RUTHFULLY YOURS

Our southernmost continent is, we’ve been told, the suffocating canary in the global coal mine. The more ice loss in Antarctica, the greater trouble we’re in. So what do we make of a study which found that between 2021 and 2023, there was a record-breaking increase in the Antarctic Ice Sheet?

We mark it down as another in a long line of misses from the global warming zealots.

“Notably, four major glaciers in the Wilkes Land–Queen Mary Land region of East Antarctica reversed their previous pattern of accelerated mass loss from 2011 to 2020 and instead showed significant mass gain during the 2021 to 2023 period,” says an article in SciTechDaily summarizing the report from Tongji University researchers.

How could such an unanticipated event happen?

“The study points to anomalous precipitation as the primary driver, suggesting that natural variability plays a significant role in short-term ice sheet changes,” says climate site Watts Up With That? It also “underscores the complexity of Antarctica’s ice system and the pitfalls of oversimplified climate narratives.”

Of the latter, we’ve had more than enough.

But then the entire global warming story line is driven by politics, not science. A short list of the many missed climate predictions could start this way:

• Twenty-five years ago the smart people said “snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.”
• “Major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.”
• Glaciers were to be gone from Glacier National Park by 2020, but they’re still there.
• No glaciers on Mount Kilimanjaro either. They were supposed to have vanished by 2020. But they’re still there, though they have been melting since the ’80s – the 1880s, when researchers first began to track them.
• The insufferable John Kerry declared at various times we have fewer than 100 months or 12 years or 10 years or four years or 500 days to save Earth from man’s fossil fuel use.
• New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in 2019 that Miami will not exist “in a few years” due to the effects of global warming.
• She also suggested “the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”
• Six years ago then-California Gov. Jerry Brown was so sure that global warming was near that he said “in less than five years, even the worst skeptics will be believers.” Absolutely nothing has happened since that would convince a skeptic to become one of the faithful.
• And then there’s climate alarmist in chief Al Gore. To see a collection of his foolish predictions, see our editorial from August 2019.
• Thirty-five years ago, the Washington Post was sure that CO2, “the gas most responsible for predictions that Earth will warm,” will force temperatures up “on average by about 3 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2020.” The U.S. was going to suffer the most “because it occupies a large continent in higher latitudes” and “could warm by as much as 6 degrees Fahrenheit.“
• Finally, there was the 1997 prediction – and hope – that global warming would kill 8 million by 2020. More than 7 million died prematurely over the next several years starting in 2020, but that was in no way connected to greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate science has been hijacked and weaponized. The media breathlessly report, with no evidence but plenty of speculation, that man is killing his planet with carbon dioxide emissions; politicians promise impending doom if their big-spending, liberty-violating legislation isn’t passed; celebrities bully the common people and elevate their status while doing the things they tell the rest of us we can’t do; activist researchers produce biased, agenda-based and corrupted work; and witless fanatics block productive citizens from getting to their jobs, hold up traffic, deface art and vandalize public property.

The behavior of all of the above is lousy and worse, and we will continue to point it out as well as present the facts that debunk the nonsense we see every day. It’s our duty to bring as much clarity to the muddied global warming tale as we are possibly able.