Commentary: Big Tent Ideas

STEVE MILLOY: President Trump And The Doomsday Glacier

Screen Capture/CSPAN

President Donald Trump is driving climate researchers literally to the ends of the Earth as they try to save their taxpayer funding. Expect to see a slew of hand-wringing reports about, and even perhaps from, the Thwaites (aka “Doomsday”) glacier in West Antarctica.

The glacier got its nickname from a Rolling Stone reporter in 2017 in an article titled: “The Doomsday Glacier:  In the farthest reaches of Antarctica, a nightmare scenario of crumbling ice – and rapidly rising seas – could spell disaster for a warming planet.”

Past the ominous title, the scare is that the Thwaites is melting and could raise sea levels by 10 feet, which would submerge about 2-3 percent of the global land mass, excluding Antarctica.

Last May, the Trump administration announced it would cut funding for the Nathaniel B. Palmer,  a football field-long icebreaker that has been taking researchers to study the Thwaites glacier. In its 2026 budget request, the National Science Foundation said it was terminating the lease. There is no replacement ship on the horizon.

Researchers wanting to go to Antarctica, where it is now summer, have had to scramble for ships. This scramble has been made more challenging because ship owners and researchers, afraid of losing taxpayer funding, are also taking reporters and their crews along to dramatize the budget cuts using the backdrop of the scariest thing they can imagine – the Doomsday glacier.

New York Times reporter Raymond Zhong has already filed articles since Dec. 30. PBS has a reporter aboard a ship sending alarmist reports. Undoubtedly, there are other reports on their way as well.

Will the Doomsday glacier live up to its name? Or will it be another in a long line of failed, if not dishonest, apocalyptic climate predictions?

It seems to be true that the Thwaites glacier is melting. But there’s much more to consider just than that.

The rate of melting is very slow. A 2023 study estimated that over the next 50 years, the Thwaites glacier might add as much as a few millimeters (about one-tenth of an inch) to global sea level over the next 50 years. That is a far cry from the claim of 10 feet of sea level rise.

Next, the fate of the Thwaites doesn’t seem to have anything to do with emissions or “global warming.” Research indicates that there are 91 volcanoes under the West Antarctic ice sheet. Not surprisingly, the Thwaites glacier is melting from the inferno beneath.

Of course, the Thwaites couldn’t be melting at the surface because there’s been no warming in West Antarctica since the late 1990s. In fact, West Antarctica has cooled by about 3°F since 1999.

Another recent study reported that the Thwaites glacier started melting in the 1940s as the result of an El Nino, a little-understood, but periodic natural warming of the Pacific Ocean: “The glacier retreat in the Amundsen Sea was initiated by natural climate variability in the 1940s. That ice streams such as Thwaites Glacier and Pine Island Glacier have continued to retreat since then indicates that they were unable to recover after the exceptionally large El Niño event of the 1940s,” the researchers concluded.

The more one reads about the Thwaites glacier, the easier it becomes to understand why they have to call it the “Doomsday glacier.” Once you understand the non-threatening reality, the only way to make it scary is to give it a scary name and hope people are too frightened to look past it.

Three cheers for Trump for defunding this and other climate research. As these researchers lose their funding, maybe they can move to Hollywood and try writing disaster scripts.

Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer. He posts on X at @JunkScience.  

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

(Featured Image Media Credit: Screen Capture/CSPAN)