Reason’s unlikely recruit
A report in CO2 Science says the Anatarctic ice sheet us actually expanding:

What was done
The authors “analyzed 1.2 x 108 European remote sensing satellite altimeter echoes to determine the changes in volume of the Antarctic ice sheet from 1992 to 2003.” This survey, in their words, “covers 85% of the East Antarctic ice sheet and 51% of the West Antarctic ice sheet,” which together comprise “72% of the grounded ice sheet.”"
What was learned
Wingham et al. report that “overall, the data, corrected for isostatic rebound, show the ice sheet growing at 5 ± 1 mm year-1.” To calculate the ice sheet’s change in mass, however, “requires knowledge of the density at which the volume changes have occurred,” and when the researchers’ best estimates of regional differences in this parameter are used, they find that “72% of the Antarctic ice sheet is gaining 27 ± 29 Gt year-1, a sink of ocean mass sufficient to lower [authors’ italics] global sea levels by 0.08 mm year-1.” This net extraction of water from the global ocean, according to Wingham et al., occurs because “mass gains from accumulating snow, particularly on the Antarctic Peninsula and within East Antarctica, exceed the ice dynamic mass loss from West Antarctica.”

What it means
Contrary to all the horror stories one hears about global warming-induced mass wastage of the Antarctic ice sheet leading to rising sea levels that gobble up coastal lowlands worldwide, the most recent decade of pertinent real-world data suggest that forces leading to just the opposite effect are apparently prevailing, even in the face of what climate alarmists typically describe as the greatest warming of the world in the past two millennia or more.

The mismatch between what the science actually tells us and what campaigners tell us the science tells us has become so extreme that the climate change lobby itself is starting to crack apart. One of its gurus, Mike Hulme, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, has turned on his own side and denounced the current hysteria over global warming (singling out the Independent newspaper by name) as manipulation and group-think:


Climate change is a reality, and science confirms that human activities are heavily implicated in this change. But over the last few years a new environmental phenomenon has been constructed in this country - the phenomenon of ‘caastrophic’climate change. It seems that mere ‘climate change’ was not going to be bad enough, and so now it must be ‘catastrophic’ to be worthy of attention. The increasing use of this pejorative term - and its bedfellow qualifiers ‘chaotic’, ‘irreversible’, ‘rapid’ - has altered the public discourse around climate change. This discourse is now characterised by phrases such as ‘climate change is worse than we thought’, that we are approaching ‘irreversible tipping in the Earth’s climate’, and that we are ‘at the point of no return’.

I have found myself increasingly chastised by climate change campaigners when my public statements and lectures on climate change have not satisfied their thirst for environmental drama and exaggerated rhetoric… What has pushed the debate between climate change scientists and climate sceptics to now being between climate change scientists and climate alarmists? I believe there are three factors now at work.

First, the discourse of catastrophe is a campaigning device being mobilised in the context of failing UK and Kyoto Protocol targets to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide. The signatories to this UN protocol will not deliver on their obligations. This bursting of the campaigning bubble requires a determined reaction to raise the stakes - the language of climate catastrophe nicely fits the bill. Hence we now have the militancy of the Stop Climate Chaos activists and the megaphone journalism of the Independent newspaper, with supporting rhetoric from the prime minister and senior government scientists.

Others suggest that the sleeping giants of the Gaian Earth system are being roused from their millennia of slumber to wreck havoc on humanity. Second, the discourse of catastrophe is a political and rhetorical device to change the frame of reference for the emerging negotiations around what happens when the Kyoto Protocol runs out after 2012. The Exeter conference of February 2005 on ‘Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change’ served the government’s purposes of softening-up the G8 Gleneagles summit through a frenzied week of ‘climate change is worse than we thought’ news reporting and group-think. By stage-managing the new language of catastrophe, the conference itself became a tipping point in the way that climate change is discussed in public.

Third, the discourse of catastrophe allows some space for the retrenchment of science budgets. It is a short step from claiming these catastrophic risks have physical reality, saliency and are imminent, to implying that one more ‘big push’ of funding will allow science to quantify them objectively. We need to take a deep breath and pause. The language of catastrophe is not the language of science. It will not be visible in next year’s global assessment from the world authority of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). To state that climate change will be ‘catastrophic’ hides a cascade of value-laden assumptions which do not emerge from empirical or theoretical science. Is any amount of climate change catastrophic? Catastrophic for whom, for where, and by when? What index is being used to measure the catastrophe? The language of fear and terror operates as an ever-weakening vehicle for effective communication or inducement for behavioural change.