Antarctic Sea Ice: ‘The beginning of the end!’ – again – Net Zero Watch

Is it game over for the climate yet? Media over-excitement takes off again.
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The great sleeping giant that is Antarctica that — apart from the Antarctic Peninsula — refuses to respond to global warming may just have begun to stir, and the implications are, well, apocalyptic, jokes Dr David Whitehouse @ Net Zero Watch.

According to CNN “Antarctic sea ice hits record lows again. Scientists wonder if it’s “the beginning of the end.” CNN also reports that, “90% of ice around Antarctica has disappeared in less than a decade.”

CNN are not the only media outlets to report on this years’ record low sea ice around Antarctica in apocalyptic terms, other media extremists are available.

For Sky News it’s the accelerating melt of polar regions. For the BBC “There is now less sea-ice surrounding the Antarctic continent than at any time since we began using satellites to measure it in the late 1970s.” All this is technically true, but misleading. When it’s put into context one sees a different picture.

So let’s have a look at the actual satellite data of Antarctic sea ice collected monthly since 1979. The NSIDC gives two data sets for what it calls i) sea ice extent, and ii) sea ice area. So let’s examine both of them.

The first graph is sea ice area, the second sea ice extent [see here].

From the empirical data it is evident that there is hardly any change of sea ice over the 44-year time span. Since 2016 there is a dip with possibly more variability (of which more later), and the lowest month (February) does show a record low, but by hardly anything (and also look at the data for 1992).

Does this actual data look like the beginning of the end to you? Where is CNN’s 90% loss or Sky News acceleration?

Antarctic sea ice evolution has no significant trends along the whole period, but a volume drop is observed since 2016.

Full article here.

CNN’s ‘chief climate’ reporter flies more than 6,000 miles to warn about melting ice, climate change

Antarctic sea ice [image credit: BBC]

Apart from spouting dodgy climate theories and proposing absurd ‘solutions’, he seems to have a problem telling the difference between land and sea ice. Antarctica is land surrounded by churning seas and high winds, making its summer sea ice seasons inherently variable.
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CNN’s chief climate correspondent purportedly flew more than 6,000 miles to report on climate change, says The Blaze.

On Wednesday, CNN correspondent Bill Weir appeared on “CNN This Morning,” reporting from the Tierra de Fuego region of Argentina, the southern tip of South America. In his report, Weir bemoaned the shrinking Antarctic ice cap.

“But while we’re here we got this news out of the National Snow and Ice Center in Colorado that for the second year in a row the South Pole is shrinking. The ice down here is shrinking,” Weir reported. “What is troubling about this is the speed that it has declined. Just to give you some perspective, in the early 2000s, it looked like Antarctica was growing even as the Arctic was shrinking in alarming ways, and scientists weren’t sure why.

“In 2014, the sea ice around Antarctica: 7 million square miles. Now, less than a decade later, it’s under 700,000 square miles – so that’s a 90% drop,” he explained.

Show anchor Don Lemon followed up by asking Weir what, if anything, can be done to slow down the melting.

The answer? According to Weir, humanity must stop spewing carbon into the atmosphere.

“It’s the same answer has been for generations. The faster we can move away from fuels that burn, in the speediest and most equitable way possible, the less horrible this gets,” Weir told Lemon.

“That’s the only way right now. And not only stopping it at the source but pulling carbon out of the sea and sky,” he continued. “Carbon removal is going to be the biggest industry you’ve never heard of as people come to grips with the enormity of this.”

If not burning fuels or putting more carbon into the atmosphere is the anecdote to melting ice caps, Weir did not do his part to help.

Full article here.
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Update, 2nd March 2023:
NetZeroWatch — Antarctic Sea Ice: ‘The beginning of the end!’ – again
Quote: ‘When it’s put into context one sees a different picture.’

Kill dates of black mosses are archives of Antarctic glacier history

Credit: coolantarctica.com

Natural climate variation is and always has been an ongoing process in Antarctica, just like everywhere else. Research suggests conditions similar to recent years prevailed about 850 years ago in at least one region.
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Mosses, one of the few types of plants living in Antarctica, have a tenuous existence, threatened by advancing glaciers, says the U.S. National Science Foundation.

When glaciers move, they can entomb or cover a plant — starving it of light and warmth. Scientists have discovered that the timing of when a glacier killed a moss, the kill date, provides an archive of glacier history.

The date the plant died coincides with the time the glacier advanced over that location. As glaciers recede, the previously entombed mosses are exposed, now dead and black.

I can’t feel fingertips after rowing in Antarctic seas

Scotia Sea, Antarctica [image credit: Antarctic96]

Midsummer in the Antarctic – no picnic.
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Adventurer Jamie Douglas-Hamilton says his latest rowing challenge in the world’s most treacherous waters has left him in the worst pain he has ever felt, reports BBC News.

“I still can’t feel my fingertips and can’t wiggle my toes,” he says.

“I couldn’t even walk to the bathroom from my bed without hanging on to things along the way.”

Jamie was part of a crew of six who battled 30ft (10m) waves, crippling seasickness, icy cold winds and constant terror in Antarctica’s Southern Ocean and Scotia Sea.

Elephant seal remains show Antarctic sea was warmer in the mid-to-late Holocene

Antarctica

Once again, evidence of times in the past long before the industrial era when warming similar to or in excess of the present ‘crisis’ conditions occurred in a polar region. Natural climate variation is the norm.
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Studying the response of Antarctic ice sheets to past warming episodes is essential to understand how they may respond to the present warming climate, as their melting and collapse can contribute to global sea level rise, says Phys.org.

Detailed records of past ocean temperatures close to the continent are rare, but clues to how ice sheets and sea ice responded to global conditions in the past can be found in funny places—even in the remains of animals that once lived there.

A study led by the University of Maine used the presence (and eventual lack thereof) of elephant seals to illustrate how the area transformed in a warm period in the recent past.

Study finds three phases of glacier advance in Northern Antarctic Peninsula in the last 1,500 years

Credit: coolantarctica.com

Glaciers advance and retreat. Repeating cycles of natural climate variation exposed.
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Receding glaciers in the northern Antarctic Peninsula are uncovering and reexposing black moss that provides radiocarbon kill dates for the vegetation, a key clue to understanding the timing of past glacier advances in that region, says Phys.org.

A University of Wyoming researcher led a study that determined the black moss kill dates coincide with evidence of glacier advances from other studies that found such events occurred 1,300, 800 and 200 calibrated years prior to 1950.

“We used radiocarbon ages, or kill dates, of previously ice-entombed dead black mosses to reveal that glaciers advanced during three distinct phases in the northern Antarctic Peninsula over the past 1,500 years,” says Dulcinea Groff, a postdoctoral research associate in the UW Department of Geology and Geophysics.

Benzene and toluene in polar oceans have a biological origin, study finds

Natural aerosols, not ‘human pollution’. Another climate assumption gets blown out of the water.
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In addition to oxygen, nitrogen or carbon dioxide, the air we breathe contains small amounts of organic gases, such as benzene and toluene, says Phys.org.

These oxidize into small particles or aerosols that contribute to the condensation of water in the droplets that form clouds.

Now, a study by the Institut de Cièncias del Mar (ICM-CSIC), the Instituto de Química Física Rocasolano (IQFR-CSIC) and the Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML) stresses the importance of clouds, which filter solar radiation, for understanding past and future climate changes.

“If we don’t get the clouds right, we won’t get the climate right,” says Charel Wohl, ICM-CSIC researcher and lead author of the study. “We are just beginning to unveil the multiple ingredients that form cloud seeds,” he adds.

Science Writer Warns Ozone Hole Recovery Claims Likely Premature, Too Optimistic

Credit: earthhow.com

Is there a role for natural climate variation here, and if so, what is going on?
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Claims by a UN-backed expert panel that the ozone layer is healing and headed to full recovery may be premature and overly optimistic, Net Zero Watch’s Science Editor Dr. David Whitehouse has warned.

Any internet search will find hundreds of news stories announcing that the ozone hole over the Antarctic is slowly filling and that by about the middle of this century mankind’s vandalism of this natural atmospheric layer will have been remedied, says Benny Peiser via Climate Change Dispatch.

The ozone hole has become an icon of anthropogenic interference in the natural world — and a hopeful signpost that there is a way back. But is the ozone hole healing? Not by as much as many headlines suggest, it would appear.

What Climate Crisis? A Primer On Earth’s Turbulent Climatic Past

Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica

Blinkered climate obsessives, from protesters to governments, need to wise up about their pet topic. Professor Ian Plimer offers some assistance to trace gas worriers.
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For more than 80 percent of the time, Earth has been a warm wet greenhouse planet with no ice, says Ian Plimer at Spectator AU (via Climate Change Dispatch.

We live in unusual times when ice occurs on continents. This did not happen overnight.

The great southern continent, Gondwanaland, formed about 550 million years ago. It occupied 20 percent of the area of our planet and included Antarctica, South America, Australia, South Africa, and the Indian subcontinent.

Gondwanaland was covered by ice when it drifted across the South Pole 360-255 million years ago. Evidence for this ice age is in the black coal districts of Australia, South Africa, and India.

Antarctic icebergs still exist today where 1700-era sailors spotted and tracked them

Antarctic sea ice [image credit: BBC]

Probably not the result that was expected from this study. Captain Cook’s descriptions of iceberg sightings still seem valid. Is saying ‘large icebergs…are not as sensitive to climate change’ enough to avoid raising questions about modern global warming theories?
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A new study comparing observations of large Antarctic icebergs from the 1700s with modern satellite datasets shows the massive icebergs are found in the same areas where they were pinpointed three centuries ago, reports Phys.org.

The study shows that despite their rudimentary tools, the old explorers truly knew their craft, and it confirms that the icebergs have behaved consistently for more than 300 years.

Using primarily the journal records of Captain James Cook’s 1772–1775 Antarctic circumnavigation on the HMS Resolution (where he noted the positions of hundreds of icebergs), a trio of researchers from Brigham Young University, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Washington’s School of Oceanography made comparisons with the two largest modern datasets available today: the BYU/National Ice Center and Alfred Wegener Institute datasets.

They found that Cook’s description of the iceberg plume east of Antarctica’s Amery Ice Shelf, along with iceberg distributions in the Weddell, Ross and Amundsen Seas, agree with modern data.

Fieldwork starts on Thwaites Glacier – British Antarctic Survey

Thwaites glacier has its own complexities, including proximity to dozens of underwater volcanoes. Wikipedia says it’s ‘nicknamed the Doomsday Glacier’ and ‘The Thwaites Ice Shelf, a floating ice shelf which braces and restrains the eastern portion of Thwaites Glacier, is likely to collapse within a decade from 2021’. Statements like ‘computer models show’, ‘how soon a transition to more rapid ice retreat might occur’ and ‘collapse of the glacier’ (the size of Florida) arouse a certain amount of scepticism. More than a whiff of climate alarm enthusiasm here.
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Nearly 60 scientists and support staff are on their way to Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica, says the British Antarctic Survey.

It’s part of an ambitious international effort to understand the glacier and surrounding ocean system to determine its future contributions to global sea-level rise.

This season represents the fourth of five planned field seasons.

Fresh understanding of ice age frequency – Otago study

Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica

By saying, of Antarctica’s ice sheets, “this research shows they actually advanced and retreated much more often – every 41,000 years – until at least 400,000 years ago”, the research adds a new twist to the longstanding 100,000 year problem of ice ages. It puts obliquity firmly back in the frame.
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A chance find of an unstudied Antarctic sediment core has led University of Otago researchers to flip our understanding of how often ice ages occurred in Antarctica, says Eurekalert.

Lead author Dr Christian Ohneiser, of the Department of Geology, says it turns out they were much more frequent than previously assumed.

“Until this research, it was common knowledge that over the last million years global ice volume, which includes Antarctica’s ice sheets, expanded and retreated every 100,000 years.

“However, this research shows they actually advanced and retreated much more often – every 41,000 years – until at least 400,000 years ago,” he says.

Scientists discovered a river longer than Thames beneath the Antarctic ice sheet

Antarctica’s George VI Ice Shelf [image credit: CIRES Colorado Univ.]

Interesting, but too many uncertainties at this time to reach any firm conclusions. The river system is ‘beneath kilometers of thick ice’.
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Scientists at Imperial College London, the University of Waterloo, Canada, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, and Newcastle University have discovered an unexpected river under the Antarctic ice sheet, says Tech Explorist.

The discovery of this 460km-long river shows the ice sheet’s base has more active water flow than previously thought, which could make it more susceptible to changes in climate.

The river is believed to affect the flow and melting of ice, contributing to the acceleration of ice loss during climate warming.

Seasonal change in Antarctic ice sheet movement observed for first time – but what does it mean?

Antarctica’s George VI Ice Shelf [image credit: CIRES Colorado Univ.]

Assumptions challenged by new data. Talk of “potentially important implications for global sea-level rise estimates”.
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Some estimates of Antarctica’s total contribution to sea-level rise may be over- or underestimated, after researchers detected a previously unknown source of ice loss variability, says Phys.org.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and Austrian engineering company ENVEO, identified distinct, seasonal movements in the flow of land-based ice draining into George VI Ice Shelf—a floating platform of ice roughly the size of Wales—on the Antarctic Peninsula.

Using imagery from the Copernicus/European Space Agency Sentinel-1 satellites, the researchers found that the glaciers feeding the ice shelf speed up by approximately 15% during the Antarctic summer.

Record of Antarctic ice sheet response to climate cycles found in rock samples

Antarctica

Climate cycles and natural variability do exist then?! No need to re-visit those discussions. Quote: “One of the key findings is that the ice sheet was responding to temperature changes in the Southern Ocean”. The study says: ‘Our findings imply that oscillating Southern Ocean temperatures drive a dynamic response in the Antarctic ice sheet on millennial timescales, regardless of the background climate state.’
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By analyzing unusual rock samples collected years ago in Antarctica, scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have discovered a remarkable record of how the East Antarctic Ice Sheet has responded to changes in climate over a period of 100,000 years during the Late Pleistocene, says Phys.org.

The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is the world’s largest ice mass. Understanding its sensitivity to climate change is crucial for efforts to project how much sea level will rise as global temperatures increase.

Recent studies suggest it may be more vulnerable to ice loss than previously thought.

Faster in the Past: New seafloor images of West Antarctic Ice Sheet upend understanding of Thwaites Glacier retreat

Some like to call it the Doomsday Glacier. The research results are probably open to a variety of interpretations, in terms of predictions. But we’re told that whatever is being observed at present is by no means exceptional, making attempts at attribution of its ever-changing condition to human activity even more problematic. Volcanic activity is an obvious confounding factor here.
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The Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica — about the size of Florida — has been an elephant in the room for scientists trying to make global sea level rise predictions, says Science Daily.

This massive ice stream is already in a phase of fast retreat (a “collapse” when viewed on geological timescales) leading to widespread concern about exactly how much, or how fast, it may give up its ice to the ocean.

The potential impact of Thwaites’ retreat is spine-chilling: a total loss of the glacier and surrounding icy basins could raise sea level from three to 10 feet.

Some Antarctic ice shelves grew in area over the last 20 years – study

Credit: British Antarctic Survey

Much ado about sea ice in recent times, but usually in terms of promoting climate alarm. On closer inspection East Antarctica (2/3rds of the continent) tells a somewhat different story.
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Some ice shelves in the eastern Antarctic have grown in the last 20 years despite global warming, a study suggests.

Researchers say that sea ice, pushed against the ice shelves by a change in regional wind patterns, may have helped to protect the ice shelves from losses, reports Yahoo News.

Ice shelves are floating sections of ice attached to land-based ice sheets and they help guard against the uncontrolled release of inland ice into the ocean.

Antarctic sea-ice expansion in a warming climate confounds model predictions

Antarctic sea ice [image credit: BBC]

The obvious conclusion would be that the climate models are wrong, due to application of incorrect climate theory. As usual, researchers cast around desperately for other alternatives, only to find natural variation preventing warming from being global.
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Antarctic sea-ice has expanded over the period of continuous satellite monitoring, which seemingly contradicts ongoing global warming resulting from increasing concentrations of greenhouse gasses, says Phys.org.

In a study, published in Nature Climate Change, an international team of scientists from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and South Korea shows that a multi-decadal swing of the tropical sea surface temperatures and its ability to change the atmospheric circulation across large distances is in large part responsible for the observed sea-ice expansion since the late 1970s.

Ice shards in Antarctic clouds let more solar energy reach Earth’s surface

Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica

It’s noted that ‘Getting clouds right…is important for calculating how much solar radiation reaches Earth.’ A difference of 10 watts per square metre could be involved in some zones, the researchers found.
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Clouds come in myriad shapes, sizes and types, which control their effects on climate, says Phys.org.

New research led by the University of Washington shows that splintering of frozen liquid droplets to form ice shards inside Southern Ocean clouds dramatically affects the clouds’ ability to reflect sunlight back to space.

The paper, published March 4 in the open-access journal AGU Advances, shows that including this ice-splintering process improves the ability of high-resolution global models to simulate clouds over the Southern Ocean—and thus the models’ ability to simulate Earth’s climate.

A ‘heat wave’ and snowfall: Why researchers are puzzled by Antarctica’s recent weather

Antarctica

The alarmist Guardian’s ‘climate disaster’ turns out to be ‘climate mitigation’, due to the massive snowfall. A so-called heatwave where temperatures reached a chilly 10 degrees Fahrenheit (-12 Celsius), seems to have fooled a lot of people. The Guardian speculates that ‘climate breakdown could be accelerating’, but seeing what you wanted to see doesn’t always work.
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While researchers say it’s too early to know what role, if any, climate change plays here, the event has their attention because it’s so extreme, says NBC News.

It’s been a strange stretch for the icy desert at the bottom of the world.

In mid-March, temperatures in parts of East Antarctica soared 70 degrees Fahrenheit above average. It was high enough for researchers living there to brave the elements for a bare-chested group photo.

The comparatively balmy temperatures, which reached around 10 degrees Fahrenheit, arrived courtesy of a history-making atmospheric river — a plume of concentrated moisture that flows through the sky.

This one brought an incredible dump of snow in the inner reaches of the ice sheet, something quite rare for the area.