Meltdown Myth

MELTDOWN MYTH: Antarctic ice growing is just the first EVIDENCE global warming is NOT REAL [Excerpts]

You might think this would be great news for all those scientists who have been warning us over the last few years about the impending horrors of “man-made global warming” but in fact they are not happy about it, not one bit.

Here for example is Dr Jay Zwally, the lead author of this week’s surprising Nasa study that confirms that the Antarctic is gaining far more ice than it is losing. “I know some of the climate deniers will jump on this and say this means we don’t have to worry as much as some people have been making out. It should not take away from the concern about climate warming.” 

The supposedly disappearing ice was part of the regular drip-drip-drip of bad news that the alarmists so desperately need in order to persuade the public that “climate change” is real and urgent and that only the most radical solutions can save us from its horrors. 

But the Antarctic has always been a bit of a problem for the alarmists. Unlike with the floating ice caps around the North Pole, which really did look for a time like they were vanishing (though they have since staged a recovery), the evidence for Antarctic ice loss has never been strong. 

That is because the area is so vast and inhospitable it is hard to be sure what is really going on there. Sure there is the odd lonely outpost like the British Antarctic Survey’s Halley VI Research Station on the Brunt Ice Shelf. But that still leaves most of the continent’s 5,500,000 square miles (about a third bigger than the whole of Europe) unexplored – and with temperatures that can drop as low as -89.6C, with an average winter temperature of around -49C this is clearly not the kind of place where you could ever maintain a comprehensive network of weather stations.

All the scare stories you have ever read about the Antarctic concern one of the few relatively accessible parts: the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

This has indeed been breaking off in large chunks, which alarmist scientists and newspapers have claimed makes it a dread harbinger of man-made global warming. 

Or at least they did until last year when the University of Texas discovered that the more likely cause of this melt, which has been going on for 20,000 years by the way, was the geothermal heat from all the volcanoes sitting underneath it. 

That is by no means the only setback alarmist scientists have experienced there recently. In the Christmas of 2013 an Australian climate change expedition came unstuck when their research ship was trapped in ice they had not been expecting because they believed so faithfully in “global warming”. This latest research from Nasa is a bigger blow to their cause.

And we know it is accurate because it uses altimetry data from satellites to gauge changes in the size of the Antarctic land mass. 

What this shows is that between 1992 and 2001 the ice sheet gained 112 billion tons of ice per year. This rate slowed between 2003 and 2008 but still the ice sheet was gaining 82 billion tons a year.

Not only that but according to the same study, it has led to a reduction in the sea level rise of about 0.23 mm a year. Does that sound to you like a continent shrinking because of global warming?

Scientists such as Zwally may refer to us as “climate deniers” but who are the real deniers here: those who look at the hard evidence or those who want to go on scaremongering regardless of what the data shows?

(James Delingpole, “MELTDOWN MYTH: Antarctic ice growing is just the first EVIDENCE global warming is NOT REAL,” Daily Express Online, Nov 5, 2015)

[TBC: As we have noted in the past, much of environmentalism and its stepchild global warming/climate change is based upon religious belief rather than scientific data. With the statements of Pope Francis, which align with similar Buddhist/Hindu/Islamic, etc. statements, there is one more reason for “people of faith” to come together in common cause. In the July 1997 issue of the newsletter Dave Hunt wrote, “Surprisingly, the ecological movement has become more religion than science. Thomas Berry of Fordham University calls man's ecological responsibility 'preeminently a religious and spiritual task.'  The 1990 Global Forum held in Moscow, with delegates from 83 countries, called for ‘a global council of spiritual leaders’ and the ‘creation of an inter-faith prayer...a new spiritual and ethical basis for human activities on Earth’.”]