The Antarctic landscape is seen near the Troll Research Station.A natural occurrence 10,000 years in the making has challenged the thinking of climate change alarmists about Antarctica.
Is it possible other such natural events are at work on Earth, outside the understanding of the so-called overwhelming consensus of scientists who believe the formerly named global warming is about to wreak havoc on our world?
Of course it is.
A NASA study, published late last month, said snow that began piling up millennia ago in East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica exceeds whatever relatively recent losses of ice have occurred in the Antarctic Peninsula and the Thwaites and Pine Island region of West Antarctica.
While ice losses were measured at 65 billion tons annually, ice gains in the central Antarctic ice sheet were 112 billion tons a year from 1992 to 2001 and 82 billion tons annually between 2003 and 2008. East Antarctica, meanwhile, thickened at a rate of 200 billion tons a year from 1992 to 2008.
The overall annual thickening - about .7 inches per year but sustained over thousands of years and spread over the vast expanse of central and eastern Antarctica - corresponds to a very large gain of ice, according to Jay Zwally, a glaciologist with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and lead author of the study. That amount, he said in the study published in the Journal of Glaciology, is enough to outweigh losses from the glaciers that are melting in other parts of the continent and reduce any global sea level rise.
Naturally, some in the climate change industry heaped ice water on the study, and one even said the decrease in ice in one place and the increase in another is "actually probably a symptom of the same thing."
And they wonder why people have such skepticism over the whole business.