A NASA article currently seems to be gold for climate deniers because it supposedly disproves climate change.

It's amazing: on the one hand, NASA is part of the big climate change conspiracy, but on the other hand, people are suddenly happy to highlight individual NASA reports as long as they support their own opinion.
A good example of this is a NASA study from 2015, which was picked up by one site three years later. Since then, the article from that page has been repeatedly posted by climate deniers in posts and comments on Facebook.

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This is what the website “ legitim.ch ” writes:

“A NASA study from 2015 confirms that the Antarctic polar ice cap is expanding massively! NASA even admitted that the research results contradict the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report (2013 World Climate Report). The world climate report seems to be wrong in its warning of rising sea levels and the melting of the polar ice caps.”

The article is accompanied by several videos and images that are intended to support the statements. In this respect, the statements are correct... but not only partially outdated, but rather "hand-picked", because not all of the statements from the NASA study were mentioned in the article, apparently especially not those parts that do not fit with one's own opinion.

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The NASA study

That NASA study is also linked in the article so that we can see for ourselves.
The numbers and information in the “Legitimate” article all agree literally with the NASA study, but you quickly come to the first discrepancy, because the following paragraph in the study is important.

This is the statement of Jay Zwally, a glaciologist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study published October 30, 2015 in the Journal of Glaciology:

“But it could only take a few decades for Antarctica’s growth to reverse.
If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate as they have increased over the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gains in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years - I don't think it will There will be enough snowfall increase to offset these losses.”

The 135 billion tons

This number does not appear directly in the NASA study, but can be easily calculated: 200 - 65.
What is interesting is which paragraph of the NASA study these two numbers come from, because it shows that Antarctica is Mass gains, but this gain becomes less and less:

"Zwally's team calculated that mass gain from the thickening of East Antarctica constant 200 billion tons per year , while ice losses from the coastal regions of West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula increased 65 billion tons per year ."

But the study also leaves questions unanswered, because it was found that although Antarctica's mass gain lowers sea level by 0.23 millimeters per year, there is still a sea level rise of 0.27 millimeters per year.
The question now is: If it doesn't come from Antarctica, where does it come from?

As mentioned above in the NASA study, the results of the study are contradictory, which is why further studies are necessary. For this purpose, NASA developed the satellite ICESat mission ICESat-2 , which detects changes in the Antarctic ice layer within a thickness of a No. 2 pencils should be able to measure. The satellite went into operation on September 15, 2018.

December 2018 – a new NASA study

Antarctica consists of frozen water and snow, which remains on this ice and freezes. The difficult thing about measurements in Antarctica is that most measurement laboratories are stationed on the coasts, so snowfall can only be measured in a rudimentary manner. However, this task is carried out by satellites that can make increasingly precise measurements.

A new study examining Antarctica's evolution in the 20th century suggests that Antarctica's ice mass was primarily caused by snowfall.

But even though it snowed more heavily in Antarctica in the 20th century and the amount of snow apparently increased, the results do not give the all-clear. Says Brooke Medley, a glaciologist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study, published December 10, 2018, in Nature Climate Change:

“Our results do not mean that Antarctica is growing;
it is still losing mass, even with the additional snowfall. What it does mean is that without this snowfall we would have seen even more sea level rise in the 20th century.”

How could this be measured?

Satellites can now calculate mass very well, but they often have a problem:
they are only able to distinguish to a very limited extent between snow that is already lying and snow that has just fallen.

That's why ice cores are taken from Antarctica. These are cylinders made of ice that are drilled out of the ice sheet. Because of the layers in the cylinders, it is easy to see how much snow has fallen in a particular year or even decade.

For this study, Brooke Medley and her colleague Elizabeth Thomas from the British Antarctic Survey examined a total of 53 of these ice cores and three atmospheric reanalyses in order to combine the combined investigations (point recordings of the ice cores + simulations of the snowfall reanalyses) into the new study.

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Why did more snow fall than usual?

The two researchers found that it is consistent with a warming atmosphere that retains more moisture, combined with changes in Antarctic circumpolar westerlies linked to the ozone hole.
Simply put, increased snowfall is a symptom of the same atmospheric change that is causing ice melting: global warming.

In her study, Brooke Medley assumes that snowfall in Antarctica will continue to increase, but at the same time ice losses will also increase.
The bottom line is that they come to the same conclusion that Jay Zwally already suspected in the 2015 study: the gain in mass will soon no longer be able to compensate for the loss in ice.

Conclusion

The pure mass actually increases, but at the same time more and more ice melts.
So what sounds quite good at first, upon closer inspection, shows that the climate models are not really contradicted, because the effect that was confirmed in 2015 (increase in mass) is in the process of being reversed (soon more decrease than increase). In addition, the increased snowfall in Antarctica, which is responsible for the mass increase, actually confirms global warming, but does not refute it.

Thus, the main message of the “Legitimate” article, which, like other articles on the site, tended to say that NASA is refuting climate change, is, upon closer inspection, very superficial and wrong in its conclusion.

Also interesting:

Article image: Shutterstock / By TravelStrategy


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