Posted on 01/18/2002 12:34:58 AM PST by sarcasm
WASHINGTON -- New measurements show the ice in West Antarctica is thickening, reversing earlier estimates that the sheet was melting.
Scientists concerned about global warming had worried that higher temperatures could melt the massive ice sheet, causing a rise in sea levels worldwide.
But new flow measurements for the Ross ice streams, using special satellite-based radars, show that movement of some of the ice streams has slowed or halted, allowing the ice to thicken, according to a paper in today's issue of the journal Science.
If the thickening is not merely part of some short-term fluctuation, it represents a reversal of the long retreat of the ice, say researchers Ian Joughin of the California Institute of Technology and Slawek Tulaczyk of the University of California-Santa Cruz.
Their finding comes less than a week after a separate paper in Nature reported that Antarctica's harsh desert valleys -- long considered a bellwether for global climate change -- have grown noticeably cooler since the mid-1980s.
Air temperatures recorded continuously over a 14-year period ending in 1999 declined by about 1 degree Fahrenheit in the polar deserts and across the White Continent, that paper said.
The cooling defies a trend spanning more than 100 years in which average land surface temperatures have increased worldwide by about 1 degree Fahrenheit. The scientists said Antarctica is the only continent that is cooling. They could not say why.
In their paper, Joughin and Tulaczyk suggest the West Antarctic ice streams may be undergoing the same transition from shrinking to growing that appears to have occurred on a neighboring stream 150 years ago. The results, they add, suggest a reduced threat of the feared massive collapse of the ice field.
"Perhaps, after 10,000 years of retreat from the ice-age maximum, researchers turned on their instruments just in time to catch the stabilization or readvance of the ice sheet," Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University wrote in a commentary accompanying the Science paper.
But he warned that coastal property owners should not become too optimistic about the findings, since the instrumental record is short and coastal ice streams have changed periodically over the centuries.
It's not like we could really, truly do something about it anyway.
I remember last year there was great surprise when scientists found that one of the major causes of the increase in temperatures was due to the sun.
amazing.
Hope she isn't immediately relocated to some remote outpost at CNN!!! Be really really nice if she took the place of Judy Woofwoof, IMO!!!
Correct. This simply can not be true in the eyes of Gorebull Warmers because it does not support the doctrine. Gorebull Warming is a cult, not science. This study will be attacked viciously.
Antarctic Cooling in a `Warming' World (15 Jan 2002)
A new paper in Nature by no less than 13 authors has been reported widely in the world's media. It begins - " Climate models generally predict amplified warming in polar regions". This is the one consistent feature of all the climate models and of the basic theory about greenhouse warming itself - the polar regions take the brunt of the warming. However, on the ground, that has not been happening. Instead of warming, the Antarctic continent has been cooling over the last 35 years in complete defiance of what the theory says should happen. The authors continue - " our spatial analysis of Antarctic meteorological data demonstrates a net cooling on the Antarctic continent between 1966 and 2000, particularly during summer and autumn. The McMurdo Dry Valleys have cooled by 0.7 °C per decade between 1986 and 2000, with similar pronounced seasonal trends."
None of this is news to the climatological community as the weather station records from the Antarctic continent have been readily available to anyone. (This website has temperature graphs from many such stations in the `What the Stations Say' page). What is new is that it is only now that the general public are being informed via the journals and the media. The IPCC and the environmentalists have for years kept the public focus only on a tiny area of the Antarctic, the Antarctic Peninsula, a mere 2% of the total area of the continent. That little area has been warming, mainly due to its interaction with the Southern Ocean, but the other massive 98% of the continent has been cooling, something the greenhouse industry has carefully ignored. Now it has been finally made public via Nature and the media outlets which quickly picked up the story.
One consequence of this cooling has been loss of biological productivity, with soil invertebrates declining by 10% annually. The authors of the paper then laid down a challenge to the climate models which predict polar warming, not the cooling we have actually had - " Continental Antarctic cooling, especially the seasonality of cooling, poses challenges to models of climate and ecosystem change."
The greenhouse modellers have a lot of explaining to do before they can expect whole societies to undergo an economically impoverishing culture shift in deference to a theory which is so patently wrong on one of its key pillars.
I have experience with Mr. Alley - he's a rabid liberal. I'd be curious to read the remainder of his commentary, as this sounds supportive of the study's findings.
More SUVs, more styrofoam containers, better refrigerant, we have to reverse what we were told to do in yesterday's fearfest - quickly, there's no time to waste. Panic in the other direction everybody, PANIC!
I have a battery powered generator. The battery runs the generator which charges the battery. It is very efficent but, sadly, not very practical as it can only supply power to itself. I do feel very good about myself however by saving the environment.
Maybe because the supposed warming trend everywhere else is a statistical artifact. Urban areas are warmer than rural areas; this is a known fact, and doesn't represent anything more sinister than the thermal mass of acres and acres of paved blacktop roads and black tarpaper roofs. Most temperature monitoring stations are in urban areas, for all the obvious reasons. So, not surprisingly, as urbanization has increased over the past 100 years, so have average recorded temperatures.
Even monitoring the same station over time won't work, as once-rural stations become urbanized, and other stations once in small urban areas become further and further from the edge of the heat island. To get accurate readings, you have to look at temperature records from measuring stations far away from any growing urban areas. Antarctica is the only continent where such stations exist in any quantity, and lo, Antarctica is the only continent where there's a cooling trend rather than a warming one. Imagine that.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.