GayandRight

My name is Fred and I am a gay conservative living in Ottawa. This blog supports limited government, the right of the State of Israel to live in peace and security, and tries to expose the threat to us all from cultural relativism, post-modernism, and radical Islam. I am also the founder of the Free Thinking Film Society in Ottawa (www.freethinkingfilms.com)

Saturday, January 31, 2009

Is Antarctica getting warmer???

A nice piece from the National Post...
For two decades now, those predicting climate-change catastrophe have been frustrated by skeptics who ask, “If carbon dioxide is warming the planet, why does the data show Antarctica to be cooling?” Until last week, the doomsayers had all manner of complicated explanations but no slam dunk answer. Now, thanks to a new study published last week in Nature magazine, the doomsayers obtained the answer they sought — proof that any fool can understand. The bottom line: Antarctica is in fact warming, just like the rest of the planet. “Contrarians have sometime grabbed on to this idea that the entire continent of Antarctica is cooling, so how could we be talking about global warming,” elaborated Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University and a co-author of the Nature study. “Now we can say: No, it’s not true ... It is not bucking the trend.”

The press seized on the findings. “Antarctica is warming, not cooling: study,” announced a Reuters headline. “Global warming hits Antarctica,” stated CNN. “Antarctica joins rest of the globe in warming,” said the Associated Press. But this study in Nature leaves many unimpressed, including top scientists from the doomsayer camp. One week after the study’s release, it is clear this study does nothing to explain the enigma of a cooling Antarctica.

The Nature authors had a daunting challenge. For one thing, the U.S. government has maintained a scientific base at the South Pole since 1957 at which temperatures have been continuously measured. The temperature readings show a cooler climate over the past half century. For another, various weather stations in Antarctica record cooler temperatures. Moreover, satellite readings of temperatures above Antarctica show a cooling trend. Little wonder that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change itself rejects the warming hypothesis. In its 2007 report, the IPCC accepts that Antarctica shows a “lack of warming reflected in atmospheric temperatures averaged across the region.” To reconcile Antarctica with the rest of the globe, global warming advocates have taken the simple, if unsatisfying, view that the lack of warming in Antarctica is consistent with the presence of warming everywhere else.

How do Mann and the other scientists involved in the Nature study now conclude that Antarctica is warming when actual temperature readings show it is not? Antarctica’s weather stations cover a small fraction of the continent. Where data doesn’t exist, Mann makes various assumptions, then deduces Antarctic temperatures over the last 50 years with the help of computer models. The official explanation: “The researchers devised a statistical technique that uses data from satellites and from Antarctic weather stations to make a new estimate of temperature trends.”

Are these statistical techniques reliable?

“I have to say I remain somewhat skeptical,” states Kevin Trenberth, a lead author for the IPCC and director of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “It is hard to make data where none exist.”

Such results “have no real way to be validated,” states John Christy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama-Huntsville. “We will never know what the temperature was over the very large missing areas that this technique attempts to fill in.”
But, please read the rest...

4 Comments:

Blogger Jay Alt said...

Not so fast. The claims you trustingly repeat are badly flawed. For example -

Small rocks long buried inside Antarctic glaciers are being exposed at a rate 20X faster than in past centuries. How can that happening if Antarctica isn't warming? Are rogue penguins trained by Al Gore and Dave Suzuki uncovering them?

http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSL2889097520080229

The slight warming trend that Americans Steig and Mann show is supported by results of Ohio State and the British Antarctic Survey researchers.

http://polarmet.mps.ohio-state.edu/PolarMet/ant_hindcast.html

It is fine to quibble with the methods of these teams. But realize they are the same methods meteorologists use in reanalysis of old weather data. These are very important to understand of hurricane systems and trends. And the conclusions of Steig et al are supported by another line of physical evidence besides the boulder story. Satellites have noticed surface melt areas in W. Antarctic beginning in 2005. These were not observed in previous decades.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2007/antarctic_snowmelt.html

So, have a great, cold day and avoid consuming more of the National Post's spoiled baloney.

7:53 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Small rocks long buried inside Antarctic glaciers are being exposed at a rate 20X faster than in past centuries."

Where is the recorded data from past centuries of the rock counts in the ice. I call bullsh*t on that. Anyone can make a clain like that but where is the proof?

8:48 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Small rocks are now proof of Global Warming. Who KNEW??? I wonder if Jay Alt has ever wandered outside the city in which he lives. Assuming that rocks are appearing does not mean that the ice and snow are melting. There is such a thing as erosion and cold shrinkage. Cold shrinkage is what happens when ice exposed to air loses mass irrespective of temperature as water molecules are drawn out of the ice by the cold dry air moving across it.

However there is only one way to measure warming or cooling its called recording the temperature with a thermometer. Projections and computer models don't cut it you have to actually measure the temperature. The actual temperature as recorded by actual thermometers show a cooling trend not a warming trend. Any other position is a failure to deal with reality.

9:02 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It is not as simple as you would like to pretend. I understand that Christians want to pretend that man has no control, and therefore no responsibility for what he does, because it reinforces their belief that "God" is all-powerful, and humans are so insignificant. Unfortunately this myth no longer serves humanity.

Please read the correct explanations: On FOX NEWS, even... http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,481227,00.html

"...the East Antarctic ...cooling was linked to another anthropogenic effect: ozone depletion. ..As ozone was depleted, less radiation was absorbed at this layer of the atmosphere, which altered the layering of temperatures over Antarctica ...This in turn altered wind patterns and strengthened the circumpolar vortex, creating a wall of winds that isolated the cold air over Antarctica from the warm air over the South Pacific Ocean ...Essentially, the effect of ozone depletion was "overwhelming the influence of greenhouse warming," Mann told LiveScience.

"Until last week, the doomsayers had all manner of complicated explanations but no slam dunk answer. "

Well that answer seems simple enough to me.

Its a shame that we need to get into such dire straits, where the worlds future hangs in convincing morons with simple answers.

""The greenhouse signal is now out-competing the ozone depletion signal," Mann said."

"this argument was "disingenuous" to begin with because the cooling caused by ozone depletion was reproduced by climate models, but the new study soundly routs contrarian claims, he said."

Hopefully this ends the matter; but for those who believe in sky fairies, miraculous births and resurrection from the dead, I guess they will never accept collapsing ice shelves as reality.

5:14 PM  

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