Not only has Antarctic sea ice not changed, but land based ice is expanding according to
NASA study.
11-24-16
| Antarctic Sea Ice Has Not Shrunk In 100 Years |
Antarctic sea ice had barely changed from where it was 100 years ago, scientists have discovered, after pouring over the logbooks of great polar explorers such as Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton. Experts were concerned that ice at the South Pole had declined significantly since the 1950s, which they feared was driven by man-made climate change. But new analysis suggests that conditions are now virtually identical to when the Terra Nova and Endurance sailed to the continent in the early 1900s, indicating that declines are part of a natural cycle and not the result of global warming. –Sarah Knapton, The Daily Telegraph, 24 November 2016
| 1) Antarctic Sea Ice Has Not Shrunk In 100 Years, Scott And Shackleton Logbooks Prove The Daily Telegraph, 24 November 2016
2) Trump To Scrap NASA Climate Research In Crackdown On ‘Politicized Science’
The Guardian, 23 November 2016
3) GWPF Climate Briefing: A Brief History Of Arctic Angst
GWPF Climate Briefing, November 2016
4) Reality Check: Donald Trump On Climategate & The Paris Agreement
GWPF, 23 November 2016
5) Bjorn Lomborg: Trump’s Climate Plan Might Not Be So Bad After All
The Washington Post, 21 November 2016
In 2009, Al Gore announced ‘there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.’ The dates by which climate scientists and politicians said the ice would disappear have come and gone, while the ice has remained. Undaunted, fresh predictions have been made in every subsequent year. One problem that persists is that there is still only a relatively short series of direct measurements on which to base our understanding of the Arctic. Satellite monitoring of the Arctic only began in 1978, giving us less than forty years of reliable data. This may not be enough to establish what is normal – or abnormal – for the region. Until the noise of a century of media hype and unscientific speculation about the Arctic has been removed from the public debate, science will be unable to explain what, if anything, the signal from the Arctic is telling us. —GWPF Climate Briefing, November 2016
Donald Trump plans to put NASA’s focus back on space exploration and cut away programs that study climate change. Bob Walker, an adviser to Trump, told The Guardian that the incoming president wants to keep NASA away from ‘politicized science.’ Other government agencies can take on climate research, he said. ‘We see NASA in an exploration role, in deep space research,’ Walker told the publication. ‘Earth-centric science is better placed at other agencies where it is their prime mission.’ –Francesca Chambers, Daily Mail, 23 November 2016
The international news media is reporting that Donald Trump has changed his mind on climate change and the Paris climate agreement. Yet the transcript of his New York Times interview shows it is far too early to know what the next US President will do about climate and energy policy. —GWPF, 23 November 2016
The election of Donald Trump and Republican majorities in both houses of Congress have terrified environmentalists and climate campaigners, who have declared that the next four years will be a “disaster.” Fear is understandable. We have much to learn about the new administration’s plans. But what little we know offers some cause for hope. Trump’s promise to dump Paris will matter very little to temperature rises, and it will stop the pursuit of an expensive dead end. –Bjorn Lomborg, The Washington Post, 21 November 2016
1) Antarctic Sea Ice Has Not Shrunk In 100 Years, Scott And Shackleton Logbooks Prove
The Daily Telegraph, 24 November 2016
Sarah Knapton
Antarctic sea ice had barely changed from where it was 100 years ago, scientists have discovered, after pouring over the logbooks of great polar explorers such as Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton.
Experts were concerned that ice at the South Pole had declined significantly since the 1950s, which they feared was driven by man-made climate change.
But new analysis suggests that conditions are now virtually identical to when the Terra Nova and Endurance sailed to the continent in the early 1900s, indicating that declines are part of a natural cycle and not the result of global warming.
 Scott’s ship the Terra Nova
It also explains why sea ice levels in the South Pole have begun to rise again in recent years, a trend which has left climate scientists scratching their heads.
“The missions of Scott and Shackleton are remembered in history as heroic failures, yet the data collected by these and other explorers could profoundly change the way we view the ebb and flow of Antarctic sea ice,” said Dr Jonathan Day, who led the study, which was published in the journal The Cryosphere.
“We know that sea ice in the Antarctic has increased slightly over the past 30 years, since satellite observations began. Scientists have been grappling to understand this trend in the context of global warming, but these new findings suggest it may not be anything new.
“If ice levels were as low a century ago as estimated in this research, then a similar increase may have occurred between then and the middle of the century, when previous studies suggest ice levels were far higher.”
 Captain Scott and team
The study was based on the ice observations recorded in the logbooks from 11 voyages between 1897 and 1917, including three expeditions led by Captain Scott, two by Shackleton, as well as sea-ice records from Belgian, German and French missions.
Captain Scott died along with his team in 1912 after losing to Norwegian Roald Amundsen in the race to the South Pole, while Shackleton’s ship sank after becoming trapped in ice in 1915 as he and his crew attempted the first land crossing of Antarctica.
The study is the first to calculate sea ice in the period prior to the 1930s, and suggests the levels in the early 1900s were between 3.3 and 4.3 million square miles (5.3 and 7.4 million square kilometres)
Estimates suggest Antarctic sea ice extent was significantly higher during the 1950s, before a steep decline returned it to around 3.7 million miles (6 million square kilometres) in recent decades which is just 14 per cent smaller than at the highest point of the 1900s and 12 per cent bigger than than the lowest point.
 One of the first aerial photographs of the Antarctic obtained from a balloon in 1901, showing Erich Von Drygalski’s ship The Gauss
The findings demonstrate that the climate of Antarctica fluctuated significantly throughout the 20th century and indicates that sea ice in the Antarctic is much less sensitive to the effects of climate change than that of the Arctic, which has experienced a dramatic decline during the 20th century.
In future the team plans to use data from naval and whaling ships as well as the logs from Amundsen’s expeditions to complete the picture.
Separate research by the British Antarctic Survey also showed that the present day loss of the Pine Island Glacier on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has been happening since the mid 20th century and was probably caused by El Nino activity rather than global warming.
Pine Island Glacier, which drains into the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica, is retreating and thinning rapidly, but the initial triggering mechanism was unclear. The team looked a sediment cores in the area which showed that an ocean cavity under the ice shelf began to form around 1945, following a pulse of warmth associated with El Niño events in the tropical Pacific Ocean.
See also: Estimating the extent of Antarctic summer sea ice during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration
The Cryosphere, 10, 2721-2730, 2016 — 21 November 2016
Tom Edinburgh and Jonathan J. Day
Abstract. In stark contrast to the sharp decline in Arctic sea ice, there has been a steady increase in ice extent around Antarctica during the last three decades, especially in the Weddell and Ross seas. In general, climate models do not to capture this trend and a lack of information about sea ice coverage in the pre-satellite period limits our ability to quantify the sensitivity of sea ice to climate change and robustly validate climate models. However, evidence of the presence and nature of sea ice was often recorded during early Antarctic exploration, though these sources have not previously been explored or exploited until now. We have analysed observations of the summer sea ice edge from the ship logbooks of explorers such as Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton and their contemporaries during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration (1897–1917), and in this study we compare these to satellite observations from the period 1989–2014, offering insight into the ice conditions of this period, from direct observations, for the first time. This comparison shows that the summer sea ice edge was between 1.0 and 1.7° further north in the Weddell Sea during this period but that ice conditions were surprisingly comparable to the present day in other sectors.
2) Trump To Scrap NASA Climate Research In Crackdown On ‘Politicized Science’
The Guardian, 23 November 2016
Oliver Milman
Donald Trump is poised to eliminate all climate change research conducted by Nasa as part of a crackdown on “politicized science”, his senior adviser on issues relating to the space agency has said.
Nasa’s Earth science division is set to be stripped of funding in favor of exploration of deep space, with the president-elect having set a goal during the campaign to explore the entire solar system by the end of the century.
Bob Walker, a senior Trump campaign adviser, said there was no need for Nasa to do what he has previously described as “politically correct environmental monitoring”.
“We see Nasa in an exploration role, in deep space research,” Walker told the Guardian. “Earth-centric science is better placed at other agencies where it is their prime mission.
“My guess is that it would be difficult to stop all ongoing Nasa programs but future programs should definitely be placed with other agencies. I believe that climate research is necessary but it has been heavily politicized, which has undermined a lot of the work that researchers have been doing. Mr Trump’s decisions will be based upon solid science, not politicized science.”
3) GWPF Climate Briefing: A Brief History Of Arctic Angst
GWPF Climate Briefing, November 2016
Until the noise of a century of media hype and unscientific speculation about the Arctic has been removed from the public debate, science will be unable to explain what, if anything, the signal from the Arctic is telling us.
 Click on image to watch video
In the last days of the Northern hemisphere’s summer, the sea ice that covers part of the Arctic Ocean reaches its minimum extent.
The annual change, recorded by satellites, has come to be seen as evidence of anthropogenic global warming, and a warning of what is to come.
It features in the global news every Summer. One journalist has called it the planet’s ‘white flag of surrender’, others the ‘Arctic Death Spiral’.
The lowest sea ice extent ever recorded was in 2012, and previous to that in 2007.
In the 2000s, a new trend of decreasing sea ice minimums seemed to be emerging. Whereas computer models had predicted that Arctic summer sea ice wouldn’t disappear until the middle of the century, the rate of decline seemed to be much faster.
The story of rapid, unnatural change and the plight of the polar bear became powerful symbols of climate change happening in real time. Campaigners launched high profile, swimming, kayaking and evidence-gathering missions to the North Pole to draw the media’s attention to the issue.
In 2007, media stories featured the claims of Prof. Wieslaw Maslowski, who claimed that the ice would be gone by 2013.
The following year, Mark Serreze, of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) predicted that 2008 could be “become ice free at the North Pole this year.”
And in 2009, Al Gore announced ‘there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.’
But the missions to the Arctic were hampered by bad weather, not open sea. And the dates by which climate scientists and politicians said the ice would disappear have come and gone, while the ice has remained.
Undaunted, fresh predictions have been made in every subsequent year.
2016 was no exception. In June, one scientist claimed that his prediction of an ice-free Arctic ocean might finally come true. The story made headlines throughout the world. But rather than disappearing, the joint-second lowest sea ice extent since 1978 was recorded…
Until the noise of a century of media hype and unscientific speculation about the Arctic has been removed from the public debate, science will be unable to explain what, if anything, the signal from the Arctic is telling us.
4) Reality Check: Donald Trump On Climategate & The Paris Agreement
GWPF, 23 November 2016
The international news media is reporting that Donald Trump has changed his mind on climate change and the Paris climate agreement.
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