Politics
New Study Smacks Down Democrats’ Climate Change Hysteria
A surprising climate change study has Democrats on their heels after scientists were startled to report that ice around the South Pole has grown by leaps and bounds for the first time in years.
The Antarctic Ice Sheet, which represents nearly all of the continent’s 5.4 million square miles, gained additional mass between 2021 and 2023, reversing a trend that had seen Antarctica steadily eroded for decades.
Snowfall in four key glacier basins in East Antarctica contributed to the growth of glacier masses there, according to the study, while satellite imagery showed that the growth of the continent was so massive that it led to a decline in overall sea levels.
The study, published this week in Science China Earth Sciences, claims “anomalous increases in precipitation” allowed for the regrowth of the four glacier basins. Researchers at Shanghai’s Tongji University analyzed satellite gravimetry data from the GRACE and GRACE-FO missions, which measure variations in Earth’s gravity to detect changes in ice mass.
They found that between 2011 and 2020, the continent was losing ice at a rate of 142 gigatons per year. However, between 2021 and 2023, East Antarctica grew by an average of 108 gigatons per year, the most significant growth spurt on record in the modern era.
The explosion in ice was enough to decrease global sea levels by about 0.3 millimeters per year during the same period, Fox News reported.
East Antarctica’s Wilkes Land and Queen Mary Land region, including the Totten, Denman, Moscow University, and Vincennes Bay glacier basins, showed the most dramatic turnaround. Surface melting and ice discharge into the ocean had contributed to their decline for decades, but all four basins now appear to have at least partially recovered.
In their conclusion, the study’s authors discourage readers from concluding that climate change is not occurring. They link the ice growth to unusual precipitation patterns rather than a change in atmospheric carbon emission levels or other factors typically blamed for climate change. However, climate scientists have been famously inaccurate in predicting future weather patterns, dating back to the dawn of the industry in the 1970s.
Still, the result is significant given how much of the global ice supply is contained within Antarctica. The South Pole holds more than half of the world’s fresh water supply and is approximately five times the size of Greenland, the second-closest contributor to sea level rise over the past several decades.
The change is a reminder of how dynamic climate shifts can be, especially in the polar regions. The study’s authors promised to continue closely monitoring the growth in Antarctica’s eastern glacier basins as they prepare to make future predictions about the rise of the global sea level in the coming years.
