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A Crack in an Antarctic Ice Shelf Grew 17 Miles in the Last Two Months
Jugal K Patel, writing for the NYTimes: A rapidly advancing crack in Antarctica's fourth-largest ice shelf has scientists concerned that it is getting close to a full break. The rift has accelerated this year in an area already vulnerable to warming temperatures. Since December, the crack has grown by the length of about five football fields each day (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternate source). The crack in Larsen C now reaches over 100 miles in length, and some parts of it are as wide as two miles. The tip of the rift is currently only about 20 miles from reaching the other end of the ice shelf. Once the crack reaches all the way across the ice shelf, the break will create one of the largest icebergs ever recorded, according to Project Midas, a research team that has been monitoring the rift since 2014. Because of the amount of stress the crack is placing on the remaining 20 miles of the shelf, the team expects the break soon.
Actually it's just the National Review passing along an "expose" by The Daily Mail. This is the same "newspaper" that claimed a 63 year-old woman became pregnant with baby squid after eating calimari.
If you look into the objections, they're rubbish. The paper in question (Karl et al) is part of an ongoing back-and-forth by scientists over the degree of warming post-1998, so if it is part of a conspiracy by the scientific establishment to cover up contrary data it's a pretty lame conspiracy because it let both sides of the data out.
As for Karl et al, it's a highly technical paper, but to cut to the chase the reason it has the denialists in an uproar is that it proposes a method that erases their precious, cherry-picked post '98 "hiatus". That hiatus didn't exist if you smoothed the data or chose any other starting point but the record setting '98, and it was was blown away by 2014-2016 anyhow. So this is beating a dead horse that was barely alive to begin with. The method in the Karl paper also suggests that the rate of warming since the early 20th C is actually lower than previously believed. Alarmist!
The thing about this kind of bullshit response is that the attraction of a conspiracy theory is that it's quick and easy to understand, as long as you don't try to square it with actual events. People find CTs credible because it says the people bearing bad news are out to get them.
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