Or maybe not so surprising if you follow this debate. This came out 2 days ago in the Australian news.
Antarctic ice is growing, not melting away
ICE is expanding in much of Antarctica, contrary to the widespread public belief that global warming is melting the continental ice cap.
The results of ice-core drilling and sea ice monitoring indicate there is no large-scale melting of ice over most of Antarctica, although experts are concerned at ice losses on the continent’s western coast. …
However, the picture is very different in east Antarctica, which includes the territory claimed by Australia.
East Antarctica is four times the size of west Antarctica and parts of it are cooling. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research report prepared for last week’s meeting of Antarctic Treaty nations in Washington noted the South Pole had shown “significant cooling in recent decades”.
Australian Antarctic Division glaciology program head Ian Allison said sea ice losses in west Antarctica over the past 30 years had been more than offset by increases in the Ross Sea region, just one sector of east Antarctica.
“Sea ice conditions have remained stable in Antarctica generally,” Dr Allison said.
Of course the media will bury this while highlighting any snippet of bad news they can find… Meanwhile 48 hours after this report, New Scientist rushes to reassure us that while it is true that Antartic ice is growing, global warming will win sooner or later.
Notice they also muddy the debate by switching between speaking about Arctic ice and Antarctic ice, a distinction many readers will miss. - Causing tortured paragraphs such as this….
Arctic sea ice is decreasing dramatically and reached a record low in 2007. But satellite images studied by Turner and his colleagues show that Antarctic sea ice is increasing in every month of the year expect January. “By the end of the century we expect one third of Antarctic sea ice to disappear,” says Turner.
HUH? It’s growing so much they expect it to disappear.
Nuance.
Steven Chu, played the fear card in a dramatic fashion this week at the Summit of the Americas. (emphasis mine)
Energy Secretary Offers Dire Global Warming Prediction
PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad and Tobago — Caribbean nations face “very, very scary” rises in sea level and intensifying hurricanes, and Florida, Louisiana and even northern California could be overrun with rising water levels due to global warming triggered by carbon-based greenhouse gases, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Saturday.
Chu’s comments followed meetings with environmental ministers attending the fifth Summit of the Americas. He did not shy away from the most perilous predictions about the potential effects of global warming.
He said global temperatures have already risen by 0.8 degree Centigrade, that another 1 degree increase was certain to occur and “there’s a reasonable probability we can go above 4 degrees Centigrade to 5 and 6 more.”
Chu painted a dire picture of the implications.
“So imagine a world 6 degrees warmer. It’s not going to recognize geographical boundaries. It’s not going to recognize anything. So agriculture regions today will be wiped out,” Chu said.
“I think the Caribbean countries face rising oceans and they face increase in the severity of hurricanes. This is something that is very, very scary to all of us. The island states in the world represent — I remember this number — one-half of 1 percent of the carbon emissions in the world. And they will — some of them will disappear,” he added.
Of course, you should consider the source… Chu is a former Berkeley professor who after he became Obama’s pick for Energy Secretary, didn’t even know that as Sec of Energy he was in change of oil policy. So he’s the typical liberal academic out of his depth.
But let’s get to that bolded part… “He said global temperatures have already risen by 0.8 degree.”
Risen 0.8 degree from when exactly? The last Ice Age? The Medieval Warm Period? Since the start of the Industrial Revolution?
Can Secretary Chu answer that age old question that other alarmists can’t? Namely, can Chu tell us the Earth’s optimal temperature at which we as humans can derive the most benefit? Of course he can’t.
Why is it, the alarmists always talk about relative changes in temperature but can’t give us the absolute measurements? If they told me the optimal temperature they wanted us to maintain, I’d be able to take them far more seriously.
YA GOTTA LOVE IT….. During the winter….
Don’t confuse weather with climate
PARIS : A cold front is sweeping across Europe after gripping swathes of North America last month, but the deep freeze does not mean the threat of global warming has abated, caution scientists. “The major trend is unmistakably one of warming,” Michel Jarraud, secretary general of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), told AFP. “If we look at the trajectory over the last 160 years, it overlays a large natural variability, and that’s what causes confusion.”
The cooler weather that was a hallmark of 2008 can be explained partly by La Nina, a reversal of the phenomenon by which warm waters build up on the surface of the Pacific, said Jarraud. “The problem is that people are confusing weather with climate,” Susan Solomon, a top scientist on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), said in a recent interview. “Weather is important locally, and from year to year. But what you really have to look at when you are interested in climate is the larger scale — the whole world — and the longer term,” she said.
Now wait a minute… during the summer we’re told every hot day is proof of global warming. And if it is a record warm day, these same people actively encourage the idea that weather = climate.
More proof Global Warming is now a religion.
