Via Linnea Lueken
The Washington Post (WaPo) published a story explaining how a 600-square-mile block of ice broke away from Antarctica, and scientists don’t believe it’s due to climate change.
This is indeed true and WaPo should be praised for publishing a scientific paper on spectacular natural phenomena without attempting to link it to climate change.
WaPo writer and meteorologist Dan Stillman addressed the recent drama of a large chunk of ice breaking off Antarctica’s Brunt Ice Shelf, in a post titled “Giant iceberg separates from Antarctica. The aerial view is ‘spectacular. Stillman reports that calving occurs “during a particularly high tide known as the spring tide” and has been expected by researchers in Antarctica for years now after a major rift formed and expanded.
The paper goes into detail on the theory and mechanics of the ice shelf as well as the natural evolution of the deep that ultimately caused the split—in part due to evolution of the ice shelf itself.
Stillman wrote, “Unlike some previous icebergs and ice shelf collapses that have related to climate changeA BAS press release said the disruption was a “natural process” and “there is no evidence that climate change plays a significant role.”
This is the only time in the paper that Stillman attempts to attribute Antarctic ice in general to climate change. To Stillman’s credit, that’s far more plausible than the blind hysteria surrounding an earlier ice melt in the spring of 2022, in which a smaller portion of the eastern Antarctic ice shelf broke off, and media headlines falsely claimed that this was a “first in history”. history” that such an iceberg has collapsed. As those stories run, Climate realism shown, herethat this is only the first time a satellite observed the collapse of the ice shelf east of Antarctica.
There’s very little to worry about when it comes to melting Antarctic ice. Data is collected from Climate at a glance: Melting ice in the Antarctic Sea shows that recent ice loss in Antarctica is only a small drop compared to the total mass of ice on the continent, nor is the loss causing any significant or alarming acceleration in sea level rise.
The figure below illustrates how dramatic ice loss appears to have produced almost no indentation, compared with all the ice that exists on the Antarctic continent.
Later in the article, the WaPo journalist quotes senior researcher at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Ted Scambos, reiterating that this calving event “is just part of how the Southern ice sheet works. Polar” and it usually “has nothing to do with” any force related to climate change.
Praise goes to scientists and journalists like Dan Stillman, who refrain from trying to include this natural event in the climate alarm narrative, which all too often overshadow good science.
https://www.heartland.org/about-us/who-we-are/linnea-lueken
Linnea Lueken is a Research Fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy. As a Heartland Institute intern in 2018, she co-authored the Heartland Institute Policy Brief “Unmasking Four Persistent Myths About Hydraulic Fracture”.
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