Right Pulse

It seems every Southern Hemisphere summer the media runs articles about how naturally occurring melting in the Antarctic ice mass is really due to global warming. The latest round of doom sayer articles can be found here. Of course the Sydney Morning Herald is at the vanguard of the movement with this article, ‘Ice shelf hangs by a thread‘:

“A MASSIVE ice shelf bigger than Greater Sydney has begun to collapse in Antarctica under the pressure of climate change, new satellite images reveal.”

But the facts are far from what is reported, as this blog from the US Senate Committee on Environment…outlines:

“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. “

“Climate scientist Dr. 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.”

If one carefully reads the NASA explanation for the current movement in Antarctic temperatures, they appear to have no firm idea why the continent has warmed in some parts but been colder overall:

“Why is Antarctica getting colder in the middle when it’s warming up around the edge? One possible explanation is that the warmer temperatures in the surrounding ocean have produced more precipitation in the continent’s interior, and this increased snowfall has cooled the high-altitude region around the pole. Another possible explanation involves ozone. Ozone in the Earth’s stratosphere absorbs ultraviolet radiation, and absorbing this energy warms the stratosphere. Loss of UV-absorbing ozone may have cooled the stratosphere and strengthened the polar vortex, a pattern of spinning winds around the South Pole. The vortex acts like an atmospheric barrier, preventing warmer, coastal air from moving in to the continent’s interior. A stronger polar vortex might explain the cooling trend in the interior of Antarctica.”

Chief Blogger @ March 30, 2008 (This is a restoration of a previously posted blog)