Give two climate scientists credit for chutzpa. A study published September 11 in Science Advances paints the worst-case scenario for Antarctic ice melt if the world burns all of its fossil fuels. The problem is that Antarctic sea ice has been growing even as atmospheric carbon dioxide has been increasing for years.
Scientific American’s story about the scientists’ findings came with the headline, “Melting Antarctica Could Drown Coasts Much Sooner Than You Thought.” So much for nuance!
SA quotes the article’s coauthor, Ricarda Winkelmann, a physicist with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, as saying, “Humanity can indeed melt all of Antarctica's ice, if we were to burn all of the fossil fuels.” And the authors assert this because they created a model that tells them it could happen.
But the Antarctic isn’t cooperating.
According to a NASA report from October of last year, “Sea ice surrounding Antarctica reached a new record high extent this year, covering more of the southern oceans than it has since scientists began a long-term satellite record to map sea ice extent in the late 1970s.” Oops!
NASA hasn’t become a “climate change denier.” The statement quotes Claire Parkinson, a senior scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, as saying, “The planet as a whole is doing what was expected in terms of warming.” She points out that Arctic sea ice is decreasing faster than Antarctic sea ice is increasing, reducing total sea ice coverage.
But the claim seems a little disingenuous since the pro-warming scientists predicted both Arctic and Antarctic sea ice levels would be declining.
The NASA statement offers some possible reasons why Antarctic ice is increasing, but the scientists can’t explain it. And that is in part because it doesn’t fit their predilections.
If the Antarctic isn’t cooperating, it must be for some reason they don’t understand, not because their climate models, and the theories they base them on, are wrong.
The other factor is that scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs are hard at work looking for alternatives to fossil fuels. We are a long, long way from completely replacing them, but that day may come—negating the study’s whole thesis.
But we live in a day when climate scientists can publish far-fetched studies making catastrophic claims that run counter to some of the observable evidence and get huge media attention. It’s bad science and probably even worse journalism.