by A. Watt,  Dec 20, 2024 in ClimateChangeDispatch

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The climate chicken littles of the media blamed it on climate change then, but today, it looks like an Emily Litella moment has just occurred, as a new peer-reviewed scientific study says it wasn’t anything abnormal, nor should we worry about it.

The new study published in Geophysical Research Letters tosses ice-cold water on those overhyped media claims.

In the study, MacKie et al. (2024) analyzed 47 years of observational satellite data from Antarcticaand found that there has been no trend in annual Antarctic maximum calving size between 1976 and 2023.

The key findings of the study are:

• There has been no detectable upward trend in the annual maximum iceberg area in Antarctica since 1973, based on satellite measurements.
• The break-off of Iceberg A-68 from the Larsen C Ice Shelf was not statistically notable.
• Calving events several times larger than anything observed in the modern record could occur, and still, it would not necessarily be due to climate change.

To be clear, the calving of the A-68 iceberg was “statistically unexceptional” in the historical satellite record. Let that sink in. The authors write:

This finding suggests that extreme calving events such as the recent 2017 Larsen C iceberg, A-68, are statistically unexceptional and that extreme calving events are not necessarily a consequence of climate change.

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