Mistranslation led to false report that a southern ocean current "reversed" - Antarctic sea ice MAY melt long term but it may be a temporary fluctuation - no warming tipping point
This is running as stories such as: the ones in the screenshot here, but it is all due to a mistranslation of a quote by one of the co-authors used by mistake in the press release - and also in the title for the press release.
TEXT ON GRAPHIC: Mistaken press release due to mistranslation
The reason was partly a result of a mistranslation of the original author’s quote and partly because of clumsy words on his part:
Turiel told Newsweek that the flawed quote was partly a result of mistranslation.
"Our original press note contained some wrong sentences, partly caused by mistranslation, partly caused by a wrong use of words on my side. That's the reason of the correction," he said.
https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-ocean-current-reversal-what-know-2096224
This shows clearly how science reporters write stories based only on the press release. They can’t have read the paper itself or consulted any experts on the topic area of the story.
This paper just talks about how the sea ice has shrunk since 2015 which is not a new discovery and about how they can measure the changes in salinity from orbit which gives a new way to monitor what is happening to the sea ice around Antarctica.
QUOTE STARTS
For decades, the surface of the polar Southern Ocean (south of 50°S) has been freshening…
Using satellite observations, we reveal a marked increase in surface salinity across the circumpolar Southern Ocean since 2015….
Crucially, we demonstrate that satellites can now monitor these changes in real time, providing essential evidence of the Southern Ocean’s potential transition toward persistently reduced sea ice coverage.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2500440122 Rising surface salinity and declining sea ice: A new Southern Ocean state revealed by satellites
The paper itself doesn’t even talk about the Southern Meridian Overturning Current which is a southern version of the AMOC which has weakened by 10% or 20% but it would be a dramatic and surprising discovery to say it has stopped, never mind reversed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Ocean_overturning_circulation
The stories and the original press release got an immediate reaction from experts on BlueSky who spotted the mistake quickly.
Gavin Schmidt’s response to the claim that the SMOC reversed:
Then replied to himself saying the press release has been edited:
The mistaken press release said the Southern Ocean's meridional overturning circulation (SMOC) had reversed.
ORIGINAL HEADLINE (FALSE) Major reversal in ocean circulation detected in the Southern Ocean, with key climate implications (ICM)
QUOTE (FALSE) This change in water composition suggests that the deep ocean circulation in the Southern Hemisphere—known as the SMOC—is not only being altered, but has reversed. That is, instead of sinking into the depths, surface water is being replaced by deep water masses rising to the surface, bringing with them heat and carbon dioxide (CO2) that had been trapped for centuries.
The edited version now just says the salinity has changed, which isn’t a new observation and could be for many reasons as Gavin Schmidt explained in his tweet.
NEW HEADLINE (TRUE AND NOT SURPRISING) A change in the Southern Ocean structure can have climate implications
QUOTE (NOT NEWS) That change in water composition suggests a change in the balance of the components the ocean circulation in the Southern Hemisphere. Fresher surface water close to the sea ice edge is being replaced by more saline waters.
https://www.icm.csic.es/en/news/change-southern-ocean-structure-can-have-climate-implications
This is a summary of the major shifts in the press release as a result of editing
Sea ice melt has no direct effect on sea level rise
Because this is sea ice it doesn’t cause the sea level to rise. That’s because the ice is already floating on the water and when the ice melts to water the water surrounding it doesn’t rise.
It can eventually make a difference to how fast the glaciers flow into the sea because sea ice buttresses the glaciers. But the sea ice melt itself does nothing.
Anatarctica’s negative greenhouse effect
Up to 2015, the ice around Antarctica was growing, which is the opposite of what you might expect but - that’s partly because Antarctica is insulated from global warming.
Antarctica actually has an anti-greenhouse effect.
CO2 is very opaque to infrared and the light bounces around and eventually escapes to space high up in the stratosphere from a very cold layer which means that most is trapped. Because that layer is so cold, that means Earth is insulated.
It's like a thermos flask with hot tea inside. If the thermos flask feels cold then that means it is trapping more heat than if it feels warm. So the heat from the sun does heat the Earth yes, but not much escapes because those upper layers are so cold
However in Antarctica it's the other way around. The ground there is so cold, especially in winter, that the layer where infrared escapes from the CO2 can actually be warmer than Earth's surface. That sometimes leads to an anti-greenhouse effect from CO2 above Antarctica.
Globally, CO2 it's warming because the CO2 layer that infrared escapes from is much cooler than (most) of the surface meaning it's trapping heat. But over Antarctica for most of the year it’s warmer than the surface and so helps to radiate the heat away.
Most popular accounts don't explain this properly and wouldn't be able to explain why there is a negative greenhouse effect over Antarctica. I think many don't even know it happens.
BLOG: How the greenhouse effect really works
— and why there is a negative greenhouse effect over Antarctica
READ HERE: https://debunkingdoomsday.quora.com/How-the-greenhouse-effect-really-works-and-why-there-is-a-negative-greenhouse-effect-over-Antarctica
Circulating winds around Antarctica prevent it from warming like the Arctic does
Then - the warming in the Arctic is mainly because of movement of warm air from the equator to the poles - in a warmer world the convection is more efficient so the temperature difference is less between the equator and the north pole in a warmer than in a colder world.
That is why the Arctic warms up faster than the equator - not because of any Arctic albedo effect.
But that amplification doesn't happen for the south pole because of strong winds that circle Antarctica. They block the movement of warm air from the southern hemisphere to the south polar region.
The north pole doesn't have those same circular winds because of the land and mountains in Canada and Russia which block the movement of the winds.
This is called the Polar Amplification Effect. I talk about it here:
https://debunkingdoomsday.quora.com/Short-debunk-of-Arctic-Albedo-effect
The modelling is made harder because we have very little by way of observation of Anatarctic sea ice - only weather stations there for 50 years
So those two effects make it very difficult to model what happens in Antarctica. Because they cancel the global warming locally, and it's a matter of how much cancelling they do. It's hard to model a fine balance like that.
Then it gets much harder also because we have very limited data on Antarctica so it's hard to distinguish between natural variations and unusual once per century events and genuine warming. There are only 23 weather stations and they've only had weather stations there for 50 years.
Also, we have only very limited observations of sea ice in Antarctica before this century and the first observations of Antarctica go back to 1820 with a first observation of the ice from a distance back to 1773 when Captain Cook retreated and hypothesized he'd found evidence of a new continent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctica#19th_century
We have much longer term observations of Arctic sea ice going back over 2000 years with a lot of observations from the 15th century onwards with the searches for the hypothesized North West passage around Canada as a quick way to get from Europe to the Pacific by sea. But it turned out back then to be too blocked by ice to be practical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_exploration
Our ocean models are much less detailed than atmospheric models because the oceans are so deep and we only really have measurements of surface conditions and very limited measurements below the surface especially before this century.
Up to 2015, sea ice was melting in the Arctic but growing in the Antarctic - it MAY have started a longer term melt in the Antarctic too but it could be a temporary fluctuation in the climate that would happen anyway
ea ice has been melting in the Arctic but for a long time was growing around Antarctica. Since 2015 that trend reversed. However we don't know enough about Antarctica to know if the reversal is a significant change or just a temporary fluctuation as there are many multi-decadal changes in the oceans.
And there is no tipping point from the Antarctic sea ice melt or any ice melt.
The Antarctic ice melts only slowly and the albedo effect can't cause a runaway warming, just add a bit of local warmth in Antarctica. But a warmer world also has more clouds including in Antarctica and especially in the tropics so you need to look at the whole picture.
So far nobody can say if it is a permanent new phase or just an anomaly.
This is a similar paper from 2024 which doesn't say that they are sure it is in a permanent new phase. Their graphic does show the ice in what looks like a new phase that it jumped into. But it could jump back. The big issue here is that we just haven't been able to observe Antarctica over long timescales making it harder to model than the Arctic.
We are not talking about sudden warming here or about some big flood from the Antarctic ice. It's about cms of sea level rise if anything. These papers don't try to convert it into sea level rise. This is far earlier stage research, they are studying what happens in Antarctica to help inform the models and sea ice is only one of numerous things they look at in the models.
This is an earlier paper on the topic from 2024:
QUOTE Some scientists even believe these low ice records may indicate a fundamental change is happening to the continent - a shift in the conditions which have kept the region insulated.
The 2024 paper’s title is "The quandary of detecting the signature of climate change in Antarctica"
Carbon Brief post by one of the authors https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-ice-cores-reveal-antarctica-is-warming-twice-as-fast-as-global-average/
They are reasonably confident they detected a signal that is outside the bounds of the normal variability for the last 1000 years, but they are not certain of this.
QUOTE STARTS
The interpretation of ice cores at such high resolution is challenging as snow in Antarctica is often blown over by the wind, which can add “noise” to the record, like static on an old videotape. In order to recover a meaningful climatic record for each individual annual ice layer, we needed to establish a strong link between the isotopes contained in each ice layer and Antarctica’s temperature.
Basic statistics were not sufficient here. We used dynamical system theory – a branch of chaos theory – to demonstrate that the current warming in Antarctica is between 0.22 and 0.32C per decade – outside the bounds of the continent’s natural variability over the last 1,000 years.
This is almost twice as strong as global warming, estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) between 0.14 and 0.18C per decade. This is also 20-50% larger than the estimates from the climate models used to produce the IPCC reports – even in East Antarctica, which was believed to be largely unaffected by climate change so far.
So it is possible that there is a warming trend there similar to the Arctic one but not confirmed. It might be more than the models and if so they might need to be tweaked a bit.
New 2025 paper just talks about a “potential transition”
This new paper doesn’t resolve the question from that 2024 paper of whether there is a long term trend or not.
It says that right there in the abstract, it just talks about a “potential transition toward persistently reduced sea ice coverage” and there is no mention of the SMOC in the paper itself.
QUOTE STARTS
For decades, the surface of the polar Southern Ocean (south of 50°S) has been freshening—an expected response to a warming climate. This freshening enhanced upper-ocean stratification, reducing the upward transport of subsurface heat and possibly contributing to sea ice expansion. It also limited the formation of open-ocean polynyas.
Using satellite observations, we reveal a marked increase in surface salinity across the circumpolar Southern Ocean since 2015. This shift has weakened upper-ocean stratification, coinciding with a dramatic decline in Antarctic sea ice coverage. Additionally, rising salinity facilitated the reemergence of the Maud Rise polynya in the Weddell Sea, a phenomenon last observed in the mid-1970s.
Crucially, we demonstrate that satellites can now monitor these changes in real time, providing essential evidence of the Southern Ocean’s potential transition toward persistently reduced sea ice coverage.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2500440122 Rising surface salinity and declining sea ice: A new Southern Ocean state revealed by satellites
SEE ALSO
Earth can’t warm suddenly - no temperature tipping point - radiates so much extra heat with each extra 1°C of warming - it can't trap or absorb it all - even with all possible feedbacks at their max
This is about temperature tipping point , the mistaken idea that a small temperature increase can lead to a large one of several degrees. The IPCC looked at this in 2021 AR6 / WG1 and showed it can’t happen, virtually certain. This has been much misunderstood by the popular press and infographic YouTube channels.
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It works much better to put comments on other topics on a special post for them.
It is absolutely fine to digress and go off topic in conversations here - this is specifically about things you want help with that might scare people.
PLEASE DON’T TELL A SCARED PERSON THAT THE THING THEY ARE SCARED OF IS TRUE WITHOUT A VERY RELIABLE SOURCE OR IF YOU ARE A VERY RELIABLE SOURCE YOURSELF - AND RESPOND WITH CARE
This is not like a typical post on substack. It is specifically to help people who are very scared with voluntary fact checking. Please no politically motivated exaggerations here. And please be careful, be aware of the context.
We have a rule in the Facebook group and it is the same here.
If you are scared and need help it is absolutely fine to comment about anything to do with the topic of the post that scares you.
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If you respond to scared people here please be careful with your sources. Don’t tell them that something they are scared of is true without excellent reliable sources, or if you are a reliable source yourself.
It also matters a lot exactly HOW you respond. E.g. if someone is in an area with a potential for earthquakes there’s a big difference between a reply that talks about the largest earthquake that’s possible there even when based on reliable sources, and says nothing about how to protect themselves and the same reply with a summary and link to measures to take to protect yourself in an earthquake.
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