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"Everything about Antarctica has defied the experts. For years Antarctic sea ice expanded when it wasn’t supposed to. Then, suddenly in 2016 the sea ice around Antarctica dramatically started to shrink, and that wasn’t supposed to happen either. Scientists wondered at the time if it was just a temporary blip, but then it got even smaller. Holes in the sea ice 'as big as Switzerland' have started to appear for the first time since the mid 1970s.
"To explain this mystery (that was rarely mentioned) a new paper suggests the salinity of surface waters has changed. We’re not just talking about a small piece of ocean, this is everything south of 50°. For decades, the surface of the polar Southern Ocean was getting less salty — an 'expected response to a warming climate' they said that started in about 1980, 'however, this trend reversed abruptly after 2015.'
"So as news seeps out this week that there is a 'dangerous feedback loop' where shrinking ice is warming the ocean, bear in mind that the experts also admit this is 'completely unexpected' which is their way of saying 'the models were wrong.' Carbon dioxide was not supposed to do this.
"Most likely some large natural cycle has shifted gears. Steadily rising CO2 didn’t cause the rise in sea level before 2015, and didn’t cause the decline after that either. There are bigger forces at work, and we don’t know what they are…Graph adapted from Climate4You
"When the die-hard believers point out that Antarctica is 'just catching up' and that they always said Antarctic sea ice would shrink, remind them that Turner et al said in 2013: 'The increase in Antarctic sea ice remains one of the great unsolved puzzles of climate science.' Now they have a new theory, 'the salinity changed' — but what caused that? They don’t know. They might as well be tea leaf readers when it comes to predicting the climate."
