Posted by Marc Morano on ICECAP
The media is once again hyping an allegedly dire consequence of man-made global warming. This time the media is promoting the ice loss of one tiny fraction of the giant ice-covered continent and completely ignoring the current record ice growth on Antarctica. Contrary to media hype, the vast majority of Antarctica has cooled over the past 50 years and ice coverage has grown to record levels since satellite monitoring began in the 1979, according to peer-reviewed studies and scientists who study the area.
Former Colorado State Climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr., presently senior scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, chastised the media’s Antarctic reporting as “typical of the bias that many journalists have.” Pielke wrote on March 25, “The media has ignored in their reporting the increase in Antarctic sea ice cover in recent years, with, at present, a coverage that is well one million square kilometers above average.” Pielke added, “Unfortunately, it appears that most journalists just parrot the perspective of the first news release on these climate issues, without doing any further investigation. If this is inadvertent, they need to be educated in climate science. If deliberate bias, they are clearly advocates and the reporters should be clearly and publically identified as having such a bias. In either case, the public is being misinformed!”
Climate scientist Ben Herman, past director of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics and former Head of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Arizona, stated, “It is interesting that all of the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) stories concerning Antarctica are always about what’s happening around the [western] peninsula, which seems to be the only place on Antarctica that has shown warming. How about the net ‘no change’ or ‘cooling’ over the rest of the continent, which is probably about 95% of the land mass, not to mention the record sea ice coverage recently.”
Read more here.
2 comments:
Once again, you are getting only half the story. The extent of the global warming deniers rhetoric is astounding. here is better info on the antartic:
"IT IS clear that the Antarctic Peninsula, which juts out from the mainland, has warmed. The continent's interior was thought to have warmed too, but in 2002 an analysis of records from 1966 to 2000 concluded that it had cooled.
This is not, as sometimes claimed, proof that the world is not warming. Climate models do not predict uniform warming of the whole planet, and almost every other part of the world is getting warmer.
The cooling in Antarctica is due to a strengthening of the circular winds around the continent, which prevents warmer air reaching the interior. Confusingly, the increased wind speeds seem to be due to cooling in the upper atmosphere caused by the hole in the ozone layer above the pole - the result of chlorofluorocarbon emissions. If the ozone layer recovers over the next few decades as expected, the circular winds could weaken, resulting in rapid warming.
This raises the question of what is happening to Antarctica's ice sheets, which hold enough water to raise sea levels by a catastrophic 61 metres. Contrary to what you might expect, the latest IPCC report continues to predict that global warming will lead to a thickening of the ice sheet over the next century, with heavier snowfall outweighing any melting.
Finding out what is actually happening to the ice is not easy. A recent study based on satellite measurements of gravity over the continent suggests that while the ice sheets in the interior of Antarctica are growing thicker, even more ice is being lost from the peripheries, resulting in a net loss.
The IPCC's latest predictions of sea level rise - 20 to 60 centimetres by 2100 - assume that the rate of ice loss from the edges of both the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets continues at the current rate. Some researchers think this is unrealistic and that the ice loss will accelerate, outpacing any increases in snowfall and leading to a much more rapid rise in sea level. No one knows for sure what will happen."
(source: http://environment.newscientist.com/article/mg19426041.100)
I think the earth has been warming and cooling ever since the earth was formed. We cannot simply say that the current warming trend is due to man. I meean we have less then 250 years of recorded weather history. After all the earth was 3 degrees hotter during the Middle Ages then it is now.
I read an article several weeks ago, that stated, top weather experts now say that the decrease of severe hurricanes and tropical storms were due to global warming.
Problem, these same experts told us after Hurricane Katrinia that there would be an increase in severe hurricanes and tropical storms becasue of Global Warming.
So which is it?
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