NASA Study Says Antarctica Ice Sheets Not Thinning

Studies like this one show that climate change is a complicated set of data that needs to be interpreted. We’ve only had good data for a few years, so it’s hard to determine long term trends from a scant few years of data—and yet many climate change alarmists act as though their claims are a hard, proven science. Climate change ideas are constantly changing (just like our climate!), as the switch from using the term “global warming” to “climate change” itself shows. Climate change alarmist scientists failed to include all the parameters when they declared that Antarctic ice melting was causing sea levels to rise—this new study shows that it’s not.

Apparently earlier models only looked at the increase in ice calving from the glaciers and entering the sea in the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica. They had failed to include the thickening of the ice sheets in East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica. This thickening is due to increased snowfall which fell, according to the researchers, about 10,000 years ago. This in the evolutionary paradigm is at the end of the most recent Ice Age.

In a creation model though, this would have been during the one and only Ice Age which followed close on the heels of the Flood and would have started approximately 4,350 years ago and lasted for a few hundred years. This increased snowfall has over the last approximately 4,300 years compacted and turned into ice in the interior of the continent and is actually adding to the Antarctic ice sheets. Researchers estimate this to be a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001 and 82 billion tons from 2002 to 2008. This ice gain was found to exceed the losses of ice falling into the sea at the continental margins. It was also determined that Antarctica is not contributing to global sea level rise.

As I’ve pointed out before, it’s clear that climates change. But what’s not clear from the data is catastrophic climate change caused by man’s activities. That’s an interpretation of the data based on certain evolutionary assumptions about past climates—an interpretation that often only selects evidence that supports their conclusion that there is catastrophic climate change being caused by humans!

In addition, we can see from the above example that models are dependent upon having all the data carefully inputted. If something is left out, then we have alarmist predictions of an Antarctica with shrinking ice sheets, when just the opposite turns out to be the case.

Climates do change, but when we start with a biblical picture of Earth’s history, we reach an entirely different conclusion about the nature and severity of this change. God created a perfect climate that was upset at the time of the catastrophic global Flood of Noah’s day. This Flood was followed shortly by the Ice Age and then a transitional climate that has led up to the climate we have today. Yes, climates change, but that shouldn’t surprise us. We can be confident in knowing that our climate was designed by an all-knowing God who has promised,

While the earth remains,
Seedtime and harvest,
Cold and heat,
Winter and summer,
And day and night
Shall not cease. (Genesis 8:22)

You can learn more about climate change in this chapter from the New Answers Book 4.

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,
Ken

This item was written with the assistance of AiG’s research team.