NASA Study Showing Massive Ice Growth Debunks UN Claims

In a barely noticed statement released last week, NASA dropped the equivalent of a nuclear bomb on the United Nations’ climate-alarmism machine, noting that ice across Antarctica has been growing at break-neck speed for decades. The surging ice growth, of course, directly contradicts the predictions of global-warming alarmists, including a 2013 report by the increasingly discredited UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claiming, falsely as it turns out, that Antarctica was losing ice at an accelerating rate and causing rising sea levels, all supposedly owing to humanity’s emissions of the “gas of life” CO2.

 

NASA, an outfit that has been under fire for cranking out politicized and easily discredited warming alarmism in recent years, spoke very diplomatically in its press release. It said only that its new study on Antarctic ice “challenges” the conclusions of the UN IPCC and other outfits that have allegedly studied the issue. In fact, though, the UN warmists and their cheerleaders in the establishment press could not have been more wrong. Rather than melting ice in the southern hemisphere contributing to sea-level rise, as claimed by the UN and its pseudo-scientific climate body, ice in Antarctica is expanding fast and has been for decades — and the surging ice levels are actually causing declines in sea level.

 

The New American has for years been reporting on Antarctica’s record-breaking levels of sea ice. Until this year broke the streak, Antarctic sea-ice levels smashed through record highs three years in a row, satellite images showed. But the phenomenal ice growth actually goes even deeper than that. According to the new study, published in the Journal of Glaciology, satellite data shows the Antarctic ice sheet featured a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001 — in other words, more than a trillion tons of ice in less than a decade. Between 2003 and 2008, Antarctica gained some 82 billion tons of ice annually.

 

“We’re essentially in agreement with other studies that show an increase in ice discharge in the Antarctic Peninsula and the Thwaites and Pine Island region of West Antarctica,” explained Jay Zwally, a glaciologist with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and lead author of the new study. “Our main disagreement is for East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica — there, we see an ice gain that exceeds the losses in the other areas.” According to NASA, virtually all of the net growth has come from eastern Antarctica, which gained an estimated 200 billion tons of ice per year between 1992 and 2008. Those gains dwarf the much-touted losses from western Antarctica, which amounted to some 65 billion tons per year.

 

Compare those facts to claims made by the UN IPCC. In 2007, for example, the UN outfit claimed the ice sheets of Antarctica “are very likely shrinking,” with Antarctica “contributing 0.2 ± 0.35 mm yr–1 to sea level rise over the period 1993 to 2003.” The UN also claimed there was “evidence” of “accelerated loss through 2005.” It also claimed, falsely, that thickening of “high-altitude, cold regions” of east Antarctica “has been more than offset by thinning in coastal regions” of West Antarctica. In 2013, the UN doubled down on its false claim, and claimed even greater sea-level rises attributed to Antarctica.

 

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