Today's Antarctic Meltwater Grifters ... Charlatans ... Hoaxers ... Fiction Writers

Operation IceBridge, Weddell Sea, 2017.
Compliments of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Ctr

Perhaps you have seen the "gotcha videos," where someone points at a shallow stretch of meltwater on the ice sheet of Antarctica ... or at a small area of coarse Antarctic surface ice ... declaring that the Climate Armageddon has finally arrived ... and that it's all the White Man's fault ... and that we don't have a minute to lose ... to save the world ... from the White Man.

Actually, these were "I-told-you-so videos," where the shallow meltwater ponds and/or unsmooth stretches  of surface ice are evidence of an atmosphere overloaded with CO2 so badly that the oceans will soon rise to the point of drowning the Statue of Liberty.

Well, here is your atmospheric reality check, compliments of MIT, otherwise known as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

Those Antarctic meltwater ponds have nothing to do with Planet Earth's CO2 level which comprises less than 1/2 of 1/10 of 1% of the Earth's atmosphere, at 431 or 432 parts per million.  They have everything to do with the Sun's ultraviolet light rays being cast upon the Antarctic ice sheet twenty-fours a day, 7 days a week, for an approximate 6 month period:

MORE SPECIFICALLY, meltwater's natural formation goes as such, according to a 2016 science paper that addressed the Eastern Antarctic ice sheet.  It's found at:

https://epic.awi.de/id/eprint/42771/

We then see ... from Stanford & Chicago Univ ... that the following is the case:

Let's review reality:

1} Antarctica really does undergo six consecutive months of constant sunlight beating down upon its 2-mile thick ice sheet.

2} Antarctica is the driest desert on Earth, meaning that the sky above it is a contiguous high pressure system which has very little water vapor and very little "condensation nuclei."  This means that the Antarctic sky doesn't readily induce the development of clouds, even though you'll see some clouds off the coastline.

3} The constant, 24/7, unblocked sunlight causes surface ice to melt, even where the temperatures are always below freezing.  The albedo effect then increases the melting of such ponds.

The meltwater has nothing to do with the CO2 level of Earth's atmosphere.  In fact, it's meltwater's action that caused the cracks seen on the Antarctic Ice Sheet to widen.  This includes the cracks on the ice shelves, even in sub-freezing temps.

The creation of meltwater has everything to do with the Sun's ultraviolet light rays & albedo.  I've already explained albedo in a previous post or two ... or three.

Moreover, Antarctica naturally loses 85% or so of its sea ice in the Summertime, even where temperatures are below freezing.  It has nothing to do with the CO2 level.  It has to do with the wind and ocean currents pushing the ice away from the coastline ... and melting the ice with the unfrozen water below the ice, while the ice drifts to warmer regions away from the Antarctic coastline.

That water isn't being melted by CO2's contribution of infrared radiation.  That ice slowly floats away in the Summertime, compliments of the wind and the ocean currents.  Then it melts.

Oh, and then there's the lie told by the young climate activists about penguins needing Antarctic ice or they will be unable to breed, followed by the penguins going extinct:   The opposite is true.

Beware of Climate Charlatans, especially when they act all so confident in what they assert.  That is where the term, Confidence Man, originated.  Today, we call them con artists;  sometimes smooth-talking snakes.  It has the same meaning, either way.