(5) MORE ICE THAN EVER

The American Spectator, 5 February 2008

By Patrick J. Michaels

The Washington Post recently ran a shocking above-the-fold article warning
us of "Escalating Ice Loss Found in Antarctica." A new paper by Eric Rignot
of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory shows a net loss of ice where most
scientists thought the opposite would occur.

The Post went full-bore with this one, spreading the article on to an entire
interior page. The piece ends by noting that Rajenda Pachauri, head of the
United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is so
concerned that he's is personally going down to inspect the situation.

He should. Before he even gets to Antarctica, Pachauri is going to see
something even more surprising than Rignot's finding. Despite a warming
Southern Ocean, the amount of ice surrounding Antarctica is now at the
highest level ever measured for this time of the year, since satellites
first began to monitor it almost thirty years ago. This represents a
continuation of the record set last winter (our summer).

Thanks to the miracles of modern technology, we can also look at the
departure from the average for ice mass in a given month. At present, the
coverage of ice surrounding Antarctica is almost exactly two million square
miles above where it is historically supposed to be at this time of year.
It's farther above normal than it has ever been for any month in
climatologic records. Around now, because it's summer down there and the ice
is headed towards its annual low point, there should be about seven million
square miles of it. That means, as data in University of Illinois' web
publication Cryosphere Today shows, that there is nearly 30% more ice down
in Antarctica than usual for this time of the year.

All of the IPCC's models of Antarctica in the 21st century forecast a gain
in ice, as a warmer surrounding ocean evaporates more water, which
subsequently falls in the form of snow when it hits the continent. It's
simply too cold for rain in Antarctica, and it'll stay that way for a very
long time.

Concerning Antarctica as a whole, the IPCC's new climate compendium notes
"the lack of warming reflected in atmospheric temperatures averaged across
the region." Other studies, such as Peter Doran's in Nature in 2003, show
actual cooling in recent decades. (There is a small area of significant
warming in the peninsula that points towards South America, but this is less
than 2% of Antarctica's total land mass.)

There's brand new evidence, just published in mid-January in Geophysical
Research Letters, of a striking increase in snowfall over that peninsula.
The few snowfall records that are available elsewhere in Antarctica show
considerable variation from decade to decade, so discriminating the "signal"
of increased snowfall caused by global warming from all the rest of the
"noise" may be very difficult indeed.

We see the same problem with hurricanes and global warming. Their strength
and numbers vary considerably from year to year. 2005 was the most active
year ever measured in the Atlantic Basin, while 2007 was one of the weakest
in history. How do you find the fingerprint of global warming amidst such
variation?

So it's not warming up, and the snowfall data are equivocal, yet the
continent is experiencing a net loss of ice. How can this be, and is it even
important? The current hypothesis is that warmer waters beneath the surface
are somehow loosening the ice. That's plausible, but again, there's precious
little proof of it.

And further, the bottom line is that there is more ice than ever surrounding
Antarctica.

One of the tired tropes that reverberate throughout global warming reporting
is that inconvenient facts get left out. In this case, it's blatant. Midway
through the Post's page-long article comes a statement that "these new
findings come as the Arctic is losing ice at a dramatic rate." Wouldn't that
have been an appropriate place to note that, despite a small recent loss of
ice from the Antarctic landmass, the ice field surrounding Antarctica is now
larger than ever measured?

Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato
Institute and author of Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global
Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media.

Copyright 2008, The American Spectator �