Antarctic Sea Ice Sets Another Record

Antarctic sea ice set another record this past week, with the most amount of ice ever recorded on day 256 of the calendar year (September 12 of this leap year). Please, nobody tell the mainstream media or they might have to retract some stories and admit they are misrepresenting scientific data.

National Public Radio (NPR) published an article on its website last month claiming, “Ten years ago, a piece of ice the size of Rhode Island disintegrated and melted in the waters off Antarctica. Two other massive ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula had suffered similar fates a few years before. The events became poster children for the effects of global warming. … There’s no question that unusually warm air triggered the final demise of these huge chunks of ice.”

NPR failed to mention anywhere in its article that Antarctic sea ice has been growing since satellites first began measuring the ice 33 years ago and the sea ice has been above the 33-year average throughout 2012.

Indeed, none of the mainstream media are covering this important story.
Amusingly, page after page of Google News results for Antarctic sea ice record show links to news articles breathlessly spreading fear and warning of calamity because Arctic sea ice recently set a 33-year low.

Sea ice around one pole is shrinking while sea ice around another pole is growing. This sure sounds like a global warming crisis to me.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2012/09/19/antarctic-sea-ice-sets-another-record/

Yeah, cause FORBES is such a well-known and highly regarded scientific journal.

Climate change has never meant that temperatures rise everywhere in lock-step. Climate, and even more so, weather, are much more complicated than that.

And the Arctic ice pack shrinking while the Antarctic grows matters a great deal if you are a polar bear. (They don't live at the South Pole.)

While Arctic melts, Antarctic ice hits record. Is warming debunked?

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environmen...ntarctic-ice-hits-record.-Is-warming-debunked

Antarctic ice expansion doesn't disprove warming, scientists say. Warming has long been expected to hit Arctic ice first.

Distracting from the news that Arctic sea-ice extent reached a record low on Sept.16 is a widely circulating blog article claiming that at the opposite end of the Earth, Antarctic sea ice is more than making up for the losses..........

Despite its lack of scientific support, Goddard's post has garnered attention around the Web. In a Forbes.com column about the record high Antarctic sea ice, skeptic James Taylor writes, "Please, nobody tell the mainstream media or they might have to retract some stories and admit they are misrepresenting scientific data."

But if anyone had asked an actual scientist, they would have learned that a good year for sea ice in the Antarctic in no way nullifies the precipitous drop in Arctic sea-ice levels year after year — or the mounds of other evidence indicating global warming is really happening.

"Antarctic sea ice hasn't seen these big reductions we've seen in the Arctic. This is not a surprise to us," said climate scientist Mark Serreze, director of the NSIDC. "Some of the skeptics say 'Well, everything is OK because the big changes in the Arctic are essentially balanced by what's happening in the Antarctic.' This is simply not true."

Projections made from climate models all predict that global warming should impact Arctic sea ice first and most intensely, Serreze said. "We have known for many years that as the Earth started to warm up, the effects would be seen first in the Arctic and not the Antarctic. The physical geography of the two hemispheres is very different. Largely as a result of that, they behave very differently."...............more at link........

and.....

Antarctica started warming 600 years ago, study finds

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0823/Antarctica-started-warming-600-years-ago-study-finds

Temperatures in the Antarctic Peninsula started rising naturally 600 years ago, long before man-made climate changes further increased them, scientists said in a study on Wednesday that helps explain the recent collapses of vast ice shelves..............

"By the time the unusual recent warming began, the Antarctic Peninsula ice shelves were already poised for the dramatic break-ups observed from the 1990s onwards," said the British Antarctic Survey, which led the study published in the journal Nature.



This file photo from Greenpeace shows a crack in the Weddell Sea, Antarctica. A new study indicates that by the end of the century a huge ice shelf in Antarctica will melt, contributing to sea levels worldwide.
AP Photo/Greenpeace, Morgan