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By Jo Nova
Antarctica would have been unrecognizable
The worst global warming nightmares all came true 130,000 years ago, done by mother nature all by herself. Most of the time the media ignores all this inconvenient catastrophe that lasted an astonishing ten thousand years. New research suggests almost all the Ross Ice Shelf melted and large parts of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet disappeared too, yet somehow Emperor penguins survived. So did the seals and the whales, and there was no tipping point that broke the planet. But the Hunter-gatherer beach clubs of 131,000 years ago were all washed away.
A new study looked at dust in Antarctic ice cores and noticed there was an ominous shift 120,000 years ago. In other periods the ice core had a layer of fine dust that seems to have traveled all the way from South American volcanoes. But when the Earth last warmed out of the depths of the ice age 130,000 years ago, a different type of coarse grainy dust appeared in the ice core they dug out. Normally big grains don’t travel far on the wind, so this implied that it was coming from a close volcanic source. And while there […]
It’s a tortured headline in ScienceAlert
By Jo Nova
For the first time Antarctic ice core teams have got hold of ice that is 3 million years old and the results have confounded them
The way CO2 responds in ice cores is canon to “the faith” so this is more important than it seems at first glance. Believers are really struggling.
Three million years ago the world was warmer, and about to cool into the violent ice age cycles. The ice core experts were expecting to confirm that CO2 levels were about 400ppm, as other proxies had shown, and they thought that greenhouse gases might fall and lead the cooling shift. But instead of CO2 being at 400 parts per million, and then leading the cooling, the bubbles trapped in ice were only 250 parts per million to start with and they stayed constant through important temperature swings. Sacre Bleu! CO2 did not appear to have any role in causing the warmth that was, or the cooling that followed. And nor did methane. O’ the dilemma?
Some sacred cows have to be sacrificed. Either CO2 is not a major driver of climate change, or the ice cores are […]
Young King Penguins are big and brown. Photo by Paul Carroll on Unsplash
By Jo Nova
Scientists had so much money they were able to follow 17,000 penguins for, wow, 24 years. They discovered they were breeding 19 days earlier now than they were then. It all sounds rather dramatic — with penguins “bringing forward their mating cycles” in an “unbelievably big change”.
It’s like penguins have been forced into teenage pregnancy or something.
Photo by Bob Brewer on Unsplash
But then there’s the quiet line slipped in there: “….with greater success rates for chick survival.” which seems rather important, or perhaps, even the whole point? Is there any better marker to measure penguin health and happiness than seeing their baby penguins frolic? There can’t be too many penguins who enjoy watching the babies die?
So the ABC writes the catchy headline:
“King penguins successfully changing breeding habits in face of climate change”
But they could have said:
“Climate change saves baby penguins”
And we all know why they didn’t.
Their first line lays it on thick:
Climate change is putting pressure on many animals and their food chains at […]
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 […]
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 […]
Image by AlKalenski from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
Something huge is happening around Antarctica and the experts didn’t see it coming
More than a million square kilometers of ice has gone:
Since 2015, the continent has shed sea ice equivalent to the area of Greenland. Researchers call it the largest environmental shift detected anywhere on Earth in recent decades.
–– Earth.com
Everything about Antarctica has defied the experts. For years Antarctic sea ice expanded when it wasn’t supposed to. Then, suddenly in 2016 the sea ice around Antarctica dramatically started to shrink, and that wasn’t supposed to happen either. Scientists wondered at the time if it was just a temporary blip, but then it got even smaller. Holes in the sea ice “as big as Switzerland” have started to appear for the first time since the mid 1970s.
To explain this mystery (that was rarely mentioned) a new paper suggests the salinity of surface waters has changed. We’re not just talking about a small piece of ocean, this is everything south of 50°. For decades, the surface of the polar Southern Ocean was getting less salty — an “expected response to a warming climate” […]
Pohlia nutans moss. Photo by Hermann Schachner
By Jo Nova
Around 1,000AD, a little delicate moss (just like the one above), lived in a spot in Antarctica which is now locked in snow and ice all year round, and considered hyper arid and perennially frozen. No one expected to find nodding thread-moss (Pohlia Nutans) on Boulder Clay Glacier.
Researchers had to drill through 11 meters of ice to find it (or what’s left of it) and managed to date it to 1,050 years before present. This puts it smack in the centre of the Medieval Warm Period, when Vikings were marauding England, showing that this part of Antarctica was warmer 1000 years ago than it is today, even though humans have poured forth 1.8 trillion tons of greenhouse gases.
At the same time as the mosses grew, there was a veritable population boom of penguins and elephant seals in the Ross Sea next door, right up until the brutal cold of the Little Ice Age wiped them out.
Pohlia nutans, needs liquid water and warmer summers. In order to grow, it has to find land that is ice free in summer has rain or melted water. Mosses can’t […]
By Jo Nova
Who knew? Penguins are not only a “sentinel species” warning us about climate change in Antarctica but “Adélie penguin breeding is closely linked to temperature“. More warming equals more penguins.
So just as we can use trees as thermometers, we can use penguins as thermometers. And when we do, we find that there was a veritable boom in penguins in the Ross Sea 1,000 years ago.
It’s all there in the peer reviewed Zheng paper, 2023 — thanks to NoTricksZone and KlimaNachrichten for finding the paper.
As one of the most important ‘sentinel species’ in the Antarctic ecosystem, the Adélie penguin (Pygoscelis adeliae) is widely distributed in the Ross Sea region and its population is extremely sensitive to climate change (Ainley, 2002; Ainley et al., 2010). Since the International Geophysical Year in 1957, researchers have conducted extensive field investigations on climate change (including temperature, SST, sea ice, and polynyas) and Adélie penguin populations in Antarctica.
Modern monitoring data also show that Adélie penguin breeding is closely linked to temperature…
After comparing with historical records of penguin populations at Cape Bird, Dunlop Island, and Cape Adare, all were found to have a […]
By Jo Nova
Lesson #457 in how to lie with science
File this lesson away in the Decline and Fall of Enlightenment Science. Nature, formerly known as the esteemed science journal, is now achieving everything a captured tabloid industry sales mag could hope for. They’ve squeezed a disaster out of a tiny change in a short record, and from a good news story. Let’s not forget, for the last 100,000 years most humans would have been happy that a bit of Antarctica was greening.
“Lush”? The only people who call this lush are penguins:
To appreciate the Black Belt level of naked exaggeration going on here, consider the opening hyperbole:
A fast-warming region of Antarctica is getting greener with shocking speed. Satellite imagery of the region reveals that the area covered by plants increased by almost 14 times over 35 years — a trend that will spur rapid change of Antarctic ecosystems.
“It’s the beginning of dramatic transformation,” says Olly Bartlett, a remote-sensing specialist at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, UK, and an author of the study1, published today in Nature Geoscience, that reports these results.
All this shock and drama arise from an […]
By Jo Nova
It’s just another scientific study doomed to disappear
A Norwegian whaler paid for 2,200 aerial photos of East Antarctica in 1937. Since then humankind has emitted 91% of all the emissions we’ve ever produced and the world is facing an extinction level catastrophe and yet satellite photos show this 2,000 kilometer long section of East Antarctica hasn’t changed — or at least, not in any way related to our uptake of coal power or planes, trains, airconditioners and cars. Basically the human race emitted 1,600 billion tons of carbon dioxide which was supposed to warm the poles twice as fast as anywhere else, but there is still nothing to see here.
Belated Thanks to Tallbloke for the first article I saw on this.
2,000 km of Antarctic ice-covered coastline has been stable for 85 years
Using hundreds of old aerial photographs dating back to 1937, combined with modern computer technology, the researchers have tracked the evolution of glaciers in East Antarctica. The area covers approximately 2,000 kilometers of coastline and contains as much ice as the entire Greenland Ice Sheet.
Compared to modern data, the ice flow speeds are unchanged. While some […]
While no one was paying attention, a Russian ship exploring Antarctica claims it has found oil and gas deposits that are ten times larger than the North Sea. Presumably quite a lot of countries would find this very interesting. At the moment Antarctica is supposedly protected by a piece of paper, but those who want to keep something so valuable to themselves will be needing more than cellulose.
It could take some fossil fuels to protect these fossil fuels
Hard to see any nation keeping control of this oil and gas field using sailing boats, solar powered ships and missiles running on palm oil.
Russia finds vast oil and gas reserves in British Antarctic territory
Johnathon Leake, Telegraph
Russia has found vast oil and gas reserves in the Antarctic, much of it in areas claimed by the UK.
The surveys are a prelude to bringing in drilling rigs to exploit the pristine region for fossil fuels, MPs have warned.
Reserves totalling 511bn barrels of oil – about 10 times the North Sea’s entire 50-year output – have been reported to Moscow by Russian research ships, according to evidence given to the […]
By Jo Nova
Where are the tears? Elephant Seals and Penguins were forced off the Ross sea 1,000 years ago because it got too cold
One thousand years ago Southern Elephant Seals were happily living in the Ross Sea of Antarctica. Likewise Adelie Penguins frolicked in the sun there during the “Penguin Optimum” of three to four thousand years ago. They had lived there on and off for thousands of years in the Holocene, but the glaciers came back and the cold times returned, and all the colonies were wiped out. All that’s left there now is just their rotting bones and fur as testament to the devastation of Global Cooling.
Thanks to Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone for his dedication in digging up these papers.
The Ross Sea is a part of Antarctica that is south of New Zealand, and in the pictures below the remains of the seals and penguins show that they had well established colonies in places where they are unable to live now. The red circles mark the seal colonies, and the blue stars show the penguins. The colonies ebbed and flowed but then were lost as the Little Ice Age began and have not […]
By Jo Nova
Despite the dreaded “polar amplification” and 1,000 new coal fired plants in China, apparently the fragile Antarctic ice shelves have barely changed in the last 40 years. Indeed, instead of fragmenting, they are melting slightly slower now than they were in 1980. Naturally, the researchers *know*, as only high priests can, that things will change any day now. The tipping point is just around the corner, hiding, ready to pounce.
Mankind has emitted fully 65% of our total carbon emissions since the year 1980 — and yet it has not done much at all to the melt-rate of the ice shelves of Antarctica. In fact, if anything, climate change is slowing the ice melting.
That’s 1.1 Trillion tonnes of man-made CO2, and no catastrophe to show for it.
The new study by Banwell et al used satellite microwave data and modeling of meltwater.
GRL
Note that the “small but significant decrease” in melting gets headlined as “a minor change”. Since when where significant warming trends reported as just a “minor change” of indeterminate direction?
Antarctic ice shelves experienced only minor changes in surface melt since 1980, study finds
The results show Antarctic ice […]
The Larcum Kendall K1 Watch — The most important watch you probably never heard of.
By Jo Nova
Oldbrew at Tallbloke’s Talkshop found a study showing that icebergs around Antarctica apparently haven’t changed much in the last few centuries despite an extra 2,000 Gt of CO2, and all that global warming. Remember climate change is going to hit Antarctica twice as hard as anywhere else.
As Oldbrew said: Probably not the result that was expected from this study.
Given the world warmed in the last three hundred years, it seems surprising that icebergs don’t seem to have changed. But if they had declined, this study would be a star of the news tonight. Instead I doubt many stations will report that if Captain James Cook returned today he might not see much difference.
Fascinatingly, Cook had a watch worth £450 so he could estimate longitude. To give some idea of just how fantastically valuable that watch was, ponder that the whole ship he commanded cost £1,800. The Larcum Kendall K1 watch was so prized Cook made sure “the commander, first lieutenant and astronomer were all present when it was used”.
It was modeled on the H4 clock, […]
The sun has just risen on South Pole after the coldest six month period on record since 1956. The last winter there was suddenly 2.2 degrees Celsius colder than the average for the last 30 years.
Remember when Polar Amplification meant Antarctica was melting?
…
Thanks to NoTricksZone
South Pole Sees Record Cold Winter, Smashing 1976 Record …“Chill Was Exceptional”
Jason Samenow and Kasha Patel, Washington Post
The chill was exceptional, even for the coldest location on the planet.
The average temperature at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station between April and September, a frigid minus-78 degrees (minus-61 Celsius), was the coldest on record, dating back to 1957. This was 4.5 degrees lower than the most recent 30-year average at this remote station, which is operated by United States Antarctic Program and administered by the National Science Foundation.
One hot weekend in Miami is Climate change but the coldest six months in Antarctic records is a blip:
While impressive and unexpected, scientists characterized this record as a mere blip and curiosity as both Antarctica and the planet continue to rapidly warm amid escalating extreme weather.
Antarctica has been cooling for a […]
Forty years of global warming have made East Antarctic summers even shorter and more miserably colder than they already were. (Save the wilderness — burn coal now?)
Surface Air temperature over East Antarctica (presumably in summer) from Hsu et al 2021.
East Antarctica is the vast mass of the Antarctic plateau which was, in theory, going to melt. If that three kilometer thick block of ice isn’t going to melt in summer, when exactly will it?
Remember when the poles were meant to amplify man-made global warming?
Not much of Antarctica is warming in summer.
These graphs come from a paper that Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone found. The authors Hsu et al think the cooling trend has a natural explanation (but if it had been warming, of course, no one would have asked that question). Hsu at al estimate that 20-40% of the trend is due to the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO). And maybe it is, but they use climate models we know are broken. Curiously they predict the East Antarctic will keep cooling — which may be a first (for the models).
For what it’s worth the MJO is a massive convective atmospheric blob that […]
It was ten degrees below normal at Scott Base, in June, and usually July is the coldest month.
Pitch black, minus 81C and a howling wind.
Scott Base crew enduring near-record breaking Antarctica winter – 10C colder than usual
Spare a thought for the hardy crew who are wintering down in Antarctica, experiencing near-record breaking cold temperatures.
They’ve come very near to the coldest ever recorded temperature of -89.6C.
Cap Allon at Electroverse points out that some of that Global Warming has made it up to New South Wales where it had the coldest June day in 122 years two weeks ago.
A few weeks before that, Dunedin Airport New Zealand hit a record of minus 8.8C in May. It was the coldest day ever recorded there in any month since records started in 1963. One cold day doesn’t mean a lot climate wise, but if Antarctica was close to record warmth would most of the worlds media have barely said a word?
Remember the poles are warming twice as fast as the rest of the world.
ht Climate Depot and Electroverse
10 out of 10 based on 80 ratings […]
Adelie Penguins would probably benefit from a bit of global warming. When 175 were tagged and tracked it turned out that they ate more krill when there was less sea ice. This is not so surprising given that they swim better than they waddle, so long stretches of sea ice make it harder to get to the supermarket and back.
And Krill (dinner) apparently like less sea ice too. Phytoplankton bloomed when the sea ice was gone.
Penguins on sea ice. Photo by Danielle Barnes on Unsplash
Penguins may be an unlikely winner from climate change
Tom Whipple, The Australian
“Counterintuitively for this ice-dependent species, body conditions and breeding success improved in the ice-free environment,” wrote researchers from the Japanese National Institute of Polar Research, in the journal Science Advances.
The scientists used accelerometers, video cameras and tracking devices to plot each hunt. They found that when there was no ice the penguins did a lot more swimming — and this was a good thing.
“For penguins, swimming is a whopping four times faster than walking.
For the first three seasons the sea ice was large, then it shrank and the […]
Two days ago over the Antarctic the SSW or Sudden Stratospheric Warming was still running strong up at 10 hPa or around 30 km high.
NIWA claim it may be the strongest SSW seen in the Southern Hemisphere ever (which means the last 50 years).
Temperatures in the green circle marked in the centre were 11C, instead of minus 40 to minus 60C. As we mentioned before, this is extremely rare, and the likely implications are that sometime in the next few weeks a cold beast will hit somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere, but no one really knows where. The Australian BOM are rather bravely predicting a warmer less rainy spring for NSW and QLD. (See below).
If only we really understood the major drivers of our climate we might have predicted this more than a few weeks in advance. Perhaps it is caused by some of those solar factors that the big GCM’s completely ignore?
From Nullschool:
Stratospheric Sudden Warming, Southern Hemisphere, Antarctica.
Two years ago, same time, we see a single large polar jetstream at 10hPA and temperatures of around minus 40C in the warmest part and minus 60 elsewhere in the jetstream. These normal winds flow […]
Remember when polar amplification was the rage? So much for that theory
Antarctica is twice the size of the US or Australia. Buried 2 km deep under domes of snow, it holds 58 meters of global sea level to ransom. The IPCC have been predicting its demise-by-climate-change for a decade or two.
A new paper looks at 60 sites across Antarctica, considering everything from ice, lake and marine cores to peat and seal skins. They were particularly interested in the Medieval Warm Period, and researched back to 600AD. During medieval times (1000-1200 AD) they estimate Antarctica as a whole was hotter than it is today. Antarctica was even warmer still — during the dark ages circa 700AD.
Credit to the paper authors: Sebastian Lüning, Mariusz Gałka, and Fritz Vahrenholt
Feast your eyes on the decidedly not unprecedented modern tiny spike:
….
The little jaggy down after 2000 AD is real. While there was rapid warming across Antarctica from 1950-2000, in the last twenty years, that warming has stalled. Just another 14 million square kilometers that the models didn’t predict.
We already knew the Medieval Warm Period was a global phenomenon, thanks to hundreds of proxies, and 6,000 boreholes. But […]
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