Volcanoes are melting the Antarctic

My first three climate change clowns have looked a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America called Evidence for elevated and spatially variable geothermal flux beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and made some very clownish statements:

Uh oh: Study says ‘collapsing’ Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica melting from geothermal heat, not ‘climate change’ effects

wattsupwiththat

WAIS outlet glacier being melted by magma – not co2 global warming after all

tallbloke

Why the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Is Really Melting. (No, It's Not 'Climate Change')

James Delingpole

The paper itself says nothing about climate change or CO2, which news reports in the general media have reflected accurately.

"Before our paper, models tended to just assume a uniform geothermal flux value beneath the glacier because it was the best you could do with the observations available (even though the presence of nearby volcanoes and other geologic evidence suggested it was probably very non-uniform).

abc.net

Now, a new study finds that these subglacial volcanoes and other geothermal "hotspots" are contributing to the melting of Thwaites Glacier, a major river of ice that flows into Antarctica's Pine Island Bay.

Researchers have long known that volcanoes lurk under the ice of West Antarctica. This is a seismically active region, where East and West Antarctica are rifting apart. In 2013, a team of scientists even found a new volcano beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

West Antarctica is also hemorrhaging ice due to climate change.

 foxnews.com

The scientific press is clear about the reason the west Antarctic ice sheet is melting:

The glacier is retreating in the face of the warming ocean and is thought to be unstable because its interior lies more than two kilometers below sea level while, at the coast, the bottom of the glacier is quite shallow.

phys.org

The effects of global warming on the west Antarctic ice sheet have been in the news recently, with scientific studies suggesting warming has pushed the sheet over a tipping point, leading to an inevitable (albeit after 200-500 years) collapse.(See 'Nothing can stop retreat' of West Antarctic glaciers, BBC News.)

Which is probably why the climate change bozos are trying to misuse this latest PNAS paper to suggest that it's just natural warming.

As if these volcanoes suddenly appeared and are melting the ice!