International
Ice Surprises – Arctic and Antarctic Ice Sheets Are Stabilizing and Growing

The Honest Broker
Roger Pielke Jr.
New climate research in science and policy context
Earlier this week the New York Post asked me to help its readers make sense of some surprising new research on ice dynamics at both poles. The new research appears in a new peer-reviewed paper and a preprint that was just posted.
At the South Pole, Wang et al. 2025 find a record accumulation of ice on the Antarctic ice sheet over the period 2021 to 2023, following a steady decrease from 2002 to 2021. The data comes from NASA’s GRACE series of satellites, which have the ability to precisely measure ice mass.
The figure below shows that the recent accumulation is small in the context of the multi-decadal decline, but is still characterized by the paper’s authors as a “significant reversal.” The paper makes no predictions of whether or how long the accumulation might continue.
At the other end of the planet, at the North Pole, a new preprint by England et al. identifies a “surprising, but not unexpected multi-decadal pause in Arctic sea ice loss.”¹ Their data can be seen below.
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From the caption to the figure: “(a,b )Observed sea ice area [106 km2] 1979-2024, (c,d) 20 year-trends of September sea ice area [106 km2/decade] with varying end year from 1998 to 2024, in which the red shaded envelope shows the bounds inside which a linear trend is not statistically significant according to a t-test at 95% confidence.” Source: England et al.
Disucssing these new papers and their significance, my op-ed for the NY Post starts as follows:
When it comes to climate change, to invoke one of Al Gore’s favorite sayings, the biggest challenge is not what we don’t know, but what we know for sure but just isn’t so.
Two new studies show that the Earth’s climate is far more complex than often acknowledged, reminding us of the importance of pragmatic energy and climate policies.
One of them, led by researchers at China’s Tongji University, finds that after years of ice sheet decline, Antarctica has seen a “surprising shift”: a record-breaking accumulation of ice.
The paper takes advantage of very precise measurements of Antarctic ice mass from a series of NASA satellites called GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment).
Since the first GRACE satellite was launched in 2002, Antarctica has seen a steady decline in the total mass of its glaciers. Yet the new study found the decline reversed from 2021 to 2023.
Melting Antarctic ice contributes to global sea-level rise, so a reversal of melting will slow that down. Understanding the dynamics of ice mass on Antarctica is thus essential.
The recent Antarctica shift makes only a small dent in the overall ice loss from 2022, but comes as a surprise nonetheless.
A second new paper, a preprint now going through peer review, finds a similar change at the opposite end of the planet.
Antarctic ice has made a turnaround, scientists say, with an increase in ice mass after years of depletion.
Antarctic ice has made a surprising rebound in mass, scientists say
“The loss of Arctic sea ice cover has undergone a pronounced slowdown over the past two decades, across all months of the year,” the paper’s US and UK authors write.
They suggest that the “pause” in Arctic sea ice decline could persist for several more decades.
Together, the two studies remind us that the global climate system remains unpredictable, defying simplistic expectations that change moves only in one direction.
In 2009, then-Sen. John Kerry warned that the Arctic Ocean would be ice-free by 2013: “Scientists tell us we have a 10-year window — if even that — before catastrophic climate change becomes inevitable and irreversible,” he said.
Today, six years after that 10-year window closed, catastrophic climate change has not occurred, even as the planet has indeed continued to warm due primarily to the combustion of fossil fuels.
Partisans in the climate debate should learn from Kerry’s crying wolf.
On one side, catastrophizing climate change based on the most extreme claims leads to skepticism when the promised apocalypse fails to occur on schedule.
On the other side, studies like the two surprising polar-ice papers reveal climate complexities, but don’t prove climate change isn’t real and serious. . .
This last point is important — climate research is not a scoreboard in a Manichean debate, but instead offers certainties, uncertainties, and even areas of total ignorance that establish a nuanced context for developing robust mitigation and adaptation policies.
The rest of my piece discusses this context. Please head over to the NY Post to read the whole thing and then come back to THB and tell me what you think.
One bit of my original draft was cut for space reasons. Here is that part:
Core understandings of climate science have remained remarkably constant over many decades – Humans affect the climate system in many ways, including greenhouse gas emissions, but also through land management, air pollution, and vegetation dynamics. At a planetary scale the net effect of these changes – driven by carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of coal, natural gas, and oil – is a warming of the planetary system. Anticipating regional and local consequences is far more challenging.
Irreducible uncertainties mean that climate variability and change are about risk management. As the late climate scientist Steve Schneider lamented in 2002, “I readily confess a lingering frustration: uncertainties so infuse the issue of climate change that it is still impossible to rule out either mild or catastrophic outcomes, let alone provide confident probabilities for all the claims and counterclaims made about environmental problems.”
Risk management means that as we balance competing objectives in energy policy we should look for opportunities to reduce costs, increase access, ensure security and reduce the human influences on the environment.
The published version ends with may call for policy makers to keep their eyes on the ball:
The surprises revealed by the two new papers about polar ice also remind us that we need to be prepared for unexpected behavior of the climate system, regardless of the underlying causes of change.
History tells us that climate can shift abruptly, with profound consequences for society.
For instance, the 1870s saw a wide range of climate extremes across the planet, by some estimates contributing to the deaths of 4% of global population.
More recently, the climate extremes of the 1970s led to many new US government programs focused on monitoring and researching climate, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Such efforts are crucially important because we can’t always anticipate the results of research. If we could, we wouldn’t need data and science.
Perhaps the most important lesson to take from the new polar-ice findings is that ongoing efforts in Washington, DC to gut climate data and research are deeply misguided.
The global climate system has more surprises in store for us — and we ignore them at our peril.
Read the whole thing here.
Next week here at THB and elsewhere, I’ll have much more on NOAA and current efforts to gut climate data and research.
Before letting you go today — last week I sat down with John Hook from Fox 10 in Phoenix and engaged in a deep discission of climate science and energy policy. You can see the full interview below. Thanks to John for the opportunity and the informed questions — I enjoyed the interview and the chance to explore nuances of climate and energy.
If you value the efforts here at The Honest Broker to contextualize science in policy and politics,
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Crime
“This is a total fucking disaster”

Michael Shellenberger and
Alex Gutentag
Congress must demand, and the Trump administration must provide, the Epstein Files and seek transparency and reform of the Intelligence Community
The idea that America is ruled by a secret government of deep state intelligence agencies like the CIA and FBI is a right-wing conspiracy theory, the media has said for the last decade. Journalists at outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and NPR have portrayed claims about a “deep state” as paranoid fabrications pushed by Donald Trump and his supporters to discredit legitimate government institutions. They insisted that accusations of political bias or covert influence by agencies like the CIA or FBI had no basis in fact and served only to inflame public distrust.
And yet over the same period, investigative reporting, including by the two of us, and official disclosures revealed that these agencies interfered in domestic politics in ways that aligned with that very narrative. The FBI launched a surveillance operation against the Trump campaign based on unverified opposition research. Dozens of former intelligence officials falsely claimed the Hunter Biden laptop story bore the “classic earmarks” of Russian disinformation, just weeks before the 2020 election. The Department of Homeland Security, along with the FBI and other agencies, coordinated with social media platforms to suppress speech under the banner of combating “misinformation.” These actions, taken together, suggest not a shadowy cabal, but a real and expanding infrastructure of state-aligned influence aimed at shaping public perception and countering populist dissent, just as the so-called conspiracy theorists claimed.
The strongest argument against the existence of a secret government run by the deep state was the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024. If agencies like the CIA, FBI, and Department of Homeland Security truly exercised covert and unchecked control over American politics, it is difficult to explain how their most outspoken critic, and avowed enemy, returned to power. Trump did not merely criticize the intelligence community; he ran on a platform promising its reform. He vowed to purge partisan operatives, dismantle what he called politically weaponized agencies, and hold officials accountable for a pattern of lawless interference. And despite his direct confrontation with the national security establishment, Trump defeated Kamala Harris decisively, winning 312 electoral votes and a narrow popular vote majority.
But now the Trump administration is attempting to sweep the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking scandal under the rug, with the Justice Department claiming that there is no client list and that no further disclosure is warranted, even though Attorney General Pam Bondi explicitly stated publicly that there were “tens of thousands of videos” which means the ability to identify the individuals involved in sex with minors, and that anyone in the Epstein files who tries to keep their name private has “no legal basis to do so.”
On April 28, 2025, in a candid off-the-record exchange caught on video, Bondi told a bystander, “There are tens of thousands of videos… and it’s all with little kids.” She later reiterated on May 7 that these were “videos of Epstein with children or child porn.”
Bondi’s comments directly contradicted the official stance of the administration, which has dismissed calls for a client list and slowed efforts to release the full contents of the Epstein files. Despite Trump’s campaign promises to dismantle the deep state and hold elites accountable, his administration now appears to be protecting the same intelligence and law enforcement networks it once condemned.
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U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi (L) and Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Kash Patel arrive for a press conference to announce the results of Operation Restore Justice on May 7, 2025 in Washington, DC. During the operation, 205 arrests were made nationwide in five days in a joint effort with federal, state, and local partners to arrest accused child sex abuse offenders and combat child exploitation. (Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)
Strong evidence suggests that Epstein was part of a sex blackmail operation tied to intelligence agencies. Visitor logs show that William Burns, who served as CIA Director under President Biden, visited Epstein’s New York townhouse multiple times. The Wall Street Journal reported those visits in 2023 based on Epstein’s private calendar. In 2017, Alex Acosta, the Justice Department official who gave Epstein his 2008 plea deal, told Trump transition officials that he was told to back off Epstein because he “belonged to intelligence.” The Justice Department later admitted that all eleven months of Acosta’s emails from that period had disappeared.
This failure to follow through seriously undermines Trump’s explicit commitments to reform and shine light on the deep state. This is not just about Epstein. The Trump administration has not been particularly transparent about much else. The CIA, to its credit, released an internal evaluation last week admitting it had erred in the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment by claiming that Russia “aspired to” help elect Trump. But it stood by the overall assessment, signaling the agency’s reluctance to admit fault, its continued defensiveness in the face of mounting evidence, and its impunity. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has disclosed a limited amount of information about intelligence community abuses during the pandemic, including the targeting of COVID vaccine dissenters as potential violent extremists. But beyond that, the Trump administration has released very little, even on issues where transparency would appear to be in its political interest. The administration has kept classified large volumes of material related to COVID origins, the FBI’s role in Russiagate, the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, and unidentified anomalous phenomena.
It is thus hard not to conclude that the intelligence community continues to operate in violation of the constitutional system of checks and balances by evading meaningful congressional oversight. The Constitution grants Congress the power and responsibility to oversee the executive branch, including intelligence agencies, through budgetary control, public hearings, and access to classified information. And yet the intelligence community is withholding and heavily redacting documents, delaying responses to lawful inquiries, and using national security classifications to avoid scrutiny.
This persistent obstruction undermines the legislative branch’s ability to hold agencies accountable and distorts the balance of power the framers designed. When unelected intelligence officials can withhold information not only from the public but from elected representatives, constitutional oversight becomes a formality rather than a functioning safeguard.
Few independent journalists have done more than we have to defend Donald Trump and the MAGA movement against the weaponization of the intelligence community and deep state agencies. Over the past two and a half years, we have published hundreds of investigative articles and testified before Congress about unconstitutional abuses of power by the CIA, FBI, DHS, and their proxies. We exposed efforts to censor Trump and his supporters through a sprawling Censorship Industrial Complex, documented the manipulation of the justice system to prosecute Trump on politicized grounds, and revealed how U.S. and foreign agencies coordinated mass surveillance of speech. We defended Trump from false and malicious claims, showed that his administration obeyed court orders, and disproved the narrative that he violated democratic norms more than Democrats. We were the first to report new evidence that President Obama’s CIA Director ordered spying on Trump campaign officials to justify surveillance and interfere in the 2016 election. After Trump’s reelection, we published investigations revealing abuses of power by USAID and the Department of Education. We editorialized in support of his lawful executive orders ending DEI and gender-affirming procedures for minors. We exposed the CIA and USAID’s role in supporting the 2019 impeachment effort and their connection to the Russia collusion hoax. In all this, we have consistently made the case that Trump’s victory was not just political, it was moral.
Given all we have done to expose the Censorship Industrial Complex and intelligence community abuses of power, Public’s readers rightly expect us to follow through on these concerns, no matter who holds office. We did not spend years documenting unconstitutional secrecy, surveillance, and coercion only to remain silent when the administration we defended begins to mirror the behavior we condemned. Our commitment is not to any one leader or party, but to the Constitution, to civil liberties, and to the principle that no government, Democratic or Republican, should be allowed to rule through secrecy, coercion, or fear.
To prove it is not simply the latest custodian of the deep state, the Trump administration must release the Epstein videos and related evidence, fully expose the scope of the sex trafficking and apparent IC blackmail operation, and ensure that every perpetrator, regardless of power or position, is held accountable under the law. It must also release the long-withheld files on COVID origins, Russiagate, the Hunter Biden laptop, January 6, unidentified aerial phenomena, and other topics. Even if these files do not reveal any “smoking guns,” the public has a right to full transparency. Only through this transparency can the credibility of the intelligence community be restored.
Congress must step up as well. Legislative leaders must hold public hearings on each of these issues, issue subpoenas if necessary, and demand full executive branch compliance with oversight. The Constitution grants Congress, not the intelligence agencies, the power to check secrecy, correct abuse, and uphold the rule of law.
These are not matters of political convenience but constitutional obligation. The American people have the right to know what their government has done in their name and against their rights. If the Trump administration fails to act, it will confirm the fear that even the most populist and combative president can be captured or neutralized by the very system he vowed to dismantle. And it will lose much of the legitimacy it gained by surviving and overcoming the lawfare, censorship, and weaponization of the deep state against it.
Many within the Trump administration acknowledge this and note that this is hardly the end of the Epstein affair.
“This is a total fucking disaster,” someone within the Intelligence Community told us this afternoon, as we were going to press with this editorial.
After we pointed out that the Attorney General said one thing and now the Justice Department, FBI Director, and Deputy FBI Director are all saying the opposite, the person said, “I hope you ask these questions. These are the questions that need to be asked. We’re in a time when information flows more freely. If people think that this is going to go away — I don’t see how it can.”
Nor, we would add, should it.
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Daily Caller
‘I Know How These People Operate’: Fmr CIA Officer Calls BS On FBI’s New Epstein Intel

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Hailey Gomez
CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou said Monday on Fox News’ “Jesse Watters Primetime” he doesn’t believe anything about the new intelligence from the FBI on deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein adds up.
A report released by Axios Sunday said that, based on a two-page memo, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI concluded that there had been no “client list” left by Epstein, despite ongoing public doubt. Discussing the new intelligence, Fox’s Jesse Watters asked Kiriakou if he believed the information from officials “adds up.”
“No, I don’t think this adds up,” Kiriakou said. “You’ve hit it on the head, and so has Barry. I think you’re both exactly right on this. We really don’t know anything because the FBI doesn’t want us to know anything. I’m not blaming the FBI Director Kash Patel or the Deputy Director Dan Bongino.”
In 2019, Epstein was arrested and charged with sex trafficking, only to be found dead in his New York Metropolitan Correctional Center cell a month later. Officials said the deceased pedophile hanged himself in the cell. Speculations grew online due to the circumstances of his death.
WATCH:
During his 2024 campaign, President Donald Trump vowed to release all Epstein’s files, with Patel also vowing to release as many files as he could. However, in May, Patel and Bongino told Fox News they remained firm that Epstein committed suicide, with Bongino flatly saying Epstein “killed himself.”
“I think that that layer beneath them, that’s part of what we like to call the deep state, has taken this bull by the horns, and they’ve probably destroyed information,” Kiriakou added. “Look at what the CIA did in 1975 after Congress ordered that it release all of its files related to an operation called MKUltra. The director of the CIA went back to headquarters and ordered everything to be destroyed, and, in the end, only about 20% of the documents survived.”
“We’re still learning about the FBI’s operations against Martin Luther King 50, 55 years after the fact, so now we’re supposed to believe that everybody’s telling the truth, that there were no files, there were no dossiers?” Kiriakou asked. “I’m sorry. I just don’t buy it because I know how these people operate.”
Despite the newly released memo from the DOJ and FBI, Attorney General Pam Bondi said in February that she had personally reviewed Epstein’s list.
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