If you pay attention to the corporate media, even if it’s just a drive-by glance in your news feed or from some search result, you’ll have heard this one. Massive polar ice loss! We’re doomed! It’s accelerating. We’ll be inundated!
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The drama queen media makes money on cataclysmic headlines. Even the indifferent or untrusting will look. The same way you want to grab a copy of the Sun or the Globe when social distancing at the grocery store checkout. Priest Explodes! Secret Clinton Alien Baby to run for Congress! Creepy Joe Biden wins Mensa Award!
Sadly, some people believe in those stories. The ice-melt ones, I mean. And not just because they seek that dreamy climate socialism. In an increasingly secular world where life is rendered meaningless, human beings seek validation. Hey, look, I can destroy the planet, but I can also save it (cue chorus of genderless winged spirit guides).
The socialists know it, and their allies in the media “work the room.”
“Earth’s great ice sheets, Greenland and Antarctica, are now losing mass six times faster than they were in the 1990s thanks to warming conditions.”
…
Greenland and Antarctica are now melting six times faster than in the 1990s, accelerating sea-level rise.”
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The two regions [Greenland and Antarctica] have lost 6.4 trillion tons of ice in three decades; unabated, this rate of melting could cause flooding that affects hundreds of millions of people by 2100.
Cool, sorry, I meant that’s so hot except for one tiny problem which Edward Ring addresses (the source of the quotes) here.
This sounds like a lot of ice, “6.4 trillion tons.” But it’s not. …
If you dropped this ice cube in the world’s oceans and let it melt, it would raise the level of the oceans by 18 millimeters—that’s 9/16ths of one inch.
But wait, the lie behind all this caterwauling gets better.
To focus on Antarctica, the report in Nature claimed Antarctica is losing, in recent years, 190 gigatons of ice per year, an amount that supposedly portends an ominous future for coastal cities around the world.
But the total ice mass of Antarctica is generally estimated at 26.5 million gigatons. This means that the participating scientists claim they can observe a change in the total ice mass of Antarctica of one seven millionths per year.
You can’t even make an easily comprehensible fraction for an amount this infinitesimal. Expressed using decimals, it’s .000007.
That’s your massive polar ice loss. A not-problem that is probably even less of a problem, according to Ring.
How on earth—using satellite-based imagers screaming through a polar orbit at nearly 20,000 miles per hour, observing a continent 5.4 million miles in area, covered with an ice sheet that is up to three miles thick—can these scientists claim with confidence that they’re detecting an annual change in the total ice mass of .0007 percent—and, worse, announce this to the world as if it’s terrifying?
Not only are the alarming headlines based on nothing, the “nothing” about which they are alarmed isn’t even big enough to be a rounding error.
Massive Bulls**t is a more accurate description of the crisis we face.
Related: Making Gasoline Cost More Won’t Stop the Natural Geologic Process of Vertical Land Motion…
If you are the curious sort, as opposed to being a Warmest Chicken-Little, Ring provides a bit more detail here, and several resources explaining how difficult and complicated is the polar ice prediction game. Much like Sea-level Rise, the matter often has nothing at all to do with ice, or melt, or warming.
Here in the Northeast, where the Warming Alarmism stupid is strong, it’s geology. And not a single sacrifice in their long list will prevent Isostatic rebound. Not even socialism. And so it is with ‘ice loss,’ and the rest of it.
