Frenetic Headlines About West Antarctic Ice Melt Are Unequivocally Deceptive

Climate Change Dispatch:

You may have seen the alarming news stories that the West Antarctic ice sheet is going to collapse, leaving low-lying areas completely flooded. With apologies to Al Gore, it’s just not gonna happen anytime soon, if ever. The harrowing headlines refer to the Thwaites Glacier study, posted online yesterday, and quickly became grist for the mill for our front-page grabbing news media reporting the most implausible, and silliest, scenarios that may or may not happen in 200 to 900 years based on data fed into computer models.

Even Andrew Revkin of the NY Times, a long-standing, fully pledged, global-warming ‘enthusiast’, took issue with the mainstream media’s handling of this non-catastrophic news, subtly blaming it on the language used, not the messenger. He even encourages his savvy readers to “consider clashing scientific and societal meanings of ‘collapse’ when reading antarctic ice news”. If that sounds similar to, “that depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is“, you’re not alone. Revkin doesn’t explicitly hand-wring his fellow journalists, but instead asks you, fellow reader, to analyze the amped-up rhetoric for yourself. As Revkin writes,

Some headlines are completely overwrought — as with this NBC offering: “West Antarctic Ice Sheet’s Collapse Triggers Sea Level Warning.” This kind of coverage could be interpreted to mean there’s an imminent crisis. It’s hard to justify that conclusion given the core findings in the studies. (Am I trying to maintain a hold on reality or am I a “scold”?)

Take the Science paper: “Marine Ice Sheet Collapse Potentially Under Way for the Thwaites Glacier Basin, West Antarctica.” Using ice-flow models and observations, the researchers, led by Ian Joughin of the University of Washington, concluded:

Except possibly for the lowest-melt scenario, the simulations indicate that early-stage collapse has begun. Less certain is the time scale, with the onset of rapid (>1 mm per year of sea-level rise) collapse in the different simulations within the range of 200 to 900 years.

To translate a bit, that means sometime between 200 and 900 years from now the rate of ice loss from this glacier could reach a volume sufficient to raise sea levels about 4 inches (100 millimeters) a century. At that point, according to the paper, ice loss could pick up steam, with big losses over a period of decades.* But in a phone conversation, Joughin said the modeling was not reliable enough to say how much, how soon.

“Collapse is a good scientific word,” he told me, “but maybe it’s kind of a bad word” in the context of news. There’s more on this work in a well-written news release from Joughin’s university.

Eric Rignot at the University of California, Irvine, admitted in a NASA recording of a conference call with reporters that the term “collapse” was inappropriate in this case.

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