Parts of the globe are cooling....

Yes, indeed..climate is complex...

While much has been made in the media about the extent of the summer melting in the Arctic, very little has been made of the record amount of sea ice forming in the Antarctic this year. Indeed, this is probably the first you’ve heard of this.

Very quietly, the ice extent in the Southern Hemisphere (Antarctica) has reached its highest level since records began in 1979. According to NASA GISS data, the Antarctic has cooled by 1F since 1957. This highlights an interesting dichotomy in the way global warming-related topics are reported by the media, and presented by the “consensus.”

Take for example, the Larsen Ice Sheet breakup in 2002, and the winter of 2004. The Larsen Ice sheet breaking up in 2002 received a lot of media attention (hint: it was in An Inconvenient Truth). What wasn’t reported is that the breakup wasn’t caused by global warming—it was caused by a spike in solar activity.

Indeed, two years after the solar peak subsided, the winter of 2004 was the coldest in the entire 50-year record of South Pole temperatures. That’s right, coldest.

And since 2002, the Larsen Ice sheet has refrozen and even grown. This past year has seen cold and snow records set in Australia, South America, and Africa—facts that received very little play in the news.

Now, before I get a bunch of angry replies calling me a global warming denier, let me say that I do believe in climate change. The planet’s climate is a system of immensity and complexity beyond our easy understanding, but to suppose that it’s static is to ignore all evidence.

What I do question, however, is how the proponents of man-made global warming (and the skeptics to a lesser extent) selectively pick only certain evidence, ignore whole swathes of conflicting data, crush dissent, claim consensus, and don’t even enter into a real debate. If the science is clear, try and explain away the Antarctic data.