Global Warming and Antartica

One of the topics I'll be covering in detail on this blog is global warming. My view is that the scientific evidence linking CO2 emissions and warming is extremely low. Yes, there is probably some warming of the earth. But, this is largely due to the sun and other factors, not CO2 emissions.

I believe that Bjorn Lomborg, author of the Skeptical Environmentalist, has the right idea - better to spend our money on the effects of global warming than to go down the Kyoto path.

Now, a new article contends that the collapse of some of Antartica's ice shelves is likely the result of natural current fluctuations.

Duncan Wingham, Professor of Climate Physics at University College London, has done a new analysis from data from the European Space Agency's ERS-1 Satellite.

"A lot of attention and research has focused on this relatively accessible area of the Antarctic Peninsula, but satellites are giving us a picture of the continent as a whole," Wingham told the Register. This broader picture shows evidence of growth and decay from place to place, a picture more in line with natural variations in snowfall and ocean circulation. The Antarctic is to some extent insulated from global warming because to its north are zonal flows in the atmosphere and ocean, unimpeded by other landmasses. This insulates the continent from warmer events further north and leads one to suppose it is better protected from global warming.

"Taken as a whole, Antarctica is so cold that our present efforts to raise its temperature might be regarded as fairly puny. Change is undoubtedly occurring: in the collapse of the northerly Peninsula ice shelves, and elsewhere in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, where the circumpolar current appears to reached the ice edge and is eating away drastically at the ice shelves. One cannot be certain, because packets of heat in the atmosphere do not come conveniently labelled 'the contribution of anthropogenic warming'