At the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos this January, Klaus Schwab’s wife, Hilde Schwab, opened the annual meeting with the assertion that Antarctica is melting.
“Antarctica, which holds 91% of the world’s glaciers, faces catastrophic ice loss, contributing to rising sea levels,” she claimed.
That statement is simply not true. According to a recent study, Antarctica gained 661 billion tons of ice during 2009-2019. “The Antarctic continent,” in fact, “has not warmed in the last seven decades.” A December 2024 study, in addition, concluded that “iceberg calving, the detachment of ice blocks from ice sheets and glaciers… a primary process in mass loss from ice shelf systems in Antarctica and a major source of uncertainty in future projections of sea level rise” is not necessarily a consequence of climate change, not even when we’re talking about “extreme calving events”.
