Global Warming Causes Coldest Weather In 15 Years

[red states rule]

I can't think of many stupider arguments than to attempt to use cold winter weather to "disprove" global warming. If you pay attention to meteorologists' reports, you'd know that the proximate cause of the extremely cold weather this week is an arctic air mass that has moved south because of changes in the flow of the jet stream. This is a naturally occuring phenomenon, and has nothing to do with climate change, whether or not climate change is human-caused or not.

Eh, I thought that is what I was saying Jeff. Global warming does not exist, and the weather we are having is normal

[April15]

Now the New York Times has a front page item on GW.

Warming in Antarctica Looks Certain

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By KENNETH CHANG
Published: January 21, 2009

Antarctica is warming.
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Enlarge This Image
NASA

An illustration that depicts the warming that scientists have determined has occurred in West Antarctica during the last 50 years. The dark red shows the area that has warmed the most.
Related
Analysis Finds Large Antarctic Area Has Melted (May 16, 2007)
Op-Ed Contributor: Cold, Hard Facts (July 27, 2006)
Dot Earth: Antarctica: New Evidence of Western Warming (January 21, 2009)
Times Topics: Global Warming
Earth in Flux: An Antarctic Ice Shelf Crumbles (March 25, 2008)
The Melting (Freezing) of Antarctica; Deciphering Contradictory Climate Patterns Is Largely a Matter of Ice (April 2, 2002)
Ozone Hole Is Now Seen as a Cause for Antarctic Cooling (Mary 3, 2002)

That is the conclusion of scientists analyzing half a century of temperatures on the continent, and the findings may help resolve a climate enigma at the bottom of the planet.

While some regions of Antarctica, particularly the peninsula the stretches toward South America, have warmed rapidly in recent decades, weather stations including the one at the South Pole have recorded a cooling trend. That ran counter to the forecasts of computer climate models, and global warming skeptics have pointed to Antarctica in questioning the reliability of the models.

In the new study, scientists took into account satellite measurements to interpolate temperatures in the vast areas between the sparse weather stations.

“We now see warming is taking place on all seven of the earth’s continents in accord with what models predict as a response to greenhouse gases,” said Eric J. Steig, a professor of space sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle and the lead author of a paper appearing Thursday in the journal Nature.

“We’re highly confident our calculation is very good,” Dr. Steig said.

Because of the climate record is still short, more work needs to be done to determine how much of the warming results from natural climate swings and how much from the warming effects of carbon dioxide released by the burning of fossil fuels, Dr. Steig said.

He and another author, Drew T. Shindell of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, presented the findings at a news conference on Wednesday.

From 1957 through 2006, temperatures across Antarctica rose an average of 0.18 degrees Fahrenheit per decade, comparable to the warming that has been measured globally.

[red states rule]

There seems to be different stories on the same subject

Antarctic Deep Sea Gets Colder
ScienceDaily (Apr. 23, 2008) — The Antarctic deep sea is getting colder, which might stimulate the circulation of the oceanic water masses. This is the first result of the Polarstern expedition of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association that has just ended in Punta Arenas/Chile. At the same time satellite images from the Antarctic summer have shown the largest sea-ice extent on record. In the coming years autonomous measuring buoys will be used to find out whether the cold Antarctic summer induces a new trend or was only a "slip“.

Under the direction of Dr. Eberhard Fahrbach, Oceanographer at the Alfred Wegener Institute, 58 scientists from ten countries were on board the research vessel Polarstern in the Southern Ocean from 6 February until 16 April, 2008. They studied ocean currents as well as the distribution of temperature, salt content and trace substances in Antarctic sea water. "We want to investigate the role of the Southern Ocean for past, present and future climate,“ chief scientist Fahrbach said. The sinking water masses in the Southern Ocean are part of the overturning in this region and thus play a major role in global climate. "While the last Arctic summer was the warmest on record, we had a cold summer with a sea-ice maximum in the Antarctic. The expedition shall form the basis for understanding the opposing developments in the Arctic and in the Antarctic,“ Fahrbach said.

In the frame of the GEOTRACES project the scientists found the smallest iron concentrations ever measured in the ocean. As iron is an essential trace element for algal growth, and algae assimilate CO2 from the air, the concentration of iron is an important parameter against the background of the discussion to what extent the oceans may act as a carbon sink.

As the oceanic changes only become visible after several years and also differ spatially, the data achieved during the Polarstern expeditions are not sufficient to discern long-term developments. The data gap can only be closed with the aid of autonomous observing systems, moored at the seafloor or drifting freely, that provide oceanic data for several years. "As a contribution to the Southern Ocean Observation System we deployed, in international cooperation, 18 moored observing stations, and we recovered 20. With a total of 65 floating systems that can also collect data under the sea ice and are active for up to five years we constructed a unique and extensive measuring network,“ Fahrbach said.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0421111622.htm