Posted on 09/12/2007 10:05:57 AM PDT by EPW Comm Team
A New Record for Antarctic Total Ice Extent? While the news focus has been on the lowest ice extent since satellite monitoring began in 1979 for the Arctic, the Southern Hemisphere (Antarctica) has quietly set a new record for most ice extent since 1979.
This can be seen on this graphic from this University of Illinois site The Cryosphere Today, which updated snow and ice extent for both hemispheres daily. The Southern Hemispheric areal coverage is the highest in the satellite record, just beating out 1995, 2001, 2005 and 2006. Since 1979, the trend has been up for the total Antarctic ice extent.
While the Antarctic Peninsula area has warmed in recent years and ice near it diminished during the Southern Hemisphere summer, the interior of Antarctica has been colder and ice elsewhere has been more extensive and longer lasting, which explains the increase in total extent. This dichotomy was shown in this World Climate Report blog posted recently with a similar tale told in this paper by Ohio State Researcher David Bromwich, who agreed “It’s hard to see a global warming signal from the mainland of Antarctica right now”.
Indeed, according the NASA GISS data, the South Pole winter (June/July/August) has cooled about 1 degree F since 1957 and the coldest year was 2004.
This winter has been an especially harsh one in the Southern Hemisphere with cold and snow records set in Australia, South America and Africa. We will have recap on this hard winter shortly. See full story here.
The dummy; you’re only supposed to count the warm spots.
>>>But at the north pole, the polar bears are falling off the ice into the water,
... and Santa Claus too.
Don’t believe your lying eyes, listen to Al Gore. /s/
I do not believe in Global Warming, as I live in Michigan and our winters get colder each year and our summers seem to be hotter every year. Balance, I'm good with that.
I do believe that there is a finite amount of water on earth, and when we come up short somewhere (Grand Traverse Bay, for example), there will be more than needed elsewhere (Chicago...those guys get everything!) Again, balance.
So, to my question. Isn't the axis of the earth shifting? If it is, would that not explain the shifting of the ice balance from north to south poles? Honest, this is a serious question!
(think 'bout it!>
Thanks for the answer.
What are you going to believe, those images you can see with your own two eyes, or the ‘statistics’ put out by Al Gore and his disciples at the IPCC? If you answered your eyes, you need to get your vision checked. It is OBVIOUS that global warming is destroying the planet, as Al Gore says, ‘the debate is over’.
LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The obvious solution to this problem is rename the poles. Since the lunatic left, the save mama earth crowd, the liberals, the democrats, the media and a few wigged out scientists only seem to be able to focus on the North Pole, lets rename it the South Pole, rename the South Pole the North Pole and everyone will be deleriously happy.
Of course hemispheres and other things would have be renamed as well, but what a small price to pay for curing mental health problems around the planet.
Liberal Hype Debate Manual, Rule #1 (don't ask how I got this, I could get killed for knowing):
Never...EVER...let something pesky like FACTS get in the way.
Oops.
Dig a big hole in the ice.
Line the hole with little green peas.
When the Polar Bear comes to take a pea, kick him in the ice-hole.
Pointing to something I have been asking about for some time, since I have known about it for some time.
If we have any “warming” it is (1) hemispheric - concentrated in the northern hemisphere (where we also have more land and more land-based temperature sensing stations) and is most likely equally offset by a “cooling” trend in the southern hemisphere.
Which suggests we have a change in the patterns of atmospheric circulation and distribution - not a total warming. And, in fact we know that is true because we have had continuous reporting of very much changed patterns in the “El Nino” and “El Nina” affects in the Pacific.
“Manmade” global warming is more political-science than science and when it’s not political-science, it’s an ignorance-based religion from those who believe what the political-science (politicized scientists) tells them.
Increasing Antarctic Sea Ice under Warming Atmospheric and Oceanic Conditions (PDF)
Abstract: (apologies for symbol mistranslation from the PDF): "Estimates of sea ice extent based on satellite observations show an increasing Antarctic sea ice cover from 1979 to 2004 even though in situ observations show a prevailing warming trend in both the atmosphere and the ocean. This riddle is explored here using a global multicategory thickness and enthalpy distribution sea ice model coupled to an ocean model. Forced by the NCEP–NCAR reanalysis data, the model simulates an increase of 0.20 1012 m3 yr1 (1.0% yr1) in total Antarctic sea ice volume and 0.084 1012 m2 yr1 (0.6% yr1) in sea ice extent from 1979 to 2004 when the satellite observations show an increase of 0.027 1012 m2 yr1 (0.2% yr1) in sea ice extent during the same period. The model shows that an increase in surface air temperature and downward longwave radiation results in an increase in the upper-ocean temperature and a decrease in sea ice growth, leading to a decrease in salt rejection from ice, in the upper-ocean salinity, and in the upper-ocean density. The reduced salt rejection and upper-ocean density and the enhanced thermohaline stratification tend to suppress convective overturning, leading to a decrease in the upward ocean heat transport and the ocean heat flux available to melt sea ice. The ice melting from ocean heat flux decreases faster than the ice growth does in the weakly stratified Southern Ocean, leading to an increase in the net ice production and hence an increase in ice mass. This mechanism is the main reason why the Antarctic sea ice has increased in spite of warming conditions both above and below during the period 1979–2004 and the extended period 1948–2004."
In the above, yr1 should be yr^-1, i.e., square meters per year. There are a bunch of non-printing characters that are a pain to delete.
Thanks.
It’s no more ridiculous than some of the official explanations we sometimes hear.
The SH is warming, but not as quickly at the surface because most of the SH surface is water, and there is a definite time-lag of ocean warming due to the high heat content of water. And one of the main land masses in the SH, Australia, is already very warm because it's mostly desert, so the effects there are harder to detect. See the above post about the sea ice model (though I can't intellectually defend it because I don't pretend to understand it). Land areas of Antarctica that are influenced by sea surface temperatures are warming markedly. The unique environment of central Antarctica, which for several reasons is semi-isolated from the rest of the world, has shown a small cooling trend.
It has to do with approach of Planet X in Sept. of 2009.
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