By Jo Nova
Something big is going on around Antarctica, but climate experts have no idea what’s causing it
The ABC ran another Agony-Antarctica column in the news — talking about mysterious “rapid, interacting and sometimes self-perpetuating changes” in ominous but vague terms. Blob-Scientists hinted at ambiguous, unnamed, “changes” which might wipe out the cute emperor penguins, or at least non-specifically “heighten the risk” of their extinction, sometime, maybe.
“Scientists say there is emerging evidence of abrupt and potentially unstoppable changes in the Antarctic environment.
The changes are heightening the risk of significant sea level rise and the extinction of species, including emperor penguins.” — ABC “News”
Very unscientifically, none of the scientists pointed out that in 45 years of satellite data the entire south polar region below 60° has not even warmed. Isn’t that material? One point six trillion tons of man-made CO2 hasn’t warmed the continent in the last 45 years. Doesn’t that matter?
Tell the world, Antarctica is the most stable climate on the surface of Earth:
Nothing says global warming like a trend of 0.03°C per decade.
For decades they told us that Antarctica would warm twice as fast as most of the world. What happened to that? Nothing.
To put it bluntly, it was warmer in Antarctica a thousand years ago, and two thousand years ago and the penguins survived just fine. In fact The Penguin Optimum (they really call it that) was three or four thousand years ago when it was even warmer still. (Hall et al 2023). It was the horrible cold of the Little Ice Age that wiped out thousands of penguins. Lord forbid, that animals that manage to survive in the coldest place on Earth would want it to be even colder.
But none of these awkward points help feed The Blob, so the ABC doesn’t ask, and the scientists don’t say anything. Instead they talk about sea ice and currents, because it’s the only thing they have at the moment.
Playing the “Sea Ice” and “Ocean Currents” Tarot Card
Like fortune tellers turning over a tarot card, it doesn’t matter what card they flip — you need to pay them money.
Matthew England (UNSW) and Nerilie Abram (Australian Antarctic Division) seem to be more than happy to take a scientific mystery and turn it into a political tax campaign. They craft a story of spooky changes going on with Antarctic sea ice. The changes are real, but they don’t have the honesty to admit that they have no idea why the sea ice grew and then dropped off the way it has. Their models didn’t predict it, and it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with CO2. In 2013 Turner et al said the increase in Antarctic sea was one of the great unsolved puzzles of climate science. Then after it vanished Silvano et al said the decline was “completely unexpected.” In other words, they have no clue. The “sea ice” card flipped!
See the graph below: for thirty years Antarctic sea ice grew far and wide and set new records (the red line). Then in 2015, something changed and it dramatically shrank. CO2 has been rising the whole time, so it’s not the cause of the sharp shift in 2015.
Possibly, a big natural change in an ocean current caused the regime change, just like it has for millions of years.
Scientists are pretending to be fortune tellers in order to get our money
Copied below the “scientists” use their own ignorance to argue Australians should spend hundreds of millions to install solar panels and windmills in order to change ocean currents and save some penguins.
Iconic Antarctic species at risk amid ‘regime shift’, scientists say, with ‘rapid and self-perpetuating changes’
[ABC] “A regime shift has reduced Antarctic sea-ice extent far below its natural variability of past centuries, and in some respects is more abrupt, non-linear and potentially irreversible than Arctic sea-ice loss,” it says. Since 2014, the report says the median contraction of the Antarctic sea-ice edge has been around 120 kilometres.
The most significant decline was in the winter of 2023, which was so far below previous satellite records and historical modelling that scientists described it as “gobsmacking”.
Professor Abram said the report’s findings highlight the need to reduce carbon emissions. “The changes that we’re seeing in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean really reinforce the importance of these international agreements that we have for how we’re going to tackle climate change,” she said.
Buy carbon-credits or the penguin gets it?
As far as we can tell, penguins are pretty happy about getting rid of the sea ice. When people tracked Adelie penguins they found out that when more sea ice melts, the penguins ate more, swam further and have more baby penguins. Happy days.
The UAH satellite trend for Antarctica for the last 45 years was just 0.03°C warming per decade. Given that Emperor Penguins survive in anything from -60°C up to 20°C the penguins today would hardly care less about a pitiful extra tenth of one degree spread over nearly 50 years.
REFERENCES
Alison F. Banwell et al, Quantifying Antarctic‐Wide Ice‐Shelf Surface Melt Volume Using Microwave and Firn Model Data: 1980 to 2021, Geophysical Research Letters (2023). DOI: 10.1029/2023GL102744
Hall et al (2023) Widespread southern elephant seal occupation of the Victoria land coast implies a warmer-than-present Ross Sea in the mid-to-late Holocene, Quaternary Science Reviews, Volume 303, 1 March 2023, 107991
Mads Dømgaard et al, Early aerial expedition photos reveal 85 years of glacier growth and stability in East Antarctica, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-48886-x
Alessandro Silvano, Aditya Narayanan, Rafael Catany, Estrella Olmedo, Veronica Gonzalez; Gambau, Antonio Turiel, Roberto Sabia, Matthew R. Mazloff, Theo Spira, F. Alexander Haumann, Alberto C. Naveira Garabato. (2025) Rising surface salinity and declining sea ice: A new Southern Ocean state revealed by satellites. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2025; 122 (27) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2500440122
Photo: Ice by AlKalenski and Penguins by Denis Luyten
I love 5 sigma events.
Apparently it means that some event, which is rare because it is 5 standard deviations away from the mean. And then the amazing ‘leap of faith part’ this is interpreted to mean that the event is a one in some ‘amazing number of years’ event.
Here’s the problem. IF the standard deviation was based on EVERY single data point available from the Earth’s history, then the announcement may well and truly be worthwhile. BUT if the sample period, used to calculate the standard deviation is based on 50 years of data, then you can see that gross errors can be made in trying to stretch this into something that can predict rarity in a much longer period. Especially if the REAL data was distributed akin to a long duration sinusoidal wave AND all 50 of your data points were in the trough, or all at the peak or all were on the declining slope or all were on the rising slope. And that’s the problem. Short sample sets. You just can’t understand what you are measuring.
5 sigma implies a rarity of 0.00006% OR 1 in 1.6M.
I really wish that error bars were used in scientific reports. Like they used to be before religion took over.
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“Then in 2015, something changed”
I’m surprised that ‘tipping point’ is not mentioned.
They are always threatening that these will occur (sometime in the nebulous future)
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Wasn’t 2015 the year that Trump decided to run for President?
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So, obviously, if it is NOT Trump, it must be Gerbil Warning!
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If you are a researcher, particularly for climate, fear means funding.
If you are a bureaucrat, fear means regulatory power that can be used with carrots and sticks to control behavior albeit strictly within the realm of your jurisdiction.
Neither has to be right, just credible enough to make the money flow.
It’s a huge stretch to think that bureaucrats can control the weather, but it will likely take years to prove that, let alone detect any changes in the weather that are consequential.
However, it pretty easy to measure CO2 and account for the amount of fossil fuels being burnt and it’s getting more obvious each day that emissions are not being reduced, in fact they have been increasing by half a billion tons a year for the last 30 years. Emissions saved in the West by applying a straitjacket to industry are more than made up by the manufacturing sent to Asia.
People are getting wise the policy failures which are hitting people in their wallets. Political changes will follow.
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You’re right, change will follow as it has for example in Argentina. Hopefully the level of education in Australia will lead to our electorate realising change is needed before we go “full Argentina” or worse – Venezuela.
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I also listened to the interview on their ABCCC and found a lot missing.
There was no mention of the total ice mass down south nor the extent or depth of it.
All that came through was the reduction in standing room for the poor penguins and their offspring and that we are to blame because: just because.
But what can we expect from the science free abc.
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Broadly speaking, there may be two reasons why sea ice is reduced in comparison with recent times.
Firstly, we may be seeing the results of a colder Antarctic which makes the ice overburden more rigid or alternately it may not have rained, snowed or iced over the continental ice field.
In the second option it means that there’s less overburden to push down and push the lower ice sideways towards the point of least resistance; the waters edge.
Plastic deformation of ice is the big factor.
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Less ice brings more salinity?
That’s not how my computer mpdel works!
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Jo, while briefly scrolling through their ABCCC yesterday to see if there was a mention of the ongoing NSW rain/floods or the next snowfall on Bluff Knoll (early next week: cold) I saw this comical pile of penguin scat masquerading as sciencey stuff where the authors used big words such as –
unstoppable… gobsmacking… cascades… regime shift
and how humanity needs to tackle… carbon.
The language was more fitting for a rugby or league coach attempting to inspire team members as, we all know, both ‘games’ are religious crusades, no science needed, just charge like a wounded bull ($$$).
Rating: Bollocks.
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And then there was that sea level rise (3.0m) again ?
…Seriously ?… from melting sea ice ?
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I presume sea ice is like icebergs, floating in the sea. Therefore, like icebergs, about 90% of the volume is below the sea surface so the sea level already incorporates that volume.
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Saving penguins is hugely important for Guinness drinkers. As Al Murray says, you boil them up, white stuff floats to the top, black stuff stays at the bottom – Guinness – job done. Well it’s about as scientifically accurate as this alarmist BS. Assessment Marks – Fail. Must try harder.
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“Must try harder.”
Do NOT encourage them.
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Indeed!
Perhaps they could retrain as designers of doilies for plates of sandwiches …
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Maybe those volcanoes under Antarctica have something to do with it. Either way, the Penguins of Madagascar seem to like the warmth.
There was no mention of plankton or the whales in the surrounding waters with the alarmist melting of the sea ice. And why not?
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>the Penguins of Madagascar seem to like the warmth.
As do the Penguins of Galapagos which straddles the equator.
Ecuador sits astride the equator and has 2 types of penguins, the Galapagos Penguin and the Humboldt Penguin.
https://birdwatchinghq.com/penguins-of-ecuador/
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And Perth, a hot city, has penguins at its Penguin Island, slightly south of Perth.
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Adelaide has them too. Just as hot as Perth.
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It was a lot warmer during the Holocene optimum and SLs are 1.5 metres lower today than 4000 years ago.
Poor little penguins during the Eemian interglacial had to endure temps 8 C warmer than today and they survived and ditto the polar bears in the NH.
Yet very few Humans during the Eemian, so definitely no cars, ships or planes etc to add to that NATURAL warming.
And co2 levels were about 280 ppm then and 424 ppm today.
Lets not waste 100s of TRILLIONs for SFA change and start to wake up.
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I can only suppose the blob want to now use penguins as their poster child. They tried polar bears for a while, but you can only take them so far. The cubs look cute and the animals themselves have that lovely white fur. But, polar bears want to eat humans, so there’s that. Plus, they have actually increased in numbers. So let’s move on to the next threatened species. In the Shrek movie, donkey says everyone love parfait. Everyone loves penguins, right? So we must all feel sorry for them and build more wind turbines or something.
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Does Susan Crockford know anything about penguins?
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A penguin walks into a bar and asks the barmaid (oops! non-binary refreshment purveyor) if he/she/it has seen his brother.
“I’m not sure” they say. “What does he look like”
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A polar bear walks into a bar.
The bartender asks him what he’d like
“A gin … … … … and tonic, please”
“Why the big pause?” asked the bartender.
The bear looked down, almost bashfully, and replied “I’ve always had them …”.
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The Blobsters think that Sigma events lead to Omega men.
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Good movie The Omega Man.
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I find it amusing that every article about these dramatic changes concludes that we need to stop burning fossil fuels or buy carbon credits without there ever being an establishment of a causal link between CO2 and climate.With all the money spent on changing the climate I’m not aware of a single person having been saved by the erection of a wind turbines or some solar panels.
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Even if there was a causal link between CO2 and climate, that still does not produce a link between an event (such as ice melting) and climate change.
Somewhere higher in this thread someone referred to the volcanoes of Antartica. These can cause melting of sea ice and nothing to do with climate.
Let alone if reducing global temperatures (even if it were possible) produces a benefit at all, let alone for the exorbitant price.
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It’s a tragedy that Australia is squandering scientific research funds (paid for by taxpayers not “the Government” as Leftists think) and spending them on fortune telling and not science.
It’s also a tragedy that the $1 billion dollar plus Their ABC is violating its charter of impartiality and using taxpayer (not Government) money for promoting Klimate Krisis Propaganda for the benefit of the subsidy harvesters and Civilisation destroyers.
Incidentally, both factions of the Uniparty continue to support Their ABC and refuse to defund it. There was a moment of elation by thinking people when Ita Buttrose was appointed Chair of Their ABC because they thought she was a conservative and would restore ABC to its legal obligation of impartiality but one of her first pronouncements was that she could see no bias.
Also, the Albanese regime has entrenched funding for Their ABC by putting it on a five year rather than three yearly cycle. Thus, in the unlikely event of Australia getting a rational Government, it would be much harder to defund it. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-16/government-announces-abc-funding-boost/104733104
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Their ABC is the propaganda arn of Liebor. It’s also funded by the taxpayer.
It’s a win-win for Labor and they would be mad to defund it.
The Libs are too scared of the media backlash to defund it.
They disappoint me on so many issues.
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Here is the paper that the ABC and others are writing about. I guess it wasn’t included in citations because the post only discussed media interviews and impressions rather than science. Maybe the science will be discussed some day?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09349-5
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No comments to make about Jo’s article? If it’s wrong in some way, perhaps you could point out the errors?
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What substantial thing do you think there is to comment on? 90% of her post was about things that weren’t reported. I agree that they weren’t.
I don’t agree that the reporting of the science is more worthy of discussion than looking at the science.
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Oh? Was there a paper. The ABC kept talking about a report (21 times). They didn’t use the word “paper” or link to a scientific reference, but I guess they only have a billion dollars to work with.
Thanks for the link GeeAye. Did you send it to the ABC too?
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They referenced it
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Where? There is one paragraph with the word “Nature”. Is that what you call a reference?
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Any paper that begins with “human-caused climate change” is unscientific and belongs in the fiction section!
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It’s all part of the circular reasoning. Carbon dioxide causes climate change therefore climate change is caused by carbon dioxide. Hurricane Beryl was caused by climate change, therefore climate change caused Hurricane Beryl. As far as Antarctica, https://notrickszone.com/2025/05/13/antarctic-ice-is-increasing-climate-models-no-longer-reflect-reality/
In 2014 NOAA blamed record Antarctic sea ice on global warming – Antarctic winter sea ice extent sets new record in 2014. So increase in sea ice caused by climate change. Decrease in sea ice caused by climate change. Settled science or what?
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Err ?…have they not noticed that… “emmission reductions pathways”… are having NO effect on any percieved climate change metric ?
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And we’ve been told, over and over again, that [insert location here] is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, to the point that everywhere is warming twice as fast as everywhere else. They don’t even think about the logic of their claims; they just plug the names into their “evil anthropogenic climate change” slogan generator to produce the latest apocalyptic claim for the media to suck up uncritically and flog across the planet.
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That’s because there are no real “emissions reductions pathways”, see China, India, and most other countries.
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I might do what most other people do. Read the abstract. If it’s mentions anything about man made climate change, then it’s not science, it’s Scientology.
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That’s how you found yourself here.
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What brought you?
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Leaf, let us talk about what caused the huge increase in sea ice?
I instinctively believed it was related to ENSO, but it was in neutral, so we are left with a talking point.
‘Analysis of anomaly patterns and the atmospheric and oceanic events suggests that a sequence of regional wind and cold-freshened surface waters is likely responsible for the record maximum and the generally high 2013 extent.’ (Reid et al 2017)
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Not sure there is strong evidence for calling it a huge increase in ice extent given a lack of data.
ENSO is part of the system and Antarctica feels its affect. If there is correlation in this short time frame it could indicate that ENSO was important but it in no way means it is always important. There could be things that frequently override or mask it, making this snapshot atypical.
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Eastern Pacific and Central Pacific El Nino.
‘A dry version of the Princeton atmospheric general circulation model was applied to verify the roles of anomalous heating in the tropics.
‘The result showed that EP El Niño can remotely induce an anomalous anticyclone and associated dipole temperature pattern in the Antarctic region, whereas CP El Niño generates a similar anticyclone pattern with its location shift westward by 20° in longitudes.’ (Zhang et al 2021)
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:\
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The 2014-16 El Nino was one of the strongest ever recorded. Coincidently the Arctic had the lowest sea ice on record, while Antarctic sea ice reached a new high record extent in 2014.
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The very first line of the abstract is palpable nonsense. It is a statement of opinion without any evidence.
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As I keep saying, a lot of these claims relate to Leftists/warmists believing in a static Earth that never has changed and never will, just as did Aristotle.
They simply do not understand that the Earth system is constantly changing both over the long term and the short term of human history (e.g. in which we have had the Minoan, Egyptian, Roman and Medieval warm periods in which Civilisation thrived, humans and nearly all living creatures love warmth but do poorly in cold).
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I’m an agriculturalist. If you look at all those ancient civilizations they flourished because the climatic conditions favored large scale agriculture. Large enough to support big human populations and also the ability of humans to be specialists. Specialists like builders, medicine people, maybe even engineer type people. Then all those civilizations crashed due to abrupt climate change over time periods of decades to centuries. Supposedly agriculture only dates back to 12k years ago, but it was probably in more advanced forms prior. The technology was remembered and agriculture probably persisted , but on a much smaller scale. The lesson to be learned- there’s going to be real climate change again, not the pretend AGW type. It’s going to be disastrous for humankind, so we need to be resilient. Building energy systems based on thin energy just wont cut it, for example. That’s also what the penguins are telling us, if they could talk.
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Nothing to see here, Folks. Now, move along back to rational thought!
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There aren’t any heat islands in Antarctica, so it is hard to create a heating trend there like they do everywhere else. It is also hard to create a poorly sited temperature gauge, no highways or busy airports.
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Along with the penguin extinction story, ABC 720 yesterday ran an interview with a GP who is anti-the Browse Gas Project. Her (their) complaint was about the increasing
levels of mental distress amongst young people who are concerned for their futures, clearly at risk because of fossil fuels (their opinion).
As I was at risk in running off the road I was able to turn my fossil fueled car radio off just in time.
Folks like this GP and the ABC are the cause of mental distress and anxiety IMHO. It’s akin to brainwashing. Living without the benefit of fossil fuels will be more harmful!
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Yes. They are being cruelly indoctrinated by warmists and Leftists. The same people who also mislead them to believe they are born in the “wrong” body and encourage them to have sterilising and mutilating hormones and surgeries and also other anti-science, anti-reason nonsense.
A mother who is a friend of mine had her daughter come home in tears and terrified because a government instructor visited her school and told the children the planet and all its plants and animals were dying and we have to stop burning fossil fuels, using plastics etc. blah, blah, blah. I was asked to counsel and educate the child why this wasn’t happening and I also bought her a book.
The indoctrination of children in this Klimate Kult by these sadistic adults is cruel and shameful and is actually a form of child abuse.
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“Living without the benefit of fossil fuels will be more harmful!”
Stanley, absolutely.
I try to get my grandkids to appreciate what life was like – even in the UK – a hundred or 200 years ago.
Plumbing and electricity were rudimentary – my grandparents got an indoor toilet only in the mid 1960s [tied cottage in the country].
Telephone was landline – and not everyone had one of those, even in the 1960s.
200 years ago, almost everyone worked physically, on the land or in factories [‘dark satanic mills’], usually for a 5.5 or 6 day week – 10 [or more] hours a day; life expectancy much less, and no antibiotics, or anaesthesia; a bad tooth could kill you.
I won’t go on.
But fossil-fuel-free paradise it certainly was not [and nor will it be if the Brezhnevites do succeed in forcing us to regress that far!].
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One has to ask the question: 🔥
If the “expert Climate Scientists” were asked in a Court of Law under sworn oath that the scientific evidence that they provide to Governments was based on proven factual truth, would they be charged with perjury if they said yes? 😱👩⚖️
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Solutions 101: 😱
People cause the demand for energy so to reduce the carbon footprint of coal burning nations all one has to do is reduce the excessive over population causing the excessive demand for energy in those nations. 🔥🔥🔥
Too easy.
Next problem.
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They’re working on it.
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Before penguins go exinct (/sarc) here’s Shackleton’s recipe for penguin breasts to try.
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Presumably the Penguin appetizer is followed by the main course of Jugged Hare, with a sauce of truffles, bacon, Grand Marnier, anchovies and cream. For drinks; six bottles of Chateau Latour, a Methusalah of champagne, and half a dozen crates of brown ale. For conclusion; a wafer-thin mint!
/Mr Creosote/ Monty Python.
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A 1934 Château Mouton Rothschild might go down nicely as well…
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Australian shearer caught a Cockatoo and being short on meat decided to cook it and asked the camp cook how it’s done. He said just get a bucket of water, add salt, add an old work boot and boil for several hours. Remove boot and eat it.
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David, your advice as to the wine to go with it?
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interesting that a temperature measurement of of the lower troposphere (and it does miss Mt Erabus), and an avowed “climate Realist” who is not a climate scientist are used to refute the measurements and inferences made by real climate scientists. Lets measure apples in relation to oranges shall we
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Define “real Klimate scientist” in a way they includes Tim Flummery as one.
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so you are saying that a non climate scientist like Mr Flannery is in the same group as the disgraced non-climate scientist Peter Ridd, and the the star of this post ‘Ole Humlum’ – that seem fair to me
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To translate: Peter Ridd reported scientific malpractice. Thus “disgraced” means someone “sold out” the Blob in order to serve the citizens and seek the truth.
You are at one with The Blob, aren’t you Peter?
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As I said previously, the following are NOT ‘climate scientists’ (sic) – Al Gore, Barak Obama, John Kerry, King Charles, Prince William, Ed Milliband, Keir Starmer, Antonio Guterres, Ursula von der Leyen, Greta Thunberg, Leonardo di Caprio, Anthony Albanese, Chris Bowen, Bob Brown, Adam Bandt, Tim Flannery, Jacinta Allan, the entire staff of the ABC, BBC, BOM, CSIRO, UN, Guardian, every Australian university, etc., etc. I’m sure you can all add to the list.
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Define “real climate scientist” Mr Fitzroy — these are the ones that predicted Antarctica would warm catastrophically, and it didn’t warm at all, and who said the sea ice would vanish, then it hit record highs? The same people who now pretend that the dramatic decline they didn’t see coming somehow proves their religious fantasy is correct?
The whole hypothesis testing thing is a bit too hard for you Peter, isn’t it?
Feel free to post temperatures from on the ground which show a warming trend or proxies that show Antarctica is warming now or any time in the last 5000 years.
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The Antarctic Peninsula, a popular tourist destination, is one of the most rapidly warming places in the Southern Hemisphere, with average summer temperatures increasing by over 5°F (3°C) between 1970 and 2020.
Since 1950, the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed almost 3°C (5.4°F). That’s more warming than anywhere else in the Southern Hemisphere. Overall warmer temperatures along the peninsula are increasing ice melt and have caused several ice shelves to break apart.
AS to Real Climate Scientist
this definition from the American Chemical Society will do (https://www.acs.org/climate-science/what-is-climate-science.html#:~:text=Climate%20science%20is%20the%20effort,infrared%20radiation%20in%20the%201850s.)
Climate science is the effort by humans to understand the natural forces that control the climate. A planet’s climate is driven by the energy of the Sun falling on the planet’s surface, which varies widely depending on latitude and the season. Climate is ultimately determined by the complex interplay between that energy and the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and land masses.
Climate science is not a new discipline. Scientists have been thinking about why the Earth has the temperature it does for at least 200 years, starting with work done by French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier in the 1820s, who speculated that the Earth’s atmosphere played a role in trapping heat energy being reradiated from the planet’s surface. The Irish chemist John Tyndall first showed that water vapor, carbon dioxide, and other gases absorbed infrared radiation in the 1850s
Some real climate scientists include Wallace Broecker, James Hansen, Phil Jones, Syukuro Manabe, Michael Mann, Susan Solomon, and Katharine Hayhoe. Other notable figures include paleoclimatologist Nerilie Abram, oceanographer David Archer, and climate modelers such as Andrew Weaver and Myles Allen.
But stay with your lot if you want, geomorphologers describing climate changes is like asking a brain suregeon to have a look at your heart
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Ahh yes. The first line in your first link says “The polar regions are the first to be affected by the heating climate” yet the Antarctic isn’t warming (UAH data). Says a lot doesn’t it?
If only you had some data that supported you, you wouldn’t have to resort to quoting opinions of people who are paid to find to a crisis and don’t know what science is. You and they have no long term data, none at all, that shows that anything in Antarctic is outside the normal variations. All they do is flip over Antarctic Tarot Cards, and pretend whatever the latest trend in anything is, it means they are right, even if they predicted the opposite.
I don’t “stay with any lot (of scientists)” — I’ll stick with the data.
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PS: The Antarctic Peninsula is about 3% of Antarctica. It has warmed, but also happens to sit on top of a chain of volcanoes.
I’m so crazy, I thought CO2 was supposed to warm the whole atmosphere?
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Peter, your quote only refers to the ‘tiny’ Antarctic Peninsula that forms an 800-mile northward extension of Antarctica toward the southern tip of South America.
It’s long been known ocean current changes and/or vulcanism may be at play there, and the vast massive majority of Antarctica is stable with the east probably cooling, cancelling out any warming for Antarctica as a whole.
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And West Antarctica, which extends up into the sub-Antarctic region, is the area with many undersea volcanoes.
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Do you think that the active volcanos there might have any influence on that region’s temperature and the ice shelves?
And Michael (hockey stick) Mann. LOL.
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Peter, from your link: ‘The water in the Southern Ocean is also warming.’
Flat out wrong.
‘Global climate models predict that the ocean around Antarctica should be warming, but in reality, those waters have cooled over most of the past four decades.
‘The discrepancy between model results and observed cooling, Stanford University scientists have now found, comes down mainly to missing meltwater and underestimated rainfall.’ (Phys.org)
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If that is the best you have then you failed miserably since rebuttals without evidence/facts is a road to nowhere.
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Glad to hear the penguins can take care of themselves.
The ABC also ran another related story last night with an attention-grabbing headline.
Blackout warnings for Queenslanders ahead of summer from Australian Energy Market Operator.
As nobody has been building new fossil fuel plants in Qld lately, the delayed project commissioning must be renewables and batteries.
The conservationists blame coal:
To be fair, the report shows in figure 22 that the coal fleet had more unplanned outages than the other types.
The full report is called 2025 Electricity Statement of Opportunities.
It contains a relevant fact that the ABC didn’t report:
So the emergency reserve generators can cover the gap.
The short term solutions (ABC):
For any Qld consumers who agreed to the Demand Management scheme (for that one-time sweetener of $400) they can expect their air-conditioner to be brought down a few notches this summer. That plus the emergency reserves will probably prevent the blackout of the headline.
Another interesting observation from the report (section 5.3 pg 89):
So they are aware of the main risk to reliability being closing the coal plants. Note also in figure 36 how bad the reliability outlook is (in terms of UnServed Energy) even after the reliability standard itself is loosened in 2028. Reliability is being risked on-plan.
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“To be fair, the report shows in figure 22 that the coal fleet had more unplanned outages than the other types.”
To be fair, that depends on your definition of “unplanned outages”. If they were defined as a cut off of power at any time that was not scheduled”, then solar and wind would have dozens a day, whenever a cloud passed over or the wind dropped.
But that would ruin the ever so precious “narrative”.
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Good point. I searched the report and could not find their definition of “unplanned outage”.
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Why do they always start that northern hemisphere chart from 1979? Can you guess?
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Image-4475.png
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That was around the end of the great “New Ice Age” media and scientific panic.
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There was a large 8.1 earthquake near the Chilean coast at Iquique on April 1, 2014. About a year before the sudden drop in ice cover.
The 1960 Valdivia earthquake is known to have had an impact on the local climate because of changes in ocean currents. Annual rainfall dropped by almost a factor 3 lin some places.
A change in deep ocean currents, perhaps?
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Ed, you may be right.
I don’t know.
But this highlights, again, how little we actually know about influences on the climate.
Obviously, some folk think they know … even if their predictions aren’t in the right hemisphere, let alone the right parish.
And politicians listen to those who shout loudest, it seems.
Or whoever last talked to them.
Yes, we do know ‘things’ that affect the climate. Maybe not all of them, I suggest.
Most of the time, for those ‘things’, it seems we are not confident of even the sign of the effects, after various feedbacks.
Far less the amount.
And we are to revert to a Seventeenth Century Civilisation on that basis, as a well-dined Socialist in a big building in NYC doesn’t understand the Fahrenheit temperature scale?
Auto
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And at the other end of the world
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/08/22/the-arctic-stays-frozen-while-climate-science-melts/
“In the Guardian this week, environment editor Damian Carrington reports on a new scientific study published in Geophysical Research Letters. “The melting of sea ice in the Arctic has slowed dramatically in the past 20 years, scientists have reported, with no statistically significant decline in its extent since 2005,” he wrote.”
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