No Convincing Evidence That Antarctic Ice Sheet Is Melting

Of all the observations behind mass hysteria over our climate, none induces as much panic as melting of the earth’s two biggest ice sheets, covering the polar landmasses of Antarctica and Greenland. As long ago as 2006, Al Gore’s environmental documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” proclaimed that global warming would melt enough ice to cause a 6-meter (20-foot) rise in sea level “in the near future.” Today, every calving of a large iceberg from an ice shelf or glacier whips the mainstream media into a frenzy.

The huge Antarctic ice sheet alone would raise global sea levels by about 60 meters (200 feet) were it to melt completely. But there’s little evidence that the kilometers-thick ice sheet, which contains about 90% of the world’s freshwater ice, is melting at all.

Any calving of large icebergs – a natural process unrelated to warming – from an ice shelf, or even disintegration into small icebergs, barely affects sea level. This is because the ice that breaks off was already floating on the ocean. Although a retreating ice shelf can contribute to sea level rise by accelerating the downhill flow of glaciers that feed the shelf, current breakups of Antarctic ice shelves are adding no more than about 0.1 mm (about 4/1000ths of an inch) per year to global sea levels, according to NOAA (the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).

Global warming has certainly affected Antarctica, though not by as much as the Arctic. East Antarctica, by far the largest region that covers two thirds of the continent, heated up by only 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.11 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade between 1958 and 2012. At the South Pole, which is located in East Antarctica, temperatures actually fell in recent decades.

For comparison, global temperatures over this period rose by 0.11 degrees Celsius (0.20 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade, and Arctic temperatures shot up at an even higher rate. Antarctic warming from 1958 to 2012 is illustrated in the figure below, based on NOAA data. East Antarctica is to the right, West Antarctica to the left of the figure.

You can see, however, that temperatures in West Antarctica and the small Antarctic Peninsula, which points toward Argentina, increased more rapidly than in East Antarctica, by 0.22 degrees Celsius (0.40 degrees Fahrenheit) and 0.33 degrees Celsius (0.59 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade, respectively – faster than the global average. Still, the Peninsula has cooled since 2000.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that all the hype about imminent collapse of the Antarctic ice sheet centers on events in West Antarctica, such as glaciers melting at rapid rates. The Fifth Assessment Report of the UN’s IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) maintained with high confidence that, between 2005 and 2010, the ice sheet was shedding mass and causing sea levels to rise by 0.41 mm per year, contributing about 24% of the measured rate of 1.7 mm (1/16th of an inch) per year between 1900 and 2010.

On the other hand, 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. The study authors found that the ice loss from thinning glaciers in West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula was currently outweighed by new ice formation in East Antarctica resulting from warming-enhanced snowfall. Across the continent, Antarctica averages roughly  5 cm (2 inches) of precipitation per year. The same authors say that the trend has continued until at least 2018, despite a recent research paper by an international group of polar scientists endorsing the IPCC human-caused global warming narrative of diminishing Antarctic ice.

The two studies are both based on satellite altimetry – the same method used to measure sea levels, but in this case measuring the height of the ice sheet. Both studies also depend on models to correct the raw data for factors such as snowdrift, ice compaction and motion of the underlying bedrock. It’s differences in the models that give rise to the diametrically opposite results of the studies, one finding that Antarctic ice is melting away but the other concluding that it’s really growing.

Such uncertainty, even in the satellite era, shouldn’t be surprising. Despite the insistence of many climate scientists that theirs is a mature field of research, much of today’s climate science is dependent on models to interpret the empirical observations. The models, just like computer climate models, aren’t always good representations of reality.

Al Gore’s 6-meter (20-foot) rise hasn’t happened yet, and isn’t likely to happen even by the end of this century. Global panic over the impending meltdown of Antarctica is totally unwarranted.

(This post has also been kindly reproduced in full on the Climate Depot blog.)

Next: No Convincing Evidence That Greenland Ice Sheet Is Melting Rapidly

Shrinking Sea Ice: Evaluation of the Evidence

Most of us know about the loss of sea ice in the Arctic due to global warming. The dramatic reduction in summer ice cover, which has continued for almost 40 years, is frequently hyped by the mainstream media and climate activists as an example of what we’re supposedly doing to the planet.

But the loss is nowhere near as much as predicted, and in fact was no more in the summer of 2019 than in 2007. Also, it’s little known that Arctic sea ice has melted before during the record heat of the 1930s. And the sea ice around Antarctica, at the other end of the globe, has been expanding since at least 1979.

Actual scientific observations of sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic have only been possible since satellite measurements began in 1979. The figure below shows satellite-derived images of Arctic sea ice extent in the summer of 1979 (left image), and the summer (September) and winter (March) of 2018 (right image). Sea ice expands to its maximum extent during the winter and shrinks during summer months.   

Arctic summer ice extent decreased by approximately 33% over the interval from 1979 to 2018; while it still encases northern Greenland, it no longer reaches the Russian coast.

However, there has been no net ice loss since 2007, with the year-to-year minimum extents fluctuating around a plateau. An exception was 2012, when a powerful August storm known as the Great Arctic Cyclone tore off a large chunk of ice from the main sea ice pack. Clearly, the evidence refutes numerous prognostications by advocates of catastrophic human-caused warming that Arctic ice would be completely gone by 2016. 

Before 1979, the only data available on Arctic sea ice are scattered observations from sources such as ship reports, aircraft reconnaissance and drifting buoys – observations recorded and synthesized by the Danish Meteorological Institute and the Russian Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute. Analyses of this spotty data have resulted in numerous reconstructions of Arctic sea ice extent in the pre-satellite era.

One such recent reconstruction is shown in the next figure, depicting reconstructed Arctic summer ice area, in millions of square kilometers, from 1900 to 2013. The reconstruction was based on the strong correlation of Arctic sea ice extent with Arctic air temperatures during the satellite era, especially in the summer, a correlation assumed to be the same in earlier years as well. This assumption then enabled the researchers to reconstruct the sea ice area before 1979 from observed temperatures in that era.  

What this graph reveals is that summer ice cover in the Arctic, apart from its present decline since about 1979, contracted previously in the 1920s and 1930s. According to the researchers, the biggest single-year decrease in area, which occurred in 1936, was about 26% – not much less than the 33% drop by 2018. Although this suggests that the relatively low sea ice extents in recent years are comparable to the 1930s, the reconstruction doesn’t incorporate any actual pre-satellite observations. Other reconstructions that do incorporate the earlier data show a smaller difference between the 1930s and today.

It’s the opposite story for sea ice in the Antarctic, which is at its lowest extent during the southern summer in February, as shown in the satellite-derived image below for 2018-19.

Despite the contraction in the Arctic, the sea ice around Antarctica has been expanding during the satellite era. As can be seen from the following figure, Antarctic sea ice has gained in extent by an average of 1.8% per decade (the dashed line represents the trend), though the ice extent fluctuates greatly from year to year. Antarctic sea ice covers a larger area than Arctic ice but occupies a smaller overall volume, because it’s only about half as thick.

Another fallacious claim about disappearing sea ice in the Arctic, one that has captured the public imagination like no other, is that the polar bear population is diminishing along with the ice. But, while this may yet happen in the future, current evidence shows that the bear population has been stable for the whole period that the ice has been decreasing and may even be growing, according to the native Inuit.

In summary, Arctic sea ice shrank from about 1979 to 2007 because of global warming, but has remained at the same extent on average in the 12 years since then, while Antarctic sea ice has expanded slightly over the whole period. So there’s certainly no cause for alarm.

Next: No Convincing Evidence That Antarctic Ice Sheet is Melting