Look at the Data, Not the Narrative

Back in the 90s, I started following the “Global Warming”/Climate Change narrative, and I have been frustrated with the debate ever since. 

The theory that human behavior and emissions can have marginal but meaningful effects on regional climates or a global level is not as absurd as some critics seem to think. We know, from actual and fairly reliable data, that pouring particulates into the air can induce at least temporary but significant changes at climatic levels, and critics of geoengineering are implicitly admitting that human beings can change the climate. 

If you are worried about plans for “global dimming,” then you are admitting that human beings can change the climate. Whether CO2 emissions are having a significant impact is a live question–I don’t think it is proven to have a significant or at least worrying impact, but the argument is not absurd on its face. It is an empirical question that real scientists who don’t fudge data or hype questionable results should study. 

Unfortunately, a lot of climate scientists do both, either for ideological reasons or because climate alarmism is where the money is. If you can’t get funding if you are neutral or skeptical about anthropomorphic climate change, good luck getting any grants. The political pressure to conform to the narrative is immense. 

Antarctic ice has made a surprising rebound in mass, scientists say https://t.co/5sdcJmH5XV pic.twitter.com/pLsOJsJVht

— New York Post (@nypost) May 5, 2025

I remember a conversation with a climate activist with considerable political clout about 15 years ago, when idiots were still bleating about the Arctic sea ice melting away as a disaster. The data he was using was bogus–Arctic sea ice waxes and wanes, and is actually at high levels despite predictions–and I let him blather on for a long time before I stumped him with a simple observation. After he went on and on about sea level rise, cities under water, and all the parade of horribles, I informed him of a simple fact/

If all the sea ice in the world melted forever, it would have zero impact on sea levels. Not a millimeter, because the ice displaces water, and when it melts, it contributes not a whit to the total volume of water in the oceans. 

He shut up. 

The story is different with land-bound ice and water, which are not currently in the oceans, and if all the glaciers on land were to melt it would indeed cause sea-level rises. If you doubt that, look at the history of the past 15,000 years, during which sea levels rose about 450 FEET with the melting of the glaciers. 

We are in an interglacial period in a still-continuing ice age, and as happens in interglacial periods, much of the ice melts, causing oceans to rise by quite a bit. Most of that ice is gone now, and what is left is a trickle of glacial melt working its way into the ocean–which would be happening whether human beings existed or not. We may or may not be contributing a bit to that, but glacial melt is built into the current climate because of, we think, the Milankovitch cycles, which change solar irradiation of the Earth. Glacial melt is at least MOSTLY due to natural variations in climate; whether we contribute is an interesting scientific question. 

Which gets me to this article. 

Unlike Arctic ice, the total ice mass on Antarctica matters quite a bit. That is because 70% of the total freshwater on Earth is bound up in the ice mass, which sits on top of an actual continent–land–and is not already part of the ocean, as the Arctic is. If the ice mass on Antarctica decreases, sea levels will rise. If it increases, sea levels will fall. And those rises and falls can be significant. If all the ice melted, it would raise sea levels by over 200 feet. 

So what’s happening in Antarctica? 

You wouldn’t know it if you followed all that climate news, but the mass of all that ice has been increasing, not decreasing. After a cyclically driven loss of ice over the past couple of decades, ice accumulation has made a dramatic reversal. 

Notably, four major glacier basins in the WL-QML region — Totten, Moscow University, Denman and Vincennes Bay — had been losing the most mass, with ice discharge and surface melting responsible for much of the loss.

But between 2021 and 2023, those glaciers experienced significant mass gain, reversing the accelerated loss they had undergone.

The researchers attribute this rebound to unusual increases in precipitation, which led to an accumulation of snow and ice.

This unexpected mass gain temporarily offset global sea level rise by about 0.3 millimeters per year — a small but notable increase.

The primary mechanism for the loss of ice in Antarctica is not melting due to warm temperatures, but glaciers doing what glaciers do: traveling from higher elevations to lower ones. Antarctica is not flat, although we think of it that way because it is a big white blob in our imaginations. But it is a continent, with mountains, volcanoes, and all the features that exist on the other continent. It’s just covered in an unimaginably large and thick ice sheet, which moves from higher elevations to lower ones. As the ice moves over the ocean, icebergs calve off the sheet, as you would expect. 

Totally natural. Much of North America’s geography has been shaped by the motion of glaciers that covered a lot of the continent until very recently. When Native Americans traveled from Asia to the Americas, the glaciers still dominated the continent. Where I am sitting right now was covered with a mile or two of ice 14,000 years ago–a blink of the eye in geologic terms. 

What is so frustrating to me about the “climate change” narrative is how much of it is driven by pure ignorance of history and the significance and reliability of data. What should be an interesting scientific question has been turned into a crusade with as much serious science done as during the COVID era. So much of what we are told–or sold–is alarmist BS. 

Like COVID, the science could and should be done, and, if done correctly, the findings could increase our knowledge and be useful. 

But, as with COVID, the science is mostly crap. As Vinay Prasad has pointed out many times, the NIH sponsored precisely zero, zip, nada, no randomized controlled trials on masks, social distancing, or any of the other “non-pharmaceutical interventions” they imposed on us. We know as little today, scientifically, about what worked and what didn’t. We can do “observational” studies, which are not good science, but no real data was collected on many of the most important questions because they didn’t WANT to know the answers. 

The state of climate science is bad. It is as good as gender research, COVID public health intervention research, and just about any other question relevant to public policy. It is politics, not science. 

Which is too bad. I really want to see good research done.