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Location: Pantego, Texas, United States

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

The greenhouse gas global warming hypothesis says that there will be more warming at the poles than at mid-latitudes. Much was made of the decline in Arctic sea ice this past summer, but there is not much discussion of Antarctic sea ice. (The Arctic sea ice has returned to near usual levels this winter.) Here is a graph of the Antarctic sea ice anomaly (that is, variation from the average).

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.south.jpg

From this graph it is obvious that the amount of sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere is increasing, not shrinking. One aspect of the extent of sea ice is that the record only goes back to 1979 when satellites started being used to monitor the extent of sea ice. Prior to that there were no good measurements. There is anecdotal evidence that the low level of sea ice in the Arctic was not unprecedented. Back in the 1930's there were years in which local observers recall seeing little sea ice during summers.

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