change
Tom Whipple, The Australian
“Counterintuitively for this ice-dependent species, body conditions and breeding success improved in the ice-free environment,” wrote researchers from the Japanese National Institute of Polar Research, in the journal Science Advances.
The scientists used accelerometers, video cameras and tracking devices to plot each hunt. They found that when there was no ice the penguins did a lot more swimming — and this was a good thing.
“For penguins, swimming is a whopping four times faster than walking.
For the first three seasons the sea ice was large, then it shrank and the […]
Two days ago over the Antarctic the SSW or Sudden Stratospheric Warming was still running strong up at 10 hPa or around 30 km high.
NIWA claim it may be the strongest SSW seen in the Southern Hemisphere ever (which means the last 50 years).
Temperatures in the green circle marked in the centre were 11C, instead of minus 40 to minus 60C. As we mentioned before, this is extremely rare, and the likely implications are that sometime in the next few weeks a cold beast will hit somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere, but no one really knows where. The Australian BOM are rather bravely predicting a warmer less rainy spring for NSW and QLD. (See below).
If only we really understood the major drivers of our climate we might have predicted this more than a few weeks in advance. Perhaps it is caused by some of those solar factors that the big GCM’s completely ignore?
From Nullschool:
Stratospheric Sudden Warming, Southern Hemisphere, Antarctica.
Two years ago, same time, we see a single large polar jetstream at 10hPA and temperatures of around minus 40C in the warmest part and minus 60 elsewhere in the jetstream. These normal winds flow […]
Remember when polar amplification was the rage? So much for that theory
Antarctica is twice the size of the US or Australia. Buried 2 km deep under domes of snow, it holds 58 meters of global sea level to ransom. The IPCC have been predicting its demise-by-climate-change for a decade or two.
A new paper looks at 60 sites across Antarctica, considering everything from ice, lake and marine cores to peat and seal skins. They were particularly interested in the Medieval Warm Period, and researched back to 600AD. During medieval times (1000-1200 AD) they estimate Antarctica as a whole was hotter than it is today. Antarctica was even warmer still — during the dark ages circa 700AD.
Credit to the paper authors: Sebastian Lüning, Mariusz Gałka, and Fritz Vahrenholt
Feast your eyes on the decidedly not unprecedented modern tiny spike:
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The little jaggy down after 2000 AD is real. While there was rapid warming across Antarctica from 1950-2000, in the last twenty years, that warming has stalled. Just another 14 million square kilometers that the models didn’t predict.
We already knew the Medieval Warm Period was a global phenomenon, thanks to hundreds of proxies, and 6,000 boreholes. But […]
Put it in a history book: scientists are sounding like scientists — admitting they don’t understand
Antarctic Sea Ice set records in 2014, but then in 2016 it rapidly declined and hasn’t recovered, indeed right now as the southern winter peaks, it’s at a record low. The long term trend is still rising, but its now only half the rate it was in 2014. On this blog, Mike Jonas recently demonstrated that the Southern Ocean had cooled, not warmed as all the models predicted. But what matters here is that sea ice covers 7% of the world and we don’t know what caused it.
What is also a record is that most scientists and journalists are showing real restraint and are not blaming this as a climate change event.
Even, bowl-me-over, New Scientist, is showing admirable restraint: Antarctic sea ice is declining dramatically and we don’t know why. This is the first time since starting this blog ten years ago that I have been able to say that. Congrats Adam Vaughan.
Decades of expanding sea ice in Antarctica have been wiped out by three years of sudden and dramatic declines, leaving scientist puzzled as to why the region […]
A map of the sea surface zone that has cooled since 1979 — from 56S – 72S . It’s a pretty big area. Click to enlarge.
For years the IPCC have said that warming would be amplified at the poles. They warned us things would heat up twice as fast, which would melt sea ice. The oceans surface in turn would switch from being reflective white to a dark absorbing deep blue. Enormous amounts of energy would then flow into the ocean instead of being reflected back out to space. The more it warmed, the more it would warm — unleashing a devastating feedback loop.
As the Arctic warmed, the merchants of doom were keen to tell us how how right they were and this was evidence of man-made warming. But in the Antarctic exactly the opposite trend was taking place.
Mike Jonas has done what the IPCC should have been doing — investigating the trends in the Sea Surface Temperature in the polar latitudes with satellite records. In the latitude band from 56 to 72 degrees south the oceans have cooled, not warmed. The models don’t even have the sign of the trend correct. At the latitudes where […]
Quick — tax the magma
It’s another round of Antarctic Doom about next to nothing. In April Antarctica’s ice was melting five times faster than usual. Now it’s losing ice three times faster in the last five years than the 15 before that! What you won’t hear is how the Antarctic ice cap has 29 million cubic kilometers of ice and has been there for 30 million, mostly warmer, years. You also won’t hear how Antarctica was warmer in Roman Times, or that the Antarctic Peninsula has cooled by almost 1 degree.
You also won’t hear a word about any volcanoes
The new paper has zero mentions of the word. But other scientists have published plenty of papers describing how the West Antarctic zone is being warmed from below by 1200 degrees of magma. According to scientist Dustin Schroeder and co, it is as if the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctic is sitting on a “stovetop burner”.[1] His words. Thwaites Glacier,, smack in the middle of the warming is being melted from below by geothermal heat. Then there is the large blob of superheated rock 60 miles below West Antarctica. The researchers use the phrase “like a blow-torch”…. Capping it […]
Let this go down as a prime example of Big Meaningless Numbers used to scare you:
Antarctica’s ice melts five times faster than usual Ben Webster — The Times (copied at The Australian)
Antarctica has lost an area of ice the size of Greater London since 2010 as warmer ocean water erodes its floating edge, a study has found. Overall about 1,463 sq km of Antarctica’s underwater ice melted between 2010 and 2016.
What does 1,463 fewer square kilometers of ice mean?
The findings suggest that melting glaciers on the continent could add significantly to long-term sea level rises, with severe implications for thousands of coastal towns and cities.
Your house might wash away. Or not. How close to zero can a number be and still be “a number”?
The total area of Antarctic sea ice averages about 11 million square kilometers. So that’s one part in 7,500 that melted or 0.013%. But volume is what matters and the percentage of volume that melted is even smaller. Let’s assume ice volume was lost to a depth of one kilometer (the depth of the “grounding line” where the ice-sheet meets the earth). The giant Antarctic Ice Sheet […]
A new study suggests temperatures across Antarctica have been falling for the last 1,600 years. This natural climate change would have been a threat to baby penguins, forcing them to walk much further across sea-ice for food. (Looks like it was even worse for polar bears 😉 ). The cooling trend would have threatened inland lakes, shortened summer breeding periods, affected seal behaviour, extended glaciers over important habitats, and destroyed rare tundra. It may have contributed to the death of a man called Scott. If man-made climate change warmed Antarctica we need to burn more oil.
Any recent weak “man-made” warming trend would have slightly reversed this destructive slide — restoring the continent back to levels last seen in 1400AD. Though, given that the models are wrong about everything, including Antarctic warming, maybe not.
…
These trends are not what the Climate Models predicted for Antarctica. The slight recent warming trend is too small. (Polar Amplification, anyone?)
The Daily Caller:
However, Stenni admits the “absence of significant continent-scale warming of Antarctica over the last 100 years is in clear contrast with the significant industrial-era warming trends that are evident in reconstructions for all other continents (except […]
It’s possibly the densest concentration of volcanoes in the world, some as high as 4km and we didn’t even know these existed til recently. Despite that overwhelming ignorance, we’re 97.00% certain that all the warming in Antarctica is due to your car and airconditioner. Robin McKie, The Guardian writer, talks about the recent discovery of so many volcanoes under the ice. Not surprisingly, we have no data on how active these volcanoes are. However because we *know* climate change is definitely wrecking Antarctica, it follows that your car, air conditioner and pet dog could melt more ice, take the pressure off the tectonic plate and set one off. Then things will really get out of hand.
Anyhow, it’s just a coincidence that all the warming in Antarctica is where the volcanoes are.
Warming in Antarctica | New volcano discoveries
Spread the hagtag #allvolcanosmatter.
From The Guardian: Scientists discover 91 volcanoes below Antarctic ice sheet
Scientists have uncovered the largest volcanic region on Earth – two kilometres below the surface of the vast ice sheet that covers west Antarctica.
The project, by Edinburgh University researchers, has revealed almost 100 volcanoes – with the highest as tall […]
CNN is “freaking out” about the latest large iceberg. But John Sutter doesn’t mention that there was an iceberg twice its size in the year 2000 which was 11,000km2, and that as long ago as 1967, two other icebergs of a similar size were recorded. Thanks to John McLean for the links.
UPDATE: Tony Heller has found a newspaper story about an even bigger one from 1956. This monster iceberg was allegedly 334km x 96km or 32,000 km2. (h.t John of Cloverdale).
UPDATE #2: Monster bergs are everywhere. Lazzara lists two other massive icebergs as well as B15 that occurred in just 18 months: A38 in Oct 1998 was 7,600km2 and A43 in May 2000 was almost as big as B15, being 9,250km2. h/t WS All three of these were larger than the current “freak”.
When it comes to long term trends in iceberg sizes, the only scientific answer is “who knows”. Satellite records are so short, if a bigger iceberg broke off in say, 1811, how the heck would we find out? Not much is left of an iceberg 100 years later. What kind of proxy could show it ever existed — ancient stone carvings of satellite pics from […]
Don’t panic now, but all the coal burnt in China has been cooling the Antarctic Peninsula.
For the last twenty years, The Antarctic Peninsula was the poster-peninsula for the Global Worriers as they calculate how many meters the oceans will rise when it melts, but all across it, temperatures are going down, not up.
We can knock half to one degree off:
This cooling has amounted to a 0.5 to 0.9 °C decrease in temperatures in most of the Antarctic Peninsula region, the only exception being three stations located in the southwest sector of the peninsula that experienced a slight delay in their thermal turning point, declining only over the shorter period of the past decade.
Thanks to CO2Science: The Antarctic Peninsula: No Longer the Canary in the Coal Mine for Climate Alarmists
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The start points matter. The cooling started after 1998, which was an El Nino, and we can see there was a similar downward slope from 1983 to 1993. As usual, with a climate graph, there are steps and stairs, and there is a trend up in the last 50 years (but probably down in the last 7,000).Whatever.
What there isn’t, […]
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