By Jo Nova
Antarctica defies the experts
Two studies out this year suggest that something shifted in Antarctica recently and no one knows what it was. In 2016 Antarctic Sea Ice surrounding the continent mysteriously started to disappear. At the same time more snow started accumulating on the main Antarctic ice-sheet (Fig 2b).
The GRACE satellite, measures the total surface mass — with all the gains as well as the losses — and suggests after 20 years of decline the steadily falling trend has broken.
What matters most in this story is that the climate models didn’t see this change coming, and therefore are missing at least one big crucial factor, or maybe ten. Who knows?
Antarctica was supposed to suffer polar amplification, and heat twice as fast as the rest of the world. What happened to that?
Wang, Wei, et al 2025. Mass Changes from the AIS from 2002 – 2023. The grey shadow shows the gap between GRACE and GRACE-FO.
The Climate Blob quickly issued a Fact Check, because it was fueling “climate denial” which is like Ebola or something, and must be stopped immediately. So the scientists who didn’t predict any of these shifts in Antarctica, now tell us it is only temporary “due to the weather”. Presumably their climate models have finally started working, at least until the next time they turn out to be wrong.
A second paper by a different Wang (S) et al, also used the GRACE satellite (NASA’s Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment). According to the paper, the Antarctic Ice Sheet was melting and adding 0.2-0.4mm each year to global sea levels. But after 2020 it has been reducing global sea levels by 0.3mm a year instead.
Timeseries of monthly Antarctic mass variation in Gt since April 2002, based on the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) data, with the period from July 2020 to June 2023 highlighted. b Timeseries of the cumulative surface mass balance (SMB) anomaly relative to April 2002, with the period from July 2020 to June 2023 highlighted Wang S et al
It is, of course, “not an indication that global warming has reversed”, because nothing can show that. It is forbidden.
The bafflement in the headline says it all:
NASA satellites show Antarctica has gained ice despite rising global temperatures. How is that possible?
LiveScience News By Patrick Pester published May 14, 2025
An abrupt change in Antarctica has caused the continent to gain ice. But this increase, documented in NASA satellite data, is a temporary anomaly rather than an indication that global warming has reversed, scientists say.
It’s always just weather:
Most of the gains have already been attributed to an anomaly that saw increased precipitation (snow and some rain) fall over Antarctica, which caused more ice to form. Antarctica’s ice levels fluctuate from year to year, and the gains appear to have slowed since the study period ended at the beginning of 2024. The levels reported by NASA thus far in 2025 look similar to what they were back in 2020, just before the abrupt gain.
Just because they didn’t predict this, that doesn’t make it strange, say the experts. There is always some factor a climate scientist can mention like a prophet, to explain why the climate surprised them, but they knew it would happen. It fools most journalists.
“This isn’t particularly strange,” said Tom Slater, a research fellow in environmental science at Northumbria University in the U.K. who wasn’t involved in the study. “In a warmer climate the atmosphere can hold more moisture — this raises the likelihood of extreme weather such as the heavy snowfall which caused the recent mass gain in East Antarctica,” he told Live Science in an email.
Obviously a warmer world has more water vapor in the atmosphere. But they don’t mention this when droughts happen, or bushfires rage, do they?
Hmm. The biggest losses of ice from Antarctica are near those 91 volcanoes we discovered a few years ago.
Nature Fig 2. Antarctic Map Professor John Smellie.
h/t David Archibald
REFERENCES
Wang, S., Liu, J., Cai, W. et al. Strong impact of the rare three-year La Niña event on Antarctic surface climate changes in 2021–2023. npj Clim Atmos Sci 8, 173 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41612-025-01066-0
Wang, W., Shen, Y., Chen, Q. et al. Spatiotemporal mass change rate analysis from 2002 to 2023 over the Antarctic Ice Sheet and four glacier basins in Wilkes-Queen Mary Land. Sci. China Earth Sci. 68, 1086–1099 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-024-1517-1
Antarctic Photo: Robert L Dale
The increase in ice aligns with the timing of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai underwater volcano, which erupted on Jan 15th 2022, so perhaps there is a connection ?. What I find amusing here is that the article claims the increase is temporary but they have no understanding of why it’s suddenly increased. So how can they claim it’s temporary ?.
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‘… the timing of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai …’
A reasonable assumption, the impact is still being felt around the world.
The Southern Annular Mode (SAM) is also a contender, its been positive for a long while and now seems to be heading into negative territory.
https://chaac.meteo.plus/en/climate/aao-index-monthly.png
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There’s a concerning rise in volcanic activity worldwide now and it would only take one like Flegrei to usher in years of global crop failures.
Stay tuned.
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Listen Serge, these so called scientists will tell the so called journalists whatever just to keep the grants from so called politicians like Albanese coming. Bowen makes sure the CSIRO has all the money it needs to ensure its reports support the government position. When our premier scientific organisation says that renewables are the cheapest form of energy we know that it has been bought and paid for. Likewise the finding that the models are correct but sometimes nature does funny things that are totally expected. I guess this sort of BS was the foundation for the word “charlatan”.
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Amazing!!
Nature denies Climate Science.
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It’s all the fault of those 91 volcanoes. If they hadn’t been discovered, everyone would have still been in the dark.
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Maybe it was the “decline” in ice that was temporary. Like everything to do with climate, we have no definition of ” temporary” does it mean that as the ice declined for the past 20 years, this was just temporary and a 20 year increase is balancing the scales.
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Yep.
IMO it’s cyclical. Until something throws the cycle out of whack and we get a ‘Waterworld’ scenario where our present Ice Age ends (which is what warmists fear) or an ‘Iceball Earth’ scenario where our present interglacial period ends and the glaciers begin to advance once again (which is what I fear). Society can survive the loss of a little bit of beachfront property and a few degrees warmer temperatures pretty easily through migration and technology. But surviving a full-blown Ice Age is a much riskier proposition. Humanity would probably survive an Ice Age (our prehistoric ancestors survived the last glacial period), but civilization might not.
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Obviously it’s one of those Inconvenient Truths of Gorebal Warming!
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I’m fatigued by talk of gerbil warming and all the catostrophic events that it will supposedly cause…according to “the science”.
This gerbil warming scam will not have a happy ending for any western country that has adopted policies in the belief that “the oceans are boiling” etc.
The leaders of today are ensuring that the children of their grandkids will still be paying off the debts incurred by policy decisions made today.
Utter madness.
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Smirk…
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Gerbille Wobbling –
the act, or the slimy trail thereof left, of rodents as they stagger and veer from one excuse to another in extremus, ie. all over the shop, depending upon where the graft lies [sic].
Sir Sarc Seriously.
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Again, the Turner BAS study has found that the Antarctic peninsula has been cooling since the year 2000.
So what’s causing the cooling, is it fairy dust or wishful thinking or what?
During the Eemian interglacial sea levels were 6 to 9 metres higher and temperature was 8 C warmer than our Holocene today in 2025. Why is it so?
See the co2 Coalition Scientist’s report at FACT 15.
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Jo,
Please don’t say that like you’re being sarcastic. Weather is real, climate is academic. Nobody is truly concerned about climate.
The dead giveaway on climate alarm is that there are no *climate* threats. The threats are about floods, droughts, heatwaves, etc., which are all matters of weather. If CO2 has no discernible effect on today’s weather — right now — then how can it possibly be affecting the climate?
Of course they do claim that bad weather is down to CO2, but as you’ve pointed out many times, floods or droughts: which is it to be?
If they can’t say exactly what the extra CO2 will do to the weather they can’t possibly know what it’ll do to the climate.
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You are on target there. The climate models predict the weather at lots of grid points around the world in tiny time steps. They add all the grid points together at each time step and say that’s the climate. IOW, they derive climate from predicted weather. I have long argued that they should derive weather from predicted climate.
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As young Tom says:
“This isn’t particularly strange.”
The thing is, the atmosphere is extremely dynamic and mobile. It’s pushed and pulled sideways and up and down and can do the unexpected.
It’s not unusual for the atmosphere to pick up and dump lots of water anywhere and conversely the reverse applies; the rain, ice and snowfalls can also stop for a while: even twenty years, it’s a big world.
Ice in the Antarctic thrives on the cold and only moves sideways to tip into the ocean when it is pushed by more ice accumulating higher up.
It’s a big thing when you look into it.
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Once again, you need to be able to discern the difference between variation and trend. The probable cause is the sequence of La Niña events that have predominated lately.
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Did you come up with that probable cause being the La Nina sequence all by yourself, as a gotcha rebuttal?
Or did you read it from Jo’s article references, with one being “Strong impact of the rare three-year La Niña event on Antarctic surface climate changes in 2021–2023.” 😉
You can be very humorous at times.
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Because three is a magic number, and one or two La Ninas don’t do it? What if the probable cause was solar magnetic shifts, UV spectral changes, cosmic rays, geothermal heat, phytoplankton blooms producing cloud seeding aerosols, or changes in the heliosphere? Climate models rate most of those as a big “Zero” — which might be why they work like digital tea leaf readings.
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Maybe the under ice volcanos have ceased their erupting
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Antarctic and Greenland add up to 99% of the world’s ice and 35 million years ago Antarctica had just started to lay down ice and continues to this day.
Before that time Antarctica was very warm and had jungles and other plant life. Greenland is warmer and definitely had periods of less ice over the last few million years and definitely lower from 130 K to 115 K years BP called the Eemian.
Weather and climate do change NATURALLY and we should be happy to live today in the greatest period of Human flourishing and since we developed our big brain and gradually left our hunter gatherer way of life.
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Good outline.
One other thing of interest: the Neanderthals, who more or less disappeared about 30,000 years ago, had significantly larger brains than us but their overall physiology wasn’t suited to the warmer climate where they were escaping the ice from the last big freeze up.
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Big Wind Bowen developed a big brain?
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It’s amazing that self appointed ‘Climate Scientists’ think atmospheric surface temperatures drive the planet, control the ice and every part of world climates. Air temperatures are purely a temporary surface effect, not cause. Largely they are irrelevant. The thin air is 1/350th of the mass of the oceans and 1/4 of the specific heat, so 1/1600th of the energy storage capacity. Air is also mobile and hot air expands and thanks to Archimedes, rises very fast, getting rid of heat rapidly. Try heating water with a hair dryer.
99.9% of all stored surface heat is in the oceans, not the thin air which goes cold every night. Unless it has a lot of water in it. All storms, all water comes from the ocean. Water which covers 74% of the planet to an average depth of 3.5km totally controls our planet, our climates and evaporation of ocean water provides all the drinking water on earth, creating all the rivers, ice, snow. And even at the North Pole at -50C, the fish are swimming happily in water which is never frozen. Just 4 metres of ice on top of 4,000 metres of non frozen water.
If anyone seriously wanted to study let alone predict climates, they would first have to model and accurately predict the two and only two sources of heat. The Sun and the oceans. Plus any stray volcanoes. But no, they try to predict the world from observed surface air temperature and wonder why no predictions work. Short term is just the weather. And supercomputers get it wrong even faster.
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The climate science model is simple. This year should be the same as last year. If not, it is someone’s fault and you can fix this with taxation, Chinese windmills and solar panels.
If however you start to look at events as cyclic, analysing the cycles will give great insight. You can extract the cycles with a Fourier transform. That’s what these mathematicians did and it worked incredibly well. Their conclusion, a single sun cycle and a single ocean cycle explains the last 250 years in Europe using only thermometer data.
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And I have always wondered how ‘climate scientists’ obtained the temperatures for the whole world, from pole to pole, say for the last 250 years when the data did not exist. Because there were no thermometers in most of the world, not allowing for super smart penguins.
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They don’t think that actually, a total straw man.
Also, if you don’t think surface temperatures are important in other ways, you are welcome to try living somewhere other than on the surface.
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That’s just silly. Assuming the tiny human world in the air just above the dry surface controls everything is absurd. A form of megalomania presented as proven science. If anything, vast deep oceans control our lives. It is where we started. Only since WWII have people started to think they are omnipotent, even that we control the weather. Carbon dioxide levels. And even the sea level!
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says no one apart from gaslighters. Maybe try citing actual work to support your argument instead of making a straw men to blow down. Oh…
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So a gas lighter now. An evil pusher of carbon dioxide. I do not have to prove a thing. I am not the one pushing a religion
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Why do I have to prove anything? I am not the one pushing the idea that humans control the planet and gases and temperature and sea level. I have never seen an actual proof that humans control CO2. It’s all conjecture at best.
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Every year in the past ten years has been the warmest year on record. That’s not a coincidence.
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Remind us please how long those records have been kept that are referred to often to claim the whatever on record?
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Simon: “That’s not a coincidence.”
How would you know? Since none of the climate models predict turning points *in advance*, some big factors are changing the climate and you have no idea what they are. Not only could it be a coincidence, odds are, it is. After natural cycles shift climate scientists make up some explanation. It’s like witchcraft.
If CO2 caused the ice sheet to decline, and we put out even more CO2 — why did the ice start to accumulate?
There’s always some post hoc guess like “La Nina”, but we don’t understand what drives La Nina’s either… and La Ninas have happened before.
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So what was the world temperature in 1492?
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And how do you know that?
Or just one place like Florence, Italy.
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How far back does an actual temperature go? And don’t babble on about proxies, or we might have to remind you of “Mike’s Nature trick”, one of the shonkiest bits of Klimate “science”.
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What I loved about the mathematicians expert analysis of temperatures in Europe over 250 years is that they used thermometers and real records. The picture is very different the fit extraordinary with just two cycles.
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“That’s not a coincidence.”
A couple of fairly strong El Nino and then the Hunga Tonga spike, now temps are heading south.
https://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_August_2025_v6.1_20x9-scaled.jpg
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True, it’s not a coincidence- its a cognitive bias driven pseudo reality.
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Africa has had the greatest Human flourishing in our history.
Since 1950 the population has grown by over 1300 million people and today is well over 1500 million.
Their life expectancy was just 36 yrs in 1950 and about 64 yrs today.
Again, that’s the greatest increase in Human history and obviously proves that the climate is very safe and benign today. Here’s the UN data via Macrotrends.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/afr/africa/population
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BTW here’s African life expectancy today and it is 64.64 years.
And about 36 years in 1950 and then only 227 million population.
When will they wake up? Obviously no climate emergency today or silly Biden’s EXISTENTIAL threat.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/afr/africa/life-expectancy
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Thirty plus years back now, I used to get books from the Library at Helensvale for myself and Barbara. One of the books I signed out for a fortnight was Ernest Shackelton’s wonderful and large sized hard cover book titled South, an amazing account of the ill fated trip in the Endurance to Antarctica. I basically read it for the purpose of this amazing account of that ill fated Antarctic journey, and then their amazing escape, after Endurance was lost, crushed in the pack ice in the Weddell Sea.
Last year, (not long before Booktopia failed) I was watching an updated version of that escape on a TV documentary, and I was reminded of that wonderful book, so I obtained the updated large sized and copiously illustrated re-release of that book, with so many new added images.
There was so much I learned anew that I had missed during that original reading back in the early 90s.
One of the things I completely missed in that original reading, with the ‘disaster’ and then that amazing escape forefront in the reading, was that I had lost track of (or was not particularly interested in at that first reading) what the original intent of the journey in the first place was all about, mainly as a voyage of Scientific discovery.
Even though the journey ‘failed’ almost before the start, those Scientific observations were still carried out during those more than nine Months from when the ship was first bound in the pack ice, and then was crushed and sunk. Even after that, as the escape became of most importance, those Scientific observations were still carried out.
Among that number of Scientists aboard was a Meteorologist (Leonard Hussey) and he made detailed recordings of Antarctic weather and climate, and all of this back in 1914.
There are details of those observations, albeit only a smallish part of that wonderful book, and they are as relevant (and as accurate) today as they were those hundred and eleven years ago.
Tony.
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And across Australia from the earliest days, people kept faithful records of temperatures, rainfall, wind and more. Station masters, school masters, public servants. All recorded faithfully for over a hundred years before the BOM took over all the State records in 1909. And has not done a thing since! Perhaps the greatest real record of temperatures in the entire Southern Hemisphere in the largest continent in the Southern Hemisphere excluding Antarctica itself. It’s criminal, dereliction of duty.
But of course who in the BOM wants to find out that the 19th century for the Southern Hemisphere might have been warmer or went up and down? It would destroy the whole story of man made CO2 driven Global Warming. And now hundreds of thousands of people live on that fable and our cash. Obviously they have time to homogenize electronic records, but who wants to have to read the real history of temperatures and rainfall across Australia when you can just make it up? We need to sell off the BOM, CSIRO, SBS, ABC and close the whole raft of “Clean” energy scams gobbling billions of dollars a year. They are all too busy for the truth to be known.
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Not mentioned often now was the letter from Dr Jennifer Marohasy and associates to the Abbott Coalition Government listing the BoM flawed claims, the Minister asked BoM management to please explain and they replied admitting there were many “errors and omissions” as claimed.
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My memory tells me that the Minister, Greg Hunt, declined Abbott’s request, following Marohasy’s, to initiate an investigation into the “homoginisation” and “updating” of temperature records that completely obliterated the exceptionally hot years in the late 1930’s. The little squirt (Hunt, not Tony) was a very active member of the WEF and, as far as I know, still is.
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Tony, one of my favourite malt whiskys is “Shackleton”. According to the blurb on the label Shackleton arranged with a distillery in the Highlands to blend a malt whisky from some of his favourite malts and he commissioned several cases to take to Antarctica to warm his team members after the evening meal. Apparently a few bottles were found some years ago in an abandoned building in the snow and taken back to the same distillery in Scotland. There the expert maltsters were able to discern, with some accuracy, the original blend and thus the current elixir was developed for the enjoyment of many others, including me. Who said nothing good comes out of a failed expedition?
Sorry Jo, I know it’s off topic but only just, as it does involve “warming”!
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Wow!
Graph b is telling us that the ice gain from 2016 up to 2024 was one thousand cubic kilometres; that’s a lot of ice.
Just imagine, an ice cube sitting on the ground with a square base of 33 km each edge and a height of 1 km.
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Agreed. Now consider a continent the size of South America, two Australias, completely covered in ice to an average height of 3.5km. That’s Antarctica. A frozen ocean on land.
And given the altitude, it’s -50C in winter, six months in the dark and only -25C in summer with the sun on the horizon. It’s not melting any time soon.
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Huge!
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It’s not melting any time soon.
something about trying to fool Mother Nature?????
Who knows what the Sun has planned for the next 25 years?
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Any Scientist that relies on a Model is a fraud.
Scientists should only rely on empirical evidence like an apple falling from a tree onto your head.
Science has been corrupted (by money).
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BTW this is Free Speech.
If any one doesn’t like my free speech then go ahead and challenge me in a Court.
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Or is it the Penguin(s) declaring a Cold War upon us, heaping waves of Antarctic ICE northwards to cool the southern outreaches of mankind (both kinds).
https://www.mountainwatch.com/Snow-news/storm-journal-27th-30th-storm-of-the-season-drops-60-80cms
Spencers Creek / Snowy Hydro (1830m) as of 1 Sept 2025 has a snow depth of 220.4 cm (near 8ft) see graph included. This is 3x deeper than last year and 2x deeper than the year before that. So according to ‘climate science’ theology [as per the sacred Book of Gore] next year’s depth shall be 4x deeper, ie. almost 3 metres or over 10ft. Hail the Goracle!
That cockatoo in the coal mine, Western Australia’s Bluff Knoll (1099m) is, again, in for a weekend southerly blast, creating conditions ripe for more impossible snow on the antipodean hills Downunder.
It’s the Penguin(s) I tells ya!
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Oops – unauthorised spellchuck – try thus:
https://www.mountainwatch.com/Snow-news/storm-journal-august-27th-30th-storm-of-the-season-drops-60-80cms
‘August’ was the missing word: good luck this time.
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It’s only climate “scientists” that ever seem to be “baffled”.
Real scientists look for reasons including alternative explanations when the prevailing hypothesis doesn’t work.
Warmists simply are unable to accept that their hypothesis is wrong.
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I needed some perspective. So the total amount of ice in Antarctica is 24,380,000 gigatonnes (Gt). The greatest anomaly in 22 years is about 2500 Gt. Which is around 0.01% difference. Should I be worried?
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We have experienced the coldest winter months in many years during 2025.
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How far back does an actual temperature record go? And don’t babble on about proxies, or we might have to remind you of “Mike’s Nature trick”, one of the shonkiest bits of Klimate “science”.
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The word climate ‘expert’ has become a derogatory and patronising term, indicating a self-appointed and self-important know-it-all who actually knows very little. The term neatly covers the pundits in the Blob.
Real climate scientists are very much at the beginning of the learning curve and know that there is much that they don’t know. Calling them ‘experts’ would be an insult.
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What is ‘climate’?*
There’s atmospheric physics.
Maybe weather forecasting.
‘Climate science’ belongs in the liberal arts department with ‘Gender Science’.
Add in the dubious utterly politicized discipline of ‘public health’ and you get the unfolding collapse of the Knowledge Hierarchy.
Which as probably understood by ‘social science’ …
comes around every multiple hundreds of years as a successful culture intellectually inbreeds as the smart people invest in their invisible wardrobe.
*(The actual ‘climate’ that Climate Science is interested in is the political one.)
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Natural variation produces a lot of apparent “effects” such as trends, cycles, steps, reversals, etc.
They are all just random noise, and they fool the idiots of academia who mostly aren’t taught, and so don’t have a clue, about 1/f noise.
Because they all look like “something is happening”, when nothing is happening except the normal natural variation … which the climate academics actually deny exists.
Indeed the most common rebuttal they give is “it’s not natural variation, it’s just something we didn’t know was happening”.
And, that sums up their entire fallacy, because natural variation doesn’t have to be unknown. That’s a concept from the way noise is taught to academics, which does not fit the real world.
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Most clocks are clouds.
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This was written: Maybe not exact words:
There was sea ice loss, Antarctica gained ice and no one knows why.
I can explain why, study ice core records, they prove why!
There is no reason for no one to know why. There is ice core data and maybe, some common sense, the data shows that in warmer times with less sea ice the evaporation and snowfall and ice accumulations are more. The data shows that in colder times with more sea ice the evaporation and snowfall and ice accumulations are less. It snows more when polar oceans are thawed and it snows more until more ice advances and causes colder. It snows less when polar oceans are frozen and it snows less until ice depletion causes ice retreat and warming.
Study and try to understand the ice core data, the answers come from understanding data.
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