The ice located on the continent of Antarctica is growing, not shrinking. Global Warming is not melting the Antarctica ice cap, in fact the latest information says the South Pole is seeing increasingly colder temperatures. See photos and a video below:
Antarctic
New reports from the Australian Antarctic Division Glaciology Program indicates that ice is expanding in most of Antarctica. The area designated as Western Antarctica is seeing some ice loss. The area known as the Eastern Antarctica is seeing ice expansion.
Eastern Antarctica is four times the size of Western Antarctica. The increasing ice in the Eastern portion of the continent has “more than offset” the ice losses in West Antarctica, according to Dr. Ian Allison of the Australian Antarctic Division. “Sea ice conditions have remained stable in Antarctica,” said Allison. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research told a meeting of Antarctic Treaty nations last week that the South Pole had shown “significant cooling in recent decades.”
Antarctica is an area of 5.1 million sq. miles. According to the World Atlas, it comprises 8.9% of the earth’s surface. It is the coldest, driest and windiest spot on earth and boasts the lowest temperature ever recorded on the planet -129.1F.
Bordered by South America on the north-northwest, New Zealand, Tasmania and Australia on the south and southeast, and Africa on the northeast, Dr. Allison said “there was not any evidence of significant change in the mass of ice shelves in East Antarctica nor any indication that its ice cap was melting.” He also cautioned that ice shelves have “episodic” instances of large icebergs breaking off – every 10, 20 or 50 years, and “the calvings of the magnitude seen recently in West Antarctica might not be unusual.”
According to Global Warming supporters, a major problem of polar-ice-cap-melts is the consequence of rising oceans. Australia’s federal Environment Minister, Peter Garrett, said:
experts are predicting sea level rises of up to 6m from Antarctic melting by 2100 .
That’s 91 years into the future. The assessment of the “experts,” however is met with opposition from the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) which predicts a worst case scenario of only 1.25m sea rise.
With all the talk of sea levels rising, it should be noted that “the melting of sea ice…does not cause sea levels to rise” because the ice is already in the water. President Obama saw his election to the White House as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow….” Maybe Mother Nature beat him to it. The video below has some beautiful scenes of Antarctica. Click on the small photos to enlarge.
Antarctic Ice (Photos)
Antarctica (Video)
April 19th, 2009 at 11:39 am
Maggie, ice is less dense(as a water crystal) than water(a fluid) so a large volume can sit above the water as part of the iceberg as your pictures show. As it melts it increases the volume of the water as it falls back into the water raising the overall “water level”. Your lack of basic physical real concepts is not well supplanted by your imaginal ruminations. You would do well in advertising though, and in spin shops. How on earth can so called intelligent people go so far astray on such a select hodge podge of right wing obssessions? I have heard of the flat earth society and I guess this is its newest installment.
April 19th, 2009 at 11:46 am
i mean this is the republican platform.
there was no torture, and the enemy deserves it anyways.
there is no global warming and in fact we are headed for a big chill so burn more carbon.
gay marriage is bad.
guns are good, even assulat rifles if you train the young uns in a 2 hour course.
give the banks oodles of free money, even the insurance companys heck.
don’t prosecute any republican criminals no matter what they did or tortured.
don’t fix the lack of workable health care problem.
don’t solve social security.
don’t solve medicare or medicaid.
build more prisons and hire more police.
enlarge the war in afghan, even into pakistan and iran if need be.
let north korea do whatever it wants and pander to it.
pray to rush limbaugh as the father of the country
laugh at all dissenters in the most sarcastic matter
there must be others, lets see…..
April 19th, 2009 at 11:53 am
You forgot “accuse your imagined opposition of being or doing what you yourself are actually doing”
e.g: Like fundis claiming that they are being oppressed for not being able to oppress others.
April 19th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
@ Brian, I quoted from the article: “The melting of sea ice…does not cause sea levels to rise because the ice is in the water.” You know Brian, to paint a picture, as the iceberg forms it digs a hole in the water. It gets taller, above the water, and weighs the ice farther down in the water. If it collapses, it uses the space already displaced. If there is excess, it is minute – as this report says.
The ice is denser now in the Antarctic than in TEN years. Last year it measured 1.89m thickness, the average since the 1950’s is 1.67m.
If you call this a “hodge podge” of information by right wing obsessions, please consider the scientific sources used for this report.
Just curious Brian, do you see Al Gore as a scientist?
April 19th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
This may amaze you but I believed in global warming way before gore made his movie which is basically a privately made psa that also portrays him in a more activist role than he ever was as veep. Everyone but cheney has a legacy project going. Born a farm boy to a powerful senator who just happened to own a big tobacco farm al gore was a journalism or english major at harvard with a future actor Tommy lee #1 as a roomate and a tour in vietnamn as an army journalist. He basically jumped into politics after that. He did little in clinton’s admin. Now he’s a jet setter up in years. He’s like not a factor in what I see happening to our overcrowded planet. All species pollute and evenutally destroy the environment they inhabit if nature doesn’t check their numbers by predators, famines, pestulance, even comets. It has to do with energy and entropy in harmonic motion with each other. Its deeper than just bugs in a jar eating microgreens. If you go to the raw physics of life in an organic environment you will see life itself is but a carrier wave of a bigger energy and entropy balancing act harmonically being played out. In that sense human pollution is an information wave that is telling the earth to limit its numbers in this global heating problem. Just because you can talk and squawk doesn’t mean you aren’t a cog in the global machine. Al gore goes nowhere near there. He doesn’t bother me or really impress me other than at least he picked a cause to champion with his visibility. He’s kind of in that rarefied silicon valley crowd of venture capitalists with social causes aka Paul Allen and a bunch of others. To me al gore is not even in the problem equation of what we face so I don’t get why he bothers you ideologus so. Regarding global warming, al gore isnt the issue. The US geological weather survey has super computers churning out global warming numbers all day long and they are consistently increasing in both the cyclical and secular wave cycles. Even gw had to agree that global warming was real. MBA majors have to take at least an introductory course in descriptive statistics, and frankly its a great tool for use on a whole host of problems as it educates your world view from your prejudices.
April 19th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
Does this mean that global warming has mysteriously disappeared? Or is the argument here that it never really existed, and all those scientists in NASA, CRU, World Meteorological Organisation, UAH, RSS, Stanford University, Max Planck Institute, The Geological Society of America, all just lying or mistaken?
April 19th, 2009 at 8:09 pm
yes the repubs dismiss especially those people you are mentioning. And they don’t embarrass easily, nor are they particularly good at analysing comparative data sources, so they must be right. rush is good enough.
April 19th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
Best data now is there was a relatively short natural warming cycle that ended about ten years ago. Temperatures have been consistently cooler in recent years, hence unsurprising data such as growing ice accumulation.
That warming cycle was well documented as were other even warmer cycles in past centuries, which is why they were growing grapes on Greenland 500 years ago. The question has always been whether or not the recent warming cycls was due to natural causes or anthropomorphic.
Mother nature has answered the question in recent years. The best theory now for the warming and cooling cycles is sun-spot activity, although that is still a hypothesis as any other including the dubious hypothesis of anthropomorphic global warming. And that’s good news because it will divert a lot of precious governmental resources to smarter social uses.
April 19th, 2009 at 9:55 pm
Maggie,
Just curious; why did you post this? Initially I assumed you were on board with the “Global Warming is a fraud” camp an cherry-picking data, but you included the statement that the same study concludes up that up to 4 ft of ocean rise from antarctic melting alone, is possible by 2100.
Brian, maybe if you would have read the whole article before you axiomatically ranted, you’d realize it was pretty fair. SCAR is a legitimate international research body. They’re not kooks, and they’re not climate change deniers. This is a very interesting study showing that CO2 increases are effecting weather on the microclimate scale. In Antarctica, the East half seems to be cooling, even as the West half is drastically warming.
April 19th, 2009 at 10:07 pm
the geometrically increasing number of carbon-oxygen bonds floating in the atmosphere, like in increasing CO2 from burning fossil fuels, fireplaces, stoves, cigarettes, industrial producion, sailing ships, driving tanks in war, cannon fire, etc etc traps increasingly more kelvin from radiant sunlight both on the way down and reflected back. This raises the kinetic energy of the carbon-oxygen bonds making them vibrate faster and faster creating little atmospheric heaters circling the globe. The oceans and other bodies of water than absorb this additonal heat creating a man made secular trend independent of the geologic short term cyclical trends, though both interact with one another. This is man’s extra contribution, though mammals grazing grassland creates assorted gases too, forest fires, volcanos, meteor strikes, methane, ethane, some of which recombines with oxygen creating yet more CO2. So word to the wise, there is both natural and man made cycles in play and they are cumulative. It takes supercomputers to do the math but the results are consistently showing cumulative global warming. The flat earth society disagrees because they want to “empower” large oil, chemical, manufacturing organizations to drill, drill, drill, as it makes more money and they are their tools unwittingly or not. Interesting how they merge money greed with self image consumerism as an ideology, and all the rest of us are deemed fools. So What they get in return is muscle cars and the vague promise of being one of the team, possibly a job, and a sticker. It takes a government to pioneer certain types of projects that benifit us all. Since we already know how to drill, drill, drill, and consume, consume, consume, it seems government can help advance our resource sciences and global conservation so we remain a viable society a hundred years from now.
April 19th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
leftrightleft, when the comment “the melting of the sea ice doesn’t cause the oceans to rise” so blatantly wrong was said like “oh its afternoon outside” came up I just had to respond. Try watching some ice cubes melt in a glass of water and tell me the water level doesn’t rise. pleeeeeeease! The utter unscientificalness of those limbaughites who critique common sense issues is so flat earth society for me I just got to wake people up. A problematic ideology is one thing, but one completely antithetical to common science is another. unacceptable. We need to have some standards of logic here.
April 19th, 2009 at 11:48 pm
clifford,
there hasn’t been a decent muscle car in the usa since the 1969 camaro … although … the 1966 shelby cobra was much nicer looking and the 68 corvette had more horse power …
April 20th, 2009 at 12:38 am
Brian, almost everything you said in #10 is true, but you commit an endearing sin of wannabe scientists. You assume that your facts are consequential. In reality, the empirical evidence demonstrably shows that CO2 increases from your wordy bag of sources has almost nil influence on global temperatures. Otherwise temperatures would be going up now more than ever before, but they are in fact falling for several years. It’s all a natural occurrance worth studying for sure, but not worth losing your sleep over. The sun spot cycles will come and go, so we’ll all get warm again someday.
April 20th, 2009 at 12:39 am
Brian, you should go to school and learn archimedes theorem again (yea, the “Eureka” one).
It says that any object floating on water displaces a volume of water with exactly his weight.
And, as the ice melts, it becomes…. water! And so, will occupy exactly the volume it was displacing as an iceberg.
April 20th, 2009 at 12:59 am
There is a little slanting at work here – not helpful if some news outlets don’t publish the full story:
“… Dr Allison says overall, ice levels are still falling”
“On average, west Antarctica is losing more ice than the east is gaining.”
April 20th, 2009 at 1:04 am
actually it is not that simple at all.
the antarctic is an ice sheet over land and water. the ice which melts in the water will become MORE dense, because water increases in density between 0 and 4 degrees celcius. the part of the iceberg above the water will become denser … which is why glasses do not overflow when ice melts in them. you can then argue about what the effect less salty water will have on the oceans.
but if the ice which is on land in the antarctic melts … it will raise the water level.
April 20th, 2009 at 4:42 am
Fernando is right here. This is a pretty simple experiment one can carry out with a glass and some ice cubes.
Think of dropping an ice cube in a glass of water. Immediately the water level will rise due to the mass displaced by the floating ice cube. As the ice cube melts, it is adding water volume, but decreasing in mass. As a result, the water level is rising due to increased water volume, while simultaneously falling due to the decreased ice mass displacement.
The result is pretty much a zero sum game. Try it out in a plastic cup. Fill it about halfway up with water, drop in a couple ice cubes, and mark the water level with a sharpie. Then, wait an hour or so until the ice is fully melted, and compare the resulting volume to the initial measurement. They will be approximately the same.
April 20th, 2009 at 6:43 am
It’s also interesting to note that some geologists think we might be due for another ice age of some sort. Basically these things come and go in spurts about every ~ 15,000 years or so, which is about the time of the last ice age. Maybe if we keep releasing CO2 in dramatic amounts we can just forestall our own demise do to hyper-glaciation.
I don’t really give two shakes about whether global warming is real or not, but I am going to laugh my ass off when millions of people discover all this cap and trade nonsense is going to cost them jobs and raise the cost of consumer goods and gasoline by a significant degree. Sounds like a great idea to implement in the middle of the Great Recession. Its easy to care about the environment when you are a rich limousine liberal, but when the average Joe has to pay $6 dollars for a gallon of gas, I’m guessing there is going to be a mini-revolution.
April 20th, 2009 at 8:37 am
Brian,
Go back to 3rd grade physics… You said…
“large volume can sit above the water as part of the iceberg as your pictures show. As it melts it increases the volume of the water as it falls back into the water raising the overall “water level”.”
The area displaced by Ice is equal to the same volume of the ice in liquid form… Go home and try this experiment… Take a class of water with ice cubes and measure the level of the water… (not at the hight of the ice cube but at the water line (the meniscus)… Let the ice melt… You will see as the Ice melts the water level stays the same…
It should also be noted the climate of the planet is changing… Some areas are warming while others are cooling… The Earths protective magnetic field is weakening(not our fault) and allowing more solar input on the planet… (more solar input means warmer weather) We are also entering a period of a polarity shift where the north pole becomes the south and vise versa… All of which has happen in the past and are quiet normal (in the big picture)… And all have had tramendious effect on the planets climatology.
There is a change in planetary climate, and I’m not saying we haven’t contributed to it. However I do question the servarity of our contribution. The sun for the past century has been increasing its solar output, orbital alignment has also been shifting, all of which will peak in about 5 to 10 years… It is quite possible that after this period the earth will start to cool, (when the sun isn’t putting out as much radiation) and we will need to find ways of warming the planet…
Best,
Amadeus
April 20th, 2009 at 9:22 am
Ahhh, heresy. It can be so much fun when poking holes in the church of anthropogenic global warming…..
April 20th, 2009 at 10:10 am
These are segmants taken from debates I’ve had on this subject as much as 3 years ago, so the dates may not be current but the facts remain the same
Dr. Kevin Trenberth once said himself in the Rocky Mountains News regarding Gores movie:
“Gore’s statement that ice-sheets melting in Greenland or the West Antarctic would raise sea level by 20 feet is correct, although it was misleading that he did not put a “TIME FRAME” on this.
Why didn’t Gore put a time-frame on it?
Because a twenty foot increase would, all things remaining equal, take millennia.
As Dr. Trenberth himself once said; temperatures would have to remain 5.5 degrees Celsius higher than today’s for several millennia before the Greenland ice sheet would lose even half of its ice. The Greenland ice sheet has in fact recently thickened by 2 inches per year, a total of 20 inches in 10 years”
(Johannesen et al., 2005).
Is that, as Dr. Trenberth says, merely “misleading” on Gore’s part?
Or was it an outright prevarication?
Dr. Vincent Gray, a New Zealand scientist who recently resigned from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where he had served as an expert from its inception, left because, in his words, “the world will slowly realize that the ‘predictions’ emanating from the IPCC will not happen. The absence of any global warming for the past 8 years is only the beginning. The whole process is a swindle. The IPCC from the beginning was given the license to use whatever methods would be necessary to provide evidence that carbon dioxide increases were harming the climate even if this involves manipulation of dubious data and using people’s opinions instead of science to prove their case.”
Even just a few years back many of us were aware of the intent behind global warming as nothing more than a means to sell the public a bucket of goods that no one needs. Thank God its finally catching on to the point now where more and more people are becoming aware of the scam and less and less are placing it as any priority. Of all our problems today global warming ranks as one of the last things on peoples minds so naturally we will see an increase in documentaries and subliminal messaging to get our paranoias back on track
Amadeus, be careful. Brian loves to make sh*t up as he goes along
April 20th, 2009 at 10:14 am
Brian: Re: #1. Back to 9th grade general science for you. “As it melts it increases the volume of the water as it falls back into the water raising the overall “water level”.” You are dead wrong. Do a little Google search and you’ll easily find the answer. That said, your subsequent political musings might best apply to you (except, of course, the right wing thing).
April 20th, 2009 at 10:32 am
Boy, this sure is a relief for me. I was beginning to worry a little about Global Warming. Thanks, Rightpundits.
April 20th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
well … you guys sure schooled cliff clavin on his 9th grade physics
however, the point of the article is:
if the ice on LAND in the antarctic melts the sea levels will rise. that would raise sea levels.
although you are absolutely correct, cliff clavin (a.k.a. brian) loves to talk about physics and string theory and whatever else he sees on mythbusters
April 20th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
However, we (as the world as a whole), driven by the media, are having the wrong discussion.
The important point is not if there is a global warming or not or if the ice is melting or not.
The important question is:
was the global warming that occurred from 1975 to 1998 caused by an increase in the greenhouse effect, and what is the contribution of mankind to it?
Because the answer is simple: no. Greenhouse effect is easy to measure, and the measures point to global warming not being caused by the greenhouse effect. Ask the director of the Mt. Palomar Observatory.
They are already preparing for the fact that reality will disprove their claims. They are replacing the term “global warming” by “climate change”. As if any climate change would have dire consequences. Then the argument will be:
“yes, apparently we were wrong in our predictions, but we still need your carbon taxes so that we make sure that a catastrophic climate change will never happen in the future.”