One of the better pieces of advice anyone can give or receive in almost any matter is "always see for yourself." Direct observation is a great tool, not just for everyday life but also in the sciences. Seeing something and measuring it directly, assuming those results are honestly reported, is how science should be done.
The problem comes when the actual observational data runs up against people with an agenda. Like, the climate scolds when they hear about the latest work being done evaluating the Antarctic ice, which it turns out isn't showing any long-term shrinking after all.
Sensational new discoveries arising from long-forgotten early aerial photographs indicate that ice has remained stable and even grown slightly since the 1930s over a 2,000 km stretch of East Antarctica. In a recent paper published in Nature Communications, researchers from the University of Copenhagen came to their conclusions by tracking glacial movement in an area with as much ice as the Greenland ice sheet. The findings are unlikely to feature in narrative-driven mainstream media. The silence will probably replicate the response to another recent paper that found the ice shelves surrounding Antarctica grew in overall size from 2009-2019.
Early aerial photographs, of course, are direct evidence. There are presumably fixed features - rocks, coastline - that can be used to scale the photographs and determine the size and flow rates of any ice sheets. And it turns out these photographs cover a pretty good period - almost a century. That's an eyeblink in geologic time, but it's well within the margin of panic for climate scolds, who keep insisting we only have a matter of months to keep the earth from actually catching fire. Or freezing solid. Whichever it is this week.
The Copenhagen scientists examined hundreds of old aerial photographs taken for mapping work in 1937. The images were supplemented with a number of photographs taken in the 1950s and 1974 of the same area and a 3D computer reconstruction was produced. This allowed the researchers to examine the evolution of glaciers over a significant time period. In order to determine if recent trends exceed the scale of natural variability, long-term observations are said to be vital.
Yes, observations - meaning, looking at actual evidence.
“Compared to modern data, the ice flow speeds are unchanged. While some glaciers have thinned over shorter intermediate periods of 10-20 years, they have remained stable or grown slightly in the long term, indicating a system in balance,” it was noted.
Balance is an ever-shifting thing over geologic time; it wasn't all that long ago, on that scale, that Antarctica was covered in temperate forest. But in human time scales, there just isn't anything here to get excited about. Antarctica is covered with ice, and while that ice varies in the short term, there appear to be no long-term trends - at least, not on the human time scale - that we need to worry over.
That seems to be a common theme on this topic lately.
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This isn't the only such report about Antarctica.
Over the last seven decades there has been little or no warming over large areas of the continent. What warming there has been, on the west side, is directly on top of a large number of volcanoes. A recent paper from Singh and Polvani found that Antarctica sea ice “has modestly expanded, a finding that seems to confirm the work on the ice shelf increases between 2009-2019. Warming has been “nearly non-existent” over 70 years, state Singh and Polvani. According to NASA figures, the ice loss is 0.0005% a year. As an example of how humans cause the climate to warm by burning hydrocarbons and eating meat, Antarctica leaves a lot to be desired.
This, folks, is why the climate scolds work so hard to bury any data counter to their projections - because it just doesn't fit their panic-mongering. Today's finding is just such an example, a study done by direct observation of historical photographs, which is supported by other studies showing similar results, specifically, that Antarctica's ice sheets exhibit unsurprising behavior. Some years, the ice grows; other years, it recedes. But over time, it's stable. No worries; no problems; stable.
The legacy media, the left (but I repeat myself), and the climate scolds will, of course, ignore this study and the studies that support it and continue to insist we surrender our comfortable modern lifestyles. But the data keeps on piling up - from the south pole to the north - and it's making it harder, day by day, for them to keep singing that same old climate-panic song.
