By Ian Tuttle
Friday, November 06, 2015
When it comes to civilization’s end, Al Gore’s theory was
simple and elegant: Increased heat (a product of the Greenhouse Effect, the
Koch Brothers, the hole in the ozone layer, etc.) leads Earth’s great swaths of
ice to melt, which leads the seas to rise, which leads to the Beatles’ “Yellow
Submarine” becoming a prophetic song, in addition to a cult one.
Alas, Antarctica, which accounts for 90 percent of the
world’s ice, is not melting. Just the opposite. According to a NASA study
published this week in the Journal of
Glaciology, “An increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000
years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the
increased losses from its thinning glaciers.” That finding contradicts the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which in 2013 declared that
Antarctica was losing land ice.
The study reports that, between 1992 and 2001, the ice
sheet that covers the continent — a polar desert of some 5.4 million square
miles, or about the size of the United States and Mexico combined — gained 112
billion tons of ice annually, and from 2003 to 2008 added 82 billion tons a year.
And, contrary to the IPCC’s conclusion, Antarctica is not contributing to
sea-level rise — in fact, it is slowing the rate of rise by 0.23 millimeters
annually.
This might be considered good news. But the lead author
of the study, NASA glaciologist Jay Zwally, predictably warns otherwise: “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,” he told Nature. “It should not take away from
the concern about climate warming.” Zwally maintains that land-ice losses in
other parts of Antarctica will overtake these gains “in 20 or 30 years.”
Of course, when it comes to forecasts, Zwally has a
spotty track record. He suggested in 2007 that “the Arctic Ocean could be
nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous
predictions.” Three years after Doomsday, there is still plenty of sea ice
(frozen seawater that floats atop the ocean) at the North Pole — more than 1.7
million square miles of it, even at its minimum this year.
Over the past several years, climate scientists have
pointed to sea ice, too, as an indicator of dangerous warming trends. When
35,000 walruses gathered on the shores of northern Alaska last fall, scientists
blamed the blubbery beach party on a decline in Arctic sea ice. It was not so.
NASA frets about the loss of sea-ice coverage — 13 percent per decade since the
late 1970s, it claims — but sea ice is an unreliable indicator of purported
long-term global warming; it is heavily subject to the vagaries of wind and
weather. Meanwhile, Antarctic sea ice has been on the increase — almost, if not
quite, canceling the decrease near the opposite pole.
Additionally, melting sea ice would raise sea levels only
a hair. Even if all of the planet’s sea ice were to melt — a volume of 46,600 cubic
miles — sea levels would rise . . . 5 millimeters. Throw in the massive
Antarctic ice shelves, which are land ice pushed out onto the sea, and the seas
would rise . . . 47 millimeters, or 1.9 inches. And given the size of the ice
masses in question, it would take decades for that melting to occur.
So, if there is danger, it comes from land ice — which,
again, at the South Pole is not diminishing, but increasing. Meanwhile, in
Greenland, the other main source of land ice — a volume of 1.8 million cubic
miles — trends are unclear. Melting in certain sectors of Greenland’s ice sheet
have increased dramatically of late, but researchers at the University of
Edinburgh reported recently that in the portion of Greenland’s ice sheet that
terminates on land, melting has decelerated in recent decades. In any event,
Lady Liberty is not going to be underwater any time soon.
Still, much of the public has bought into climate
alarmists’ simplistic narrative of doom. Presenting the facts is the best way
to put that theory on ice.
No comments:
Post a Comment