What Emily Shuckburgh Forgot To Tell You

By Paul Homewood 

 

h/t Dave Ward

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3970082/How-Captain-Robert-Scott-s-log-book-expedition-Antarctica-100-years-ago-raises-troubling-new-doubts-global-warming.html 

 

 

Booker had a piece in the Mail the other day about how Scott’s and Shackleton’s records showed that sea ice extent around Antarctica then was little different to today.

I did not bother reposting it as I had already covered the topic myself. However, it has elicited a hysterical and misleading reply from Dr Emily Shuckburgh of the British Antarctic Survey. More of that later, but first this is what Booker wrote:

 

 

 

 

Why should there be so much excitement over the discovery — from the log books of two of Britain’s most famous explorers more than 100 years ago — that there was the same amount of ice floating round Antarctica then as there is today?

To the surprise of academics from the University of Reading, the records kept by the expeditions of Captain Robert Scott and Sir Ernest Shackleton in the early years of the last century — which detail the extent of ice cover, the state of the sea and the weather — show there has been remarkably little change in the extent of sea ice at the other end of the world.

Dr Jonathan Day, who led the study, said: ‘The data collected by these and other explorers could profoundly change the way we view the ebb and flow of Antarctic sea ice.

‘We know that sea ice in the Antarctic has increased slightly over the past 30 years, since satellite observations began.

‘Scientists have been grappling to understand this trend in the context of global warming, but these findings suggest it may not be anything new.’

 

Passengers from the Russian ship ‘Akademik Shokalskiy’ explore the frozen Ross Sea in the Antarctic. Mount Erebus volcano is in the background

 

 

The relevance of this startling discovery is that it again raises question marks over what has become the single most influential scientific theory shaping our modern world: the belief that the planet is dangerously overheating and we need to take drastic steps to bring it under control.

Those who believe in man-made global warming are passionate in their belief that, thanks to those supposedly soaring temperatures, the mighty polar ice caps are melting rapidly.

If this continues, the theory runs, it could lead to a rise in sea levels so great that it would eventually flood many of the most densely populated regions of the world.

No sequence in the film An Inconvenient Truth — made by the former U.S. Vice President Al Gore — was more chilling than his computer graphics showing how melting ice could cause the oceans to rise by 20 ft, drowning many of the world’s great cities, from Shanghai and San Francisco to New York and London.

It is true that, in the past 37 years since satellite records began, the summer ice at the top of the world, in the Arctic, has been shrinking — though nothing like as far or fast as has been constantly predicted.

But even if all that floating sea ice did melt, it would do no more to raise sea levels than the melting of an ice cube in a gin and tonic raises the level of liquid in the glass — in other words, barely at all, because the volume of the ice is replaced by a similar volume of water.

 

Potentially much more serious in terms of the planet’s future is the colossal amount of land ice on Antarctica, which contains 90 per cent of all of the ice on the planet.

And it is here that we find what is arguably the single most glaring contradiction in the global warming theory.

Because all the evidence suggests that, far from getting warmer, over the past 50 years Antarctica has, in fact, been getting colder.

The satellite records show sea ice around that mighty continent has been increasing to the point where last year, it reached its greatest extent since Nasa’s observations began in 1979.

Even more significant was another finding reported by Nasa last year, showing that the thickness of ice over most of that vast continent has been making colossal gains — as much as 112 billion tons a year between 1992 and 2001, and an average of 82 billion tons a year between 2003 and 2008.

For years, the global warming zealots remained so convinced of their theory about melting ice that they simply shut their eyes to what is really happening at the bottom of the world.

There was a farcical example in 2013 when an Australian-led ‘scientific expedition’ sailed into the Antarctic Ocean to study how quickly climate change was melting the ice.

 

On-board the Russian ship were 18 scientists from Australia and New Zealand, plus assorted green campaigners who had paid to go along as ‘science assistants’, along with journalists from the BBC and the Guardian newspaper, who helped sponsor the trip.

As Christmas approached, they ignored their Russian captain’s warning that the ice was closing in so fast that they should escape.

They continued to frolic around on ice thickening around their ship to more than 10 ft while, according to the BBC man, they were still taking measurements ‘to show how quickly the Antarctic’s sea ice is disappearing’.

Eventually, they became so dangerously trapped that they had to be helicoptered to a Chinese rescue ship, which, itself, became so stuck that it had to be rescued by an American ice-breaker.

Many attempts have been made by less reckless scientists to persuade the world that Antarctica is warming, though their efforts have focused almost entirely on the one part of that vast continent which has, indeed, become slightly warmer — its western coast.

It is from here we have seen dramatic shots of melting glaciers crashing into the sea.

But more cautious experts have tried to explain this is because of heat rising from a mighty crack in the Earth’s crust buried far beneath the surface.

 

The efforts of global ‘warmists’ to turn the evidence on its head have bordered on the comical.

In 2009, scientific luminaries of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change produced a paper in advance of what was to be the most important climate conference the world had ever seen.

Their sensational study was part of a general bid to whip up climate hysteria before the world’s leaders met in Copenhagen that December to discuss a treaty committing them to every kind of drastic measure to halt global warming.

The paper claimed to show that, far from getting colder, as all previous evidence suggested, Antarctica was getting warmer.

Almost immediately, however, other experts spotted a fatal flaw in the study. It had all hinged on temperatures recorded by a single weather station.

But pictures of this place showed it buried under snow, which would have cocooned its thermometers from the freezing outside air, giving readings distinctly warmer than they should have been.

Of course, the discovery that emerged this week from the records kept by Shackleton and Scott supports what we already knew from modern research — that what is going on at the bottom of the world is the most embarrassing single flaw in the whole global warming theory.

Isn’t the whole point about ‘global warming’ that it is meant to be ‘global’?

So how does that stack up when Antarctica appears to be cooling, its sea ice has been growing so fast there is more of it than at any time since records began and it has been confirmed scientifically that the thickness of its land ice has been increasing by trillions of tons?

And why is all this of much more than just academic interest to the rest of us?

Because it is the widely held belief in human-made climate change that is persuading our politicians to plan the most extraordinary revolution, not just in how we make our electricity, but in our entire way of life.

The next time you are shocked at how fast your energy bills are rising, or you pay an extra £70 tax on an airline ticket thanks to a green levy, or see another row of giant windmills looming over the countryside, you might think of the great puzzle of Antarctica.

And then ask if the theory driving this incredibly costly change is really as foolproof as politicians have been led to believe.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3970082/How-Captain-Robert-Scott-s-log-book-expedition-Antarctica-100-years-ago-raises-troubling-new-doubts-global-warming.html

 

To which Shuckburgh replied:

 

 

 

However, there are certain things that she left out of her account:

 

1) As she must know, climate change, (by which she means AGW), cannot cause the ocean changes she talks about, as GHG cannot warm up the sea to the depths involved. Perhaps she might like to spend a bit of time finding what has caused it.

2) For some reason, she omits to tell the Mail’s readers that geothermal activity is contributing to glacial melting in West Antarctica.

3) She also forgets to mention that overall the Antarctic ice sheet is actually growing. (It took Lyn Jenkins in the other letter to mention this inconvenient fact).

4) Her colleagues at the BAS reported a few months ago that temperatures in West Antarctica have actually been dropping since the late 1990s. Surely she knew that?

5) There has been no rise in Antarctic temperatures in the satellite era, and it has been warmer than now for most of the last 8000 years. 

6) The changes to West Antarctica glaciers reports are nothing new, and scientists and explorers have been aware of them since the 19thC.

7) Professor John Turner of the BAS has stated that the Pine Island glacier seems to be an ongoing retreat that could have been going on for 10,000 years.

8) She claims that ice loss has doubled in six years, but does not tell us that we have only been monitoring these things for a few years, or that such short term trends are utterly meaningless.

 

 

If she had bothered to read the paper that Booker referred to, she would have discovered that the findings demonstrate that the climate of Antarctica fluctuated significantly throughout the 20th century .

Getting hysterical about a few years’ of data, whilst ignoring the longer term, is not what serious scientists are supposed to do.