Debunking claims of Antarctica’s ‘record’ sea ice loss
Antarctica is getting renewed focus for having ‘record’ summer sea ice loss, beating the old one by 0.1 percent.
The NSIDC announced #Antarctica’s #Sea Ice loss was the greatest it’s been since 1978 (when tracking began) despite a long-term trend showing the continent gaining in size. The sea ice, which shrinks every summer, contracted 883,015 square miles. The previous low was 884,173 square miles in 1997. That’s a difference of 0.1 percent or 1,158 square miles.
And predictably, the head of NSIDC (U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center), Mark Serreze, used the 0.1 percent change and asserted less summer sea ice is Antarctica’s reaction to a warming world, despite having grown in size by 33 percent since 1978 and covered almost entirely by snow. And Serreze said this record-breaking sea ice loss was making it “harder to deny” the “impact of #Climate Change on planet Earth.”
Antarctic Sea Ice Claims Don’t Stand Up To Scrutiny
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Antarctica’s weather
So, what’s happening in Antarctica? According to Paul Homewood, the simple answer was weather. Changing wind patterns, Homewood wrote on his site, caused by the Southern Annular Mode flipping negative allowed winds to penetrate from the north. That elevated temperatures while “pushing sea ice towards the coast.” Another issue was the accuracy of the satellites, also called the margin of error.
NSIDC admits on its site that calculating sea ice loss, especially in summer, can be difficult with large discrepancies. That’s because satellites have trouble distinguishing between melt ponds and ice, leading to a margin of error of plus or minus 15 percent. Accuracy is highest when the ice pack is thick and concentrated. It decreased when thin ice increased.
By Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof Fritz Vahrenholt
(German text translated/edited by P Gosselin)
Image: visibleearth.nasa.gov
A huge crack recently formed through the Antarctic Larsen C ice shelf. The German Tagesspiegel here was fair and did not attribute it to climate change:
A huge iceberg threatens to break away from Antarctica
An iceberg twice the size of Saarland threatens to break off the Larsen-C ice shelf. That’s a rare spectacle. […] ‘The crack is probably 160 kilometers long and 300 to 500 meters deep,’ the project-involved scientist Martin 0′Leary told the German Press Agency on Saturday. A direct connection to climate change cannot be ascertained.”
That’s a normal process: Self ice forms, but does not last forever. Time and again cracks form and chunks break off. During the Little Ice Age the shelf ice was more extensive and stable. Before that, during the Medieval Warm Period, the shelf ice melted similarly like today. If one looks at the past 150 years — the global rewarming since the Little Ice Age — then no one wonders that the Antarctic shelf ice retreated 5 meters per day between 1900 and 1930. Over the past fifty years things probably have looked different, as the Antarctic sea water has cooled over the past 50 years. According to Sinclair et al. (2014), the Ross ice shelf has expanded 5%. Apparently the Antarctic sea ice is indeed more stable than previously thought.…
But this is not just another sad climate change story. It’s more complicated.
“A lot of things are going on deep inside the ice,” says Adrian Luckman, a glaciologist at Swansea University in the U.K. He’s also leading a project to track changes in the ice shelf.
Luckman says climate change is certainly influencing this region. Larsen C used to have two neighbors to the north, Larsen A and Larsen B. As the air and water warmed, those ice shelves started melting and then splintered into shards in 1995 and 2002.
But the crack in Larsen C seems to have happened on its own, for different reasons.
“This is probably not directly attributable to any warming in the region, although of course the warming won’t have helped,” says Luckman. “It’s probably just simply a natural event that’s just been waiting around to happen.”
Rumours of a hidden city have been floating about for years, as conspiracy theorists and even some scientists claim the freezing continent is actually the home of the legendary Lost City of Atlantis.
One scientific theory claims that once upon a time Antarctica was ice-free and home to an ancient civilisation.
The theory, called crustal displacement, alleges that movements in the Earth’s crust meant that large parts of Antarctica were ice-free 12,000 years ago and people could have lived there.
And this could have been Atlantis, a mythical city founded by people who were half god and half human which was first mentioned by Greek philosopher Plato in 360BC.
Antarctica’s secret city was apparently ‘”confirmed” by an ancient map called the Piri Reis map, compiled in 1513 from military intelligence.
It appears to show the Antarctic coast hundreds of years before it was discovered, but was denounced by many scholars at the time.
However, earlier this year photos from NASA appeared to reveal traces of a human settlement underneath the ice.
The pictures, taken using remote sensing photography for NASA’s Operation IceBridge mission to Antarctica, show what online sleuths believe could be a city.
Experts have been concerned that ice at the South Pole had declined significantly since the 1950s, which they feared was driven by man-made climate change. But new analysis suggests that conditions are now virtually identical to when the Terra Nova and Endurance sailed to the continent in the early 1900s, indicating that declines are part of a natural cycle and not the result of global warming. 2
“The missions of Scott and Shackleton are remembered in history as heroic failures, yet the data collected by these and other explorers could profoundly change the way we view the ebb and flow of Antarctic sea ice,” said Dr. Jonathan Day, co-author of a recent study. 3
The research was based on the ice observations recorded in the logbooks from 11 voyages between 1897 and 1917, including three expeditions led by Captain Scott, two by Shackleton, as well as sea ice records from Belgian, German and French missions. A map showing current sea ice extent in Antarctica and the routes of expedition ships, reveals that the edge of the continent is largely the same today as it was 100 years ago.
We know that sea ice in the Antarctic has increased slightly over the past 30 years since satellite observations began. Scientists have been grappling to understand this trend in the context of global warming, but these new findings suggest it may not be anything new.
These findings demonstrate that the climate of Antarctica fluctuated significantly throughout the 20th century and indicates that sea ice in the Antarctic is much less sensitive to the effects of climate change that that of the Arctic which has experienced a dramatic decline during the 20th century.
LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – The largest all-female expedition to Antarctica, comprising 76 scientists, is due to set sail from Argentina on Friday in a quest to promote women in science and highlight the impact of climate change on the planet.
The international team will brave sub-zero temperatures to undergo a 20-day bootcamp on the frozen continent aimed at developing their leadership skills and challenging male dominance of senior scientific roles.
Women make up only 28 percent of the world’s researchers and are particularly under-represented at senior levels, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) says.
Yet greater female leadership is needed to fight climate change, which disproportionately affects women, according to Fabian Dattner, co-founder of the Antarctica initiative, Homeward Bound.
“Mother Nature needs her daughters,” said Dattner, an Australian entrepreneur and leadership coach.
Many of sub-Saharan Africa’s smallholder farmers – one of the groups hardest hit by more frequent and worsening drought linked to climate change – are women.
In other parts of the developing world, women and girls face the prospect of walking further to gather water as a result of climate change drying up riverbeds and groundwater supplies.
Natural disasters, which are expected to worsen with climate change, are also likely to kill more women and girls than men, a 2007 study from the London School of Economics showed.
Dattner said she decided to set up the initiative after hearing a group of polar scientists joking that candidates had to have a beard to land a leadership role in Antarctic science.
Why should there be so much excitement over the discovery — from the log books of two of Britain’s most famous explorers more than 100 years ago — that there was the same amount of ice floating round Antarctica then as there is today?
To the surprise of academics from the University of Reading, the records kept by the expeditions of Captain Robert Scott and Sir Ernest Shackleton in the early years of the last century — which detail the extent of ice cover, the state of the sea and the weather — show there has been remarkably little change in the extent of sea ice at the other end of the world.
Dr Jonathan Day, who led the study, said: ‘The data collected by these and other explorers could profoundly change the way we view the ebb and flow of Antarctic sea ice.
‘We know that sea ice in the Antarctic has increased slightly over the past 30 years, since satellite observations began.
‘Scientists have been grappling to understand this trend in the context of global warming, but these findings suggest it may not be anything new.’
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Passengers from the Russian ship ‘Akademik Shokalskiy’ explore the frozen Ross Sea in the Antarctic. Mount Erebus volcano is in the background
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Capt Laurence Oates, Capt Robert Scott, Petty Officer Edgar Evans (standing, left to right), Lt Henry Bowers, Dr Edward Wilson (sitting, left to right). Polar explorers remembered as ‘heroic failures’ have provided crucial proof that sea ice around Antarctica has barely changed in size – 100 years after their expeditions
The relevance of this startling discovery is that it again raises question marks over what has become the single most influential scientific theory shaping our modern world: the belief that the planet is dangerously overheating and we need to take drastic steps to bring it under control.
Those who believe in man-made global warming are passionate in their belief that, thanks to those supposedly soaring temperatures, the mighty polar ice caps are melting rapidly.
If this continues, the theory runs, it could lead to a rise in sea levels so great that it would eventually flood many of the most densely populated regions of the world.…
Antarctic sea ice had barely changed from where it was 100 years ago, scientists have discovered, after pouring over the logbooks of great polar explorers such as Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton. Experts were concerned that ice at the South Pole had declined significantly since the 1950s, which they feared was driven by man-made climate change. But new analysis suggests that conditions are now virtually identical to when the Terra Nova and Endurance sailed to the continent in the early 1900s, indicating that declines are part of a natural cycle and not the result of global warming. –Sarah Knapton, The Daily Telegraph, 24 November 2016
In 2009, Al Gore announced ‘there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.’ The dates by which climate scientists and politicians said the ice would disappear have come and gone, while the ice has remained. Undaunted, fresh predictions have been made in every subsequent year. One problem that persists is that there is still only a relatively short series of direct measurements on which to base our understanding of the Arctic. Satellite monitoring of the Arctic only began in 1978, giving us less than forty years of reliable data. This may not be enough to establish what is normal – or abnormal – for the region. Until the noise of a century of media hype and unscientific speculation about the Arctic has been removed from the public debate, science will be unable to explain what, if anything, the signal from the Arctic is telling us. —GWPF Climate Briefing, November 2016
Donald Trump plans to put NASA’s focus back on space exploration and cut away programs that study climate change. Bob Walker, an adviser
Secretary of State John Kerry disembarks from his U.S. Air Force aircraft at the Pegasus ice runway near McMurdo Station, Antarctica on Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. (AP Photo/Mark Ralston, Pool)
(CNSNews.com) – Secretary of State John Kerry winged his way Monday from New Zealand to the Middle East on the next leg of what may be his longest trip yet, a journey during which America’s top diplomat will account for roughly 16.5 tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
That’s more or less the amount of CO2 – one of the key “greenhouse gases” blamed for global warming – produced by the average American in a full year, according to World Bank data.
Climate change features prominently on Kerry’s itinerary on his current trip, an eight-day haul from Washington to New Zealand to Antarctica – where he became the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit – and on to two Arab Gulf states and then Morocco before winging to Peru and then back home.
The Antarctica visit, which included a stop at the McMurdo research station on Ross Island, was focused primarily on climate change – Kerry spoke about concerns that should a huge ice sheet break up and melt sea levels could rise by 12 feet.
The trip to Morocco is also climate-focused: Kerry will attend the U.N. climate conference in Marrakesh, where is expected to deliver a speech to an audience deeply concerned about President-elect Donald Trump’s views on climate change and the new Paris climate accord.
An imprecise calculation of the route Kerry is taking on this trip indicates he will travel around 35,300 miles, which would make it the longest of Kerry’s many journeys as secretary of state.
Secretary of State John Kerry waves as he boards his plane. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
Prior to this one, his longest trip was around 31,900 miles last fall, when he visited East and West Africa, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, and then flew east to Bangladesh, India and on to China to join President Obama for a G20 summit.