Links tagged “antarctica”

“When averaged over the whole WAIS [West Antarctic Ice Sheet] , SMB [surface mass balance] shows a significantly negative trend (-1.9± 2.2Gt yr-1decade-1, p<0.01) [loss of ice] during the 19th century, but a significantly positive trend (5.4± 2.9Gt decade-1, p<0.01) [gain in ice] in the 20th century."

"Global panic over the impending meltdown of Antarctica is totally unwarranted...A 2015 NASA study reported that the Antarctic ice sheet was actually gaining rather than losing ice in 2008, and that ice thickening was making sea levels fall by 0.23 mm per year."

Warmist Eric Holthaus claims you get to decide how fast ice melts: "It's still up to us to decide if that ice takes 500 years to melt, or 50. We are in a climate emergency."

See this from alarmist Eric Holthaus (a writer at Grist). It has 8k retweets and 16 likes, and was featured in Naked Capitalism’s daily links. Holthaus re-tweets climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf’s exaggeration of the study’s results, and further exaggerates them into fiction. The new study says none of the things Holthaus describes. Fifty years to melt Antarctica?

Warmist Eric Holthaus: "A new study confirms that global warming has triggered an irreversible collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which will alone raise global sea levels by 10 feet. It's still up to us to decide if that ice takes 500 years to melt, or 50. We are in a climate emergency."

Warmist Stefan Rahmstorf: "The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is melting and has probably passed the tipping point to its complete demise, causing a long-term sea-level rise of 3 meters. But is that our fault?"

Antarctica rapidly cooling in recent decades

In a review of the scientific literature, Lüning et al. 2019 report Antarctica as a whole has undergone a cooling trend in recent decades.

The Antarctic Peninsula has cooled at a rate of -0.5°C per decade since the late 1990s.

West Antarctica as a whole has “slightly cooled” (or the warming has “plateaued”) over the past two decades.

East Antarctica “has not experienced any significant temperature change since the 1950s” with ice sheet mass gains and cooling during the past 15 years.