NASA issued a pre-Halloween press release Friday that is spooking the mainstream climate narrative. When it comes to all that supposed ice melt in Antarctica, it turns out the devil’s in the details.

According to the release, “A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers. The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice.” Lead author Jay Zwally says, “We’re essentially in agreement with other studies that show an increase in ice discharge in the Antarctic Peninsula and the Thwaites and Pine Island region of West Antarctica. Our main disagreement is for East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica — there, we see an ice gain that exceeds the losses in the other areas.”

Of course, this isn’t news to some of us. We reported in May that sea ice extent broke the previous record high set just last year. And areal coverage has been on the upswing for decades now (increasing an average of 1.2% increase per decade, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center). It seems the only real news here is how long it took NASA to admit it. Nevertheless, Zwally warns, “If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate they’ve been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years — I don’t think there will be enough snowfall increase to offset these losses.”

“The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away” [emphasis added], adds Zwally, debunking yet another piece of settled science. “But this is also bad news. If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for.” Which presents another quagmire: Why is NASA taking issue with the IPCC’s ice statistics but accepting its sea level reporting at face value? The bottom line is that Antarctic sea ice is gaining, yet somehow warmists are still blaming it on global warming, like this headline from Nature World Report: “Global warming is actually creating more ice in Antarctica.” At some point you have to ask: Why does the bad always outweigh the good?