A Polar Comeback

Record breaking ice growth at the End of the World...

“I am wisest of all the Greeks because that which I do not know, I do not claim to know either.”

~ Socrates in Plato's Apology

Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Syros, Greece...

Uh oh...

Bad news, dear reader... at least, if you’re a card-carrying member of the Professional Catastrophist Community (PCC). The latest, from SciTechDaily:

Antarctica’s Astonishing Rebound: Ice Sheet Grows for the First Time in Decades

The article goes on to reveal a disturbing trend reversal in ice sheet coverage down at the other End of the World:

Mass changes across the Antarctic ice sheet have been detected using satellite gravimetry, revealing significant instabilities in major glacier basins of East Antarctica as well as across the entire ice sheet.

The Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS) plays a major role in global sea-level rise. Since March 2002, the GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) mission and its successor, GRACE-FO (GRACE Follow-On), have provided valuable data to monitor changes in ice mass across the AIS.

Previous studies have consistently shown a long-term trend of mass loss, particularly in West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula, while glaciers in East Antarctica appeared relatively stable. However, a recent study led by Dr. Wang and Prof. Shen at Tongji University has found a surprising shift: between 2021 and 2023, the AIS experienced a record-breaking increase in overall mass.

Wait, what? The Antarctic Ice Sheets are... growing? A “record-breaking” increase?

Mindless Automatons

As we all know, having mindlessly uploaded the daily headlines like obedient, unquestioning automatons, the world is going to Hades in a hand basket. And naturally, humble creatures that we are, humans are both at the center of, and to blame for, absolutely everything.

Overpopulation… rising sea levels… collapsing crop yields... mass starvation... wild fires… hurricanes… volcanoes… bovine flatulence…

That’s us! Guilty, on all counts!

And beneath it all, an archenemy of our very own, anthropogenic, making: climate change, né “global warming.”

Or as Secretary of the United Nations, António Guterres, somberly reminded the rarified minds gathered around the UN cauldron a couple of years back:

“The era of global warming has ended. The era of global boiling has arrived.”

What, then, to make of this latest anomaly, this catastrophic increase in Antarctic Sheet Ice?

What is the activist class to do with all those plastic “Science is Real” lawn signs, now that such pesky, counter-narrative facts have presented themselves? What cruel fate awaits the multi-hundred-billion dollar, virtue signaling, corporate ESG community? What of all the do-good Hollywood vegans, full of plastic themselves but bravely saving the planet one paper straw, one bug burger, one Toyota Pious at a time?

And, perhaps most pressing, what is to become of Lady Greta’s magic racing yacht, the Malizia II, which spirited the patron saint of great causes across the Atlantic during the height of her fame, so that she might lecture the unwashed, working masses about their crude, carbon-belching ways?

(Never mind that several crew members flew from the UK to the US to sail the boat back to Europe after Greta was done with it and the genuflecting media had regurgitated their “stories” ... nor that the vessel itself, made from non-recyclable, highly energy-intensive carbon fibre, thermoformed plastic and other naughty, environmentally damaging materials, produced thousands of tons of carbon during manufacturing, transportation and storage...)

Inconvenient Truths

Let us make like Greta and jettison those inconvenient truths for a moment, remembering that, despite the historic gains in ice growth throughout Antarctica from 2021 to 2023, the same study revealed that the continent suffered a net loss of 1.848 trillion tons of ice over the two decades preceding the “record-breaking increase.”

For those of us accustomed to counting annual federal budget deficits in trillions, magnificent market caps in the multi-trillions, and national debts in the tens of trillions, we have understandably become rather blasé about such a titanic numeral. Let’s turn then to the experts, to see what terrific damage has been wrought by such unabated Antarctic ablation…

According to the best estimates, AIS melt has contributed to a rise in sea levels during this century, the dreaded Era of Global Boiling (2000 to 2020), by an apocalyptic...

...5.99 millimeters. (Or about a quarter of an inch for our American readers).

Indeed, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) best estimates, sea levels have risen by something like 20 centimeters (just under 8 inches) since 1880.

At that rate, 0.138 centimeters per year, we’ll be watching the world’s lowest lying country, the ill-fated, oft-publicized Maldives, sink beneath the waves in just...

...1,088 years!

As with all apocalyptic claims regarding the future, that rate is subject to dramatic change... meaning full Maldivian submersion may arrive in half, or even a quarter of a millennium.

Submerging Markets

You remember The Maldives don’t you, dear reader? The picturesque island destination for well-heeled, jet-setting tourists first attained Climate Celebrity Status back in 1988, when Hussein Shihab, the country’s environmental affairs director, warned that his tiny nation would be completely underwater within 30 years, a prediction which expired, worthless, back in 2008. (Of course, those same experts also predicted the Maldives would run out of drinking water by 1992, before mass desalination solved that non-problem.)

Even so, one would think that even half (or even a quarter) millennium would be sufficient time even for the Maldivian population to construct a dam, a dyke or a simple levy. After all, the Dutch managed to protect their sub-sea level geography from time and tides with projects dating back to the 14th century.

The name “Netherlands” literally means “lower countries,” in reference to its low elevation and flat topography. To this very day, over a quarter (26%) of the entire country is below sea level. These farm-rich, sub-sea level areas, known as polders, are home to millions of Dutchmen, who nightly lay their blonde heads to rest, safe in the knowledge they will not be swimming with the proverbial fishes by morning.

Are climate alarmists suggesting that the Maldivians (along with the ill-fated Tuvaluans, Fijians and Kiribatis) will be incapable of doing in 1,000... 500... even 100 years what the Dutch already did 700 years ago? And what does that say for those forecasting a subaqueous future for first world cities like Boston, Miami and New York City?

Have citizens of these doomed locales no access to technology that was apparently available to the Dutch peasantry in the century before Hieronymus Bosch began imagining his Garden of Earthly Delights... before a single Dutchmen had ever heard the words “fossil fuel” or “nuclear reactor”... or even “light bulb?”

If history is any indicator, it may not matter anyway. If nothing else, experts have a reliable track record of offering unreliable predictions.

This Time is Different

After all, aren’t these the same “experts” who predicted the imminent extinction of man-eating polar bears... right before it was discovered that their population is growing...

... the same infallible genius class who forecast the irreversible devastation of the Great Barrier Reef... right before the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) released its annual report, last August, showing that “Coral cover has increased in all three regions on the Great Barrier Reef and is at regional highs in two of the three regions...”

...the same proud Pentagon prognosticators who, in 2004, assured us that “major European cities would be underwater by 2020,” at which point Britain would “suffer the impacts of a Siberian climate...”

Readers will recall ABC host, Bob Woodruff, who told us New York City would be underwater by 2015... Al Gore who, a year later, predicted the Arctic Ocean would be “ice free” by 2014... a claim that was blindly recycled by St. Greta, who readjusted the doomsday calendar for 2022... (The European Space Agency’s Climate Change Initiative now predicts we could see “ice-free Arctic summers by 2050.” Gulp!)

Not that we’d have a problem with any of these predictions... if only costly and coercive government policy was not built so confidently upon them.

Alas, 97% of scientists have reached a consensus: they agree with whatever they’re paid to believe. Still, there are some brave souls who are not allergic to independent thought. Here’s Mike Hulme, Professor of Human Geography at that well-known bastion of alt-right science denialism, the University of Cambridge...

“Climate change is cited as the sole explanation for everything going wrong in the world. Drought, famine, flooding, wars, racism – you name it. And if it's bad, it's down to global warming caused by humans,” Professor Hulme said in a recent interview with The Daily Mail.

“I disagree with the doom-mongers,” the professor profaned. “Climate change is not like a comet approaching Earth. There is no good scientific or historical evidence that it will lead to human extinction or the collapse of human civilization.”

Like that old Greek gadfly, your non-scientist editor does not claim to know that which he does not know. It is not given to man to know his fate. As renowned physicist Niels Bohr famously proclaimed, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future!”

Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

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