A paper to be published soon by the British Antarctic Survey in the journal Geophysical Research Letters is expected to confirm that over the past 30 years, the area of sea ice around the continent has expanded.
Also:
The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research report prepared for last week’s meeting of Antarctic Treaty nations in Washington noted the South Pole had shown “significant cooling in recent decades.”
Emphasis mine.
What I find ridiculous is that this is even newsworthy. How can we be suffering from global warming if the Antarctica has been cooling for decades and the continent itself has increased its ice mass over the past 30 years?
Global warming isn’t science. It’s socialism in new clothes.
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What bugs me is all the actually USEFUL research and environmental improvement programs that didn’t get done because “Global Warming” took up all those resources.
It’s additionally meaningful because according to the laws of thermodynamics, if there was global warming the coldest areas would warm first.
But remember the drowning polar bears!
Global warming — the movement — is bovine scatology. I don’t even listen to these alarmist trolls anymore.
–HB
Kevin,
totally agree that this is something that needs to be addressed, but to pick a nit, the whole global warming thing has to do with global average temperature. any one region, even the antarctic, experiencing local cooling is not necessarily a comment on the hypothesis of global warming.
Choey,
I think you must misunderstand the laws of thermodynamics. Why would coldest areas need to warm first? Consider a hollow cylinder of ice placed in a bath of liquid nitrogen. The coldest part of the ice, that sitting in contact with the LNO2, is on the outside of the cylinder. Now imagine placing a heat source, a resistor through which current is flowing, is placed in the exact center of the cylinder. The part that will warm first is that closest to the source, not the coldest portion of the cylinder. Indeed, the area near the heat sink will warm last. Not saying that anything like that is happening here, but it’s certainly plausible, especially in a thermodynamically complex system such as the Earth, that other areas besides the polar regions would warm prior to the ice caps.
We’ve been warned for years by the alarmists that the snow and ice in the antarctic is melting and that this is causing huge problems for wildlife and global sea rises. But oh, guess what? They were full of shit. Again.
My conclusion after many years of watching this thing is that it is pseudoscience of the worst order. It is a religion masquerading as a scientific idea. The IPCC has zero credibility. And we have blown probably trillions of dollars worldwide on this mess, and the things that we could have done with that money to make the planet cleaner and healthier, but that we spent on this horse shit instead, is just sickening.
There is no “conspiracy,” you defenders of the faith. Just the typical mix of bureaucratic incompetence married to researchers who have a direct financial stake in the theory being right–whether it is or not. Indeed, the gold standard proof at this point that shows that even the Warmenists are increasingly seeing that it’s a house of cards is they keep blathering “conspiracy, conspiracy, there is no conspiracy!” when all that’s really going on is the typical conflicts of interest and issues of pride and prestige that the scientific method was designed to address–IF YOU USE IT.
They blew it. They made shit up just to keep the money and prestige flowing–no doubt convincing themselves all along that they were right. Game over, the jig is up. Antarctica isn’t melting, and hasn’t been melting for over 30 YEARS.
Zach,
Even if the warming is a global average, the poles would have a mediating effect upon it. And we’d see this effect in the accumulation or loss of ice over that average.
You can’t say the global average is rising with the poles growing in ice and be right. Once you do that you’re not talking “global” because you’d have to throw out data like I’m talking about.
Dean’s right. The game is over. Global warming cannot exist along side of growing ice caps.
I don’t know that it’s necessarily the case thta the poles can’t possibly get colder while the rest of the planet warms. But it doesn’t look easy. Antarctica’s a freaking continent, and not even the smallest one (both Australia and the entirety of Europe are smaller). More important to me is the fact that “the antarctic ice cap is melting” has been thrown constantly in our faces as the undeniable proof we need to know there’s a disaster that we must address immediately by reducing carbon emissions. That melting ice cap was the reason we all needed to do something right now. Heck, go watch “An Inconvenient Truth,” which got Al Gore his Oscar and his Nobel prize.
This is ridiculous. It’s exactly backwards as to how real science is done, which is where you formulate a theory and then put together painful experiments to try to throw the theory out–not sit around thinking of crazy complicated, increasingly abstract experiments that prove that the theory MIGHT be true. You can do this for years, generations even, on a failed paradigm. I could, right now, give you a bunch of plausible reasons to think there MIGHT be a Sasquatch out there–and I can point you to some fairly normal, rational people who will make that case for you–but at some point the proof will be on me to SHOW YOU A SASQUATCH.
The simplest explanation is that the South Pole isn’t melting because the Earth isn’t getting warmer any faster than it used to (this is an interglacial after all, so temps have been rising for millennia).
The idea that trace amounts of CO2 can drive climate has never had a lot of convincing evidence behind it. We’re gone into Ice Ages when Co2 levels were ten times higher. At most it is probably a small positive feedback relative to other factors.
If you’re not a climatologist, you have no right to opine on this matter, Dave. Unless you’re a climatologist with doubts, in which case you’re just an oddball weirdo who probably shouldn’t be given any funding.
Oh, and let’s get this straight, meteorologists are not qualified to comment period, unless they agree with the “consensus” of climatologists. Mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientists also have no qualifications to speak of here in reviewing computer code to make sure it’s doing its job honestly and properly, and mathematicians and statisticians have no place pointing to any so-called errors because they aren’t smart enough to understand climatology.
Really, the only people qualified to draw a judgment are climatologists who agree with the consensus view of the climatologists who control virtually all climatology funding. Don’t question this, however, as that would be an attack on Science Itself.
Kevin,
well you can indeed still be talking about global without throwing out the data you’re talking about. all that global means is averaging over everything. and it’s worth noting that ice shelf or not, portions (though not all of) antarctica have experienced temperature rises over the past several years — though i’m sure there are the standard methodological caveats dave is sure to be more versed on than i am.
and it’s worth noting (and this gets to dean’s contention that shit got made up) that the article makes clear that as ice on the eastern side is growing, ice on the western side is still melting. although, the quoted expert maintains that sea ice conditions overall have remained stable.
as i said above, i think climatologists have to address this but i would be willing to bet that this piece of data alone does not ring the death knell for global warming politically, and probably not scientifically. though we can all agree that climate science has a long way to go.
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