Greensplaining why more ice means the world is getting warmer.
This tweet from Tony appears to have stirred up establishment media greens;
“Antarctic sea ice extent is 17% higher today than it was in 1979. Ice doesn’t lie, but climate scientists do,” the text reads.
An NSIDC spokesperson told Reuters via email that Antarctic sea ice extent on Dec. 24, 1979, was 7.38 million square kilometres, and on Dec. 24, 2024, it was 8.28 million square kilometres. This is an increase of 12.2%.
Source Reuters / Tony Heller
…
However, NSIDC data also show that there was more, opens new tab Antarctic sea ice on the majority of days in 1979 compared with days in 2024. …
“It would be a bit like saying that because a sports team won the first game of the year in 2025 but lost the first game of the year in 2020, they had got better, even if they were bottom of the league in 2025 and top of the league in 2020,” she said.
…
Antarctic sea ice is particularly variable, and has defied attempts to connect its long-term trend to climate change, the NSIDC spokesperson said.
“In the absence of a clear climate reason for the change, many scientists looked to oceanic changes as the cause.”
But uncertainties about Antarctic sea ice’s relationship with global temperatures do not invalidate evidence of climate change globally.
Screen said: “Even if sea ice returns in the Antarctic, it doesn’t disprove other indicators of climate change. Warming oceans, melting glaciers, and the dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice are just some of the many signs of a warming planet.”
Tony Heller responded to this Reuters “fact check”.
When they mentioned uncertainty and sea ice variability, Reuters forgot to mention back in 2014 record Antarctic sea ice was blamed on global warming.
Antarctic winter sea ice extent sets new record in 2014
BY MICHON SCOTT REVIEWED BY TED SCAMBOS PUBLISHED OCTOBER 7, 2014
DETAILS
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It’s not unreasonable to wonder how, if the planet is warming, Antarctic winter sea ice can set record highs. As the NSIDC release explains, Antarctica’s sea ice growth spurt may be down to stronger winds and slightly fresher sea surface water around the margins of the continent’s melting ice shelves.
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Winds probably did not act alone to spur so much sea ice growth; melting land ice may have played a role. Most of Antarctica’s ice lies in the ice sheets that cover the continent, and in recent decades, that ice has been melting. Along the coastline, ice shelves float on the ocean surface, and much of the recent melt may be driven by warm water from the deep ocean rising and making contact with ice shelf undersides.
How does the melting of land ice matter to sea ice formation? The resulting meltwater is fresher than the seawater. As it mixes with the seawater, the meltwater makes the nearby seawater slightly less dense, and slightly closer to the freezing point than the ocean water below. This less dense seawater spreads out across the ocean surface surrounding the continent, forming a stable pool of surface water that is close to the freezing point, and close to the ice onto which it could freeze.
So as counterintuitive as expanding winter Antarctic sea ice may appear on a warming planet, it may actually be a manifestation of recent warming. “Both the Arctic and the Antarctic are responding to climate change, and both have areas that are warming rapidly,” explains NSIDC lead scientist Ted Scambos. “But Antarctic sea ice is responding to wind shifts and ocean changes in an unexpected way, and we’re still trying to fully understand it.”
“It may actually be” doesn’t fill me with a sense of certainty.
If melting land ice in the Antarctic caused sea ice to peak, due to melting fresh water ice reducing the salinity of adjacent sea water, why didn’t melting land ice in the Arctic cause Arctic sea ice to peak? Or does the melting land ice effect only work in Southern latitudes? It is all very well to talk about the Southern ocean being bigger, but shouldn’t the concentration of nearby land ice allegedly melting into the landlocked Arctic ocean cause even more sea ice to form?
If sea ice is so poorly understood and variable, and the connection to global warming so ambiguous, why have we been subject to years of claims that runaway global warming is going to flood all the coastal cities and melt the polar ice caps?
Climategate 2 Email 0700.txt (20/03/1998):
EC Meeting on Polar Climate Research
Copenhagen 12-13 March 1998
DISCUSSION
On future challenges for the polar regions
Discussion Panel : A Ghazi, J. Thiede, O. Orheim
Participants : L Anderson, K Briffa, H Decleir, M Fily, T Friborg, A Hakon Hoel, J O Hagen, C Hammer, J P Hart Hansen, D Hedberg, J C Hesselbjerg, K Holmen, K Hutter, E Jansen, O Johannessen, J Jouzel, G Jugie, A Korhola, K Kristjansson, E Larsen, P Lemke, P Malkki, H Miller, J Oerlemans, V Pavlenko, S Raper, C Rapley, D Raynaud ; N Reeh, O Rogne, B Stauffer, J Taagholt, I Troen, C A Williams, M Zucchelli,
…
The interface between science and politics
B Stauffer said that science could not prevent global climate change, therefore science should support sustainability, however if science can point to means of reducing the rate of global change, this would show that there was something that could be done and would evoke political decisions.
J Jouzel said that the truth will come from the use of models and their validation and that there was a move in WCRP – CLIVAR to take more interest in palaeo-data. Communications between scientists and politicians are becoming more and more important and the scientific population must be large enough to be visible. D Raynaud commented that the work by Stocker in 1997 on the gross rate of emissions and the change in thermo circulation is important to conferences such as Kyoto. K Hutter added that politicians accused scientists of a high signal to noise ratio; scientists must make sure that they come up with stronger signals. The time-frame for science and politics is very different; politicians need instant information, but scientific results take a long time
A Ghazi pointed out that the funding is set once the politicians want the research to be done. We need to make them understand that we do not understand the climate system. Kyoto was a compromise and the EC accepted pollution levels which were not accepted by all members. At the next meeting in Buenos Aires in November 1998 we must learn how to approach the USA. The USA wants to buy the 30% of emissions that is not achieved in Russia. This emission trading is not acceptable. However the US argues that if the EC is trading within itself then it can do so also, however the EC will be achieving an emissions reduction of 6-8
…
From Climategate Email 0700.txt
Politicians who control research funds pressuring scientists to provide “stronger signals” raises obvious concerns – though to be fair, in the email the scientists resolved to try to educate politicians on how science works.
One thing seems clear. Regardless of what you read, hear or see in the media, nobody truly understands the global climate system, especially when it comes to the behaviour of polar sea ice.
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The infamous Inflation Reduction Act is best known for throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at green causes. Along the way it also says repeatedly and falsely that carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases (except water vapor) are pollution.
This is important because it is the first time Congress has said such a thing in law. Alarmists are now claiming that this saying somehow certifies the bogus EPA CO2 Endangerment Finding and requires EPA regulation of GHGs. Technically this is not true but a Court might think it is so we need to get that language out of the law.
Fortunately this false language occurs in ways that make it relatively easy to erase. Repeal of major provisions of the IRA, while highly desirable for other reasons, is not necessary. Repeal is hard but making small changes in language might not be especially difficult when these do not affect the cash flow.
Most of the worst green language occurs in a small part of the bill called “TITLE VI — Subtitle A — Air Pollution.” There are 16 sections and a few refer to actual pollution but they are mostly about GHGs so the “Air Pollution” title is already wrong. It should be changed to something accurate like “Greenhouse Gas Money For Nothing.” Such a change would have no effect on the ridiculous law.
The primary wrong is in a definition that appears in a lot of different sections. It says this:
‘‘GREENHOUSE GAS.—The term ‘greenhouse gas’ means the air pollutants carbon dioxide, hydrofluorocarbons, methane, nitrous oxide, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride.”
None of these airborne chemicals acting as GHGs are pollutants so here is the obvious, corrected replacement:
‘‘GREENHOUSE GAS.—The term ‘greenhouse gas’ means carbon dioxide, hydrofluorocarbons, methane, nitrous oxide, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride.”
This is easily done and it has no effect on the law except to stop calling GHGs pollutants. It would be even more correct to add water vapor to the list but there are no billions for reducing water vapor emissions just the listed harmless GHGs.
Another bit of name calling occurs when both GHGs and actual air pollutants are referred to. Here we repeatedly find locutions like this
“…reduce greenhouse gas emissions and other air pollutants…”
Here the word “other” implies that GHGs are also pollutants. Phrases like this are easily corrected to this:
“…reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants…”
Simply taking out “other” does not change the substance of the law.
It would not be that hard to find every incorrect instance of the words pollutant, pollutants, pollution, etc., and write a simple amendment that corrects their misuse. Careful reading might find other cases that need corrected.
Since this simple change has no effect on the hundreds of billions of wasteful dollars being given away by the IRA it might actually be passable. It would go a long way on the road to reversing the bogus Endangerment Finding.
In fact it would clearly signal that Congress does not consider GHGs to be pollutants.
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“…despite increasing area burned in recent decades,… a widespread fire deficit persists across a range of forest types and recent years with exceptionally high area burned are not unprecedented when considering the multi-century perspective offered by fire-scarred trees.”
Let’s review that one more time:
“Wildland fire was common and widespread across many forests and woodlands in North America prior to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In subsequent decades, fire exclusion—the practice of preventing and suppressing nearly all wildland fires—occurred as the result of the disruption of traditional burning, livestock grazing, and active suppression of human- and lightning-ignited fires. As a consequence, average annual area burned since the late 19th and early- to mid-20th centuries is generally less than that experienced under historical fire regimes across many North American forests, resulting in a widespread 20th century ‘fire deficit’ relative to earlier time periods.”
Note: The authors use “the term ‘traditional burning’ to encompass both Indigenous fire stewardship and post-colonization traditions of burning that were widely adopted in the eastern United States.”
The table shows that only one single region, the Taiga & Hudson Plain, in Northern Canada, had had more fires in the 1984-2022 study interval than would be predicted based on the burn scar data prior to 1880.
The study gives a conceptual explanation of the causes and effects as:
“Overall, contemporary fires (1984–2022) burned NAFSN [North American tree-ring fire-scar network] sites less frequently than fires during the historical reference period (pre-1880), indicating that a substantial fire deficit persists and is still accumulating across many forests and woodlands across the United States and Canada (Table 1). Based on the historical fire-scar record, NAFSN sites collectively would be expected to have burned 4346 times from 1984– 2022, yet they burned 989 times, or only 23% of what would be expected under the historical fire regime.”
The mass media would rather focus on studies such as “U.S. fires became larger, more frequent, and more widespread in the 2000s” , Iglesias et al. (2022), found in Science Advances. Iglesias et al. only studied fires since 1984. Looking at Parks et al. (2025) Figure 4 above, we see that time period as the raging fires fed by 100 years of fire deficit.
Bottom Lines:
1. Claims made repeatedly in the mainstream media that wildfires are getting more common and more severe are not supported by the findings of this study.
2. When looked at over the last 200 years, we have a severe fire deficit, not an excess. In the ecoregions studied (U.S. and Canada), fires have been far less frequent and the result is a fire deficit.This is true of all the ecoregions except the most northern parts of Canada.
3. The long-term fire deficit, unburned wildlands, sets up wildlands for more fiercely burning fires that consume all the extra fuel left by the lack of fire.
4. Parks et al. (2025) has a very interesting discussion section that covers possible long-term effects and regime shifts that might result from the century of fire suppression.
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Author’s Comment:
Fire is always a news worthy topic. Humans seem, even in our technologically advanced era, to be fascinated by fire while at the same time, depressingly ignorant of its causes and effects. This is seen all over the United States in the building of highly flammable homes in our forests and, as in Los Angeles, on indefensible hillsides covered with incendiary brush and grasses.
It is no mystery why some recent fires have been particular hot. The basics of fire have not changed: fuel + oxygen + heat = fire. More fuel with adequate oxygen makes hotter fires.
Studying short-term data sets for long-term phenomena is not good science.
After uploading the above essay, I found that Roger Pielke Jr. has picked up on the same study. His piece is The North American Fire Deficit.
Thanks for reading.
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