William sent in the link https://www.yahoo.com/news/fact-check-despite-claims-old-215243519.html .. which is a rather unusual post as the authors appear to lack critical analasis skills. It starts off by ridiculing Judith Curry and Don Easterbrook, a couple of climate scientists who are not alarmist but have a more level approach to the subject. They are far from deniers. This is what appears to have triggered the two authors, also climate scientists but relatively unknown to the outside world [or outside their academic cloisters one might say]. I don’t know if Judith has bothered to respond on her blog as the attack line is somewhat feeble and hardly worth the effort. I might check that out later. What offended the self appointed fact checkers, or were they elevated by some behind the scenes mechanism because they were onboard with the screeching side of climate change. Curry and Easterbrook said the Antarctic ice sheet was not melting as the annual temperature is 58 degrees Celsius below zero. Zero is presumably the point where ice melt begins, theoretically. This is minus 72 degrees Fahrenheit below freezing point. Sounds reasonable to most normal people – but the fact checkers, it seems, are abnormal. They claim, that most certainly, Antarctic ice is melting. However, when you read further down the link you realise they are not talking about the ice sheet at all – but referring to sea ice melt [which is seasonal]. In other words, sea ice in the ocean around Antarctica, and presumably nowhere near the South Pole [somewhere in the centre of the ice sheet which sits on the Antarctic continent]. In other words, two very different things. Why do they do that? They wish to sow seeds of doubt in the minds of casual readers. Not only that, they do not tell us how long the records they use go back. Probably just to the beginning of the Global Warming hype in the late 1990s. In other words, they do not use old records of temperature and sea ice that are available via naval logs. These go back to the 17th century and we may note this is during a period when nations used their navies in attempts to find a NW passage through the Arctic Ocean and show periodic ice melt near the North Pole. The same probably applies to the Antarctic as whaling boats were in the southern ocean from at least that time as whale oil was worth a lot of money – for  lamps to light rooms during the latter part of the day.

William also sent a link to https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/1st-mega-tsunami-record-since-161211850.html … which concerns the Tonga underwater volcano [but see earlier posts on the subject].