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!!!
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!
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.
This is bad news for the Global Warming Cultists. I am stunned that this study was published. I don't know how the truth slipped through. The Enviro-Nazis are slipping, they usually have better control over the media than this.