When Antarctic Doom Headlines Melt Faster Than The Ice
On May 15th Red State reported on yet another breathless headline warning that Antarctic ice shelves are melting faster than we thought, that sea levels are going to swamp our coastlines
The article states:
As predictable as the sun rises, it’s another breathless headline warning that Antarctic ice shelves are melting faster than we thought, that sea levels are going to swamp our coastlines, and that millions face an underwater future.
The Daily Mail’s recent coverage of Norwegian researchers studying the Fimbulisen Ice Shelf is a case study in how legitimate, and genuinely interesting, science gets processed through the media’s climate catastrophe machine until the nuance is ground out entirely and only the alarmism remains.
The discovery of deep channels beneath ice shelves trapping warm ocean eddies and accelerating basal melt is a new discovery and is legitimate science work. What isn’t legitimate is the leap from “we discovered something we didn’t fully know about” to “sea levels could rise 30 meters by 2150.”
That’s not science. That’s science fiction with a university letterhead attached.
Here’s what the coverage buries: the reason we’re only learning about these sub-ice channels and their effects right now is that we have only recently developed the technology and methodology to observe conditions beneath Antarctic ice shelves.
Think about that for a moment. We are talking about one of the most remote, inaccessible, and hostile environments on the planet. The ice shelf cavities these researchers are studying sit beneath hundreds of meters of ice, in waters that are extraordinarily difficult to instrument, monitor, or sample directly.
The Fimbulisen Ice Shelf case study used a combination of detailed topographical mapping and computer modeling, not decades of direct observational data, to draw its conclusions.
This is a statement of fact that The Daily Mail missed entirely, and it has enormous implications for how confidently we should accept these projections.
When a scientist tells you they’ve discovered a process they didn’t previously know existed, and then in the same breath tells you they can project its consequences out to the year 2300, you should be concerned and skeptical of that claim.
You should ask how can you forecast with confidence the far future behavior of an Antarctic system you’ve only just begun to observe?
See the Red State article here.
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