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Antarctic Ice Sheet Growing?

Posted by michael on from the weird-science dept.

kraut_juice writes: "The West Antarctic Ice Sheet just may have stopped melting, scientists reported on Thursday. Experts have been saying there is little evidence that global warming is responsible for melting the ice sheet."

5 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. Echo's.. by AnalogBoy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Every year i hear "Global Warming is Occuring" and "The icecaps are melting", but then i also hear "The icecaps are expanding! another ice age is coming!"

    -make up your scientific minds already-. You're worse than the local weatherperson.

    Now.. do i need this fleece sweater or not?!

    1. Re:Echo's.. by Transcendent · · Score: 4, Informative

      The earth's magnetic field has nothing to do with the weather going on about the surface of the earth. When the earth's magnetic field changes (which it does... and we think it has a couple of times), all that is happening is a shift in the flow of the super-hot, liquid metal core (since it is iron, and iron is one of the naturally occuring ferromagnets, along with nickle and some other elements). So when the magnetic field changes, it's just showing that the direction of the flow within the earth has shifted... it can even shift direction entirely. Just think... north becomes south, and south becomes north.

      Although you may think that the flow in the hot core may change things above the surface... the heat that disipates up to the surface is very very small (except for volcanos and such). The only flow that effects the climate on earth is (besides the jet stream) the ocean currents.

  2. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. by schwap · · Score: 4, Insightful
    A lot of the debate about global warming reminds me about all the Y2K talk a few years ago. Its one of those things that unless it happens no one is going to believe that its real, but if it is real and something wasnt dont about it and disaster resulted, then enough wasnt being done, but then again if something was done to prevent the disaster, then all that money and time was spent for nothing because there was nothing to worry about in the first place.

    Also, the only thing that anyone involved in the science of the whole thing is that global warming will have an effect on the climate. Its anybody's guess, really. I could mean that in the sort term temperatures rise a little allowing snow to fall in places in which it used to be too cold to snow in large quantities resulting in more sun light being reflected back. Who knows? The problem as I see it is not climate change itself. The climate will change with or without our pollution. The problem it seems is our unwillingness to deal with the fact that we will face problems. Again, contingency is seen as a waste, and disaster is seen as the failure of those who were supposed to have the contingency that was so wasteful. Shit happens. Seas rise, lakes dry up, rocks fall from the sky and stars explode.

  3. increased snowfall was predicted in some areas by coyote-san · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Global warming is incredibly complex - it does not mean that everything is the same except that the temperature is a few degrees warmer everywhere.

    Specifically, there were some predictions that GLOBAL warming would cause LOCAL cooling and increased snowfall. The reason is simple - increased temperatures means increased evaporation and increased clouds. Some early naive rebuttals thought that the cloud cover would increase globally, reducing the amount of sunlight and throttling global warming, but more sophisticated models (and experience) shows that there will be stronger "high pressure bubbles" that keep the skies clear of all clouds for prolonged periods. Read: expect more droughts, and more severe droughts.

    In the high latitudes, there's been relatively little cloud cover or snowfall because cold air can't hold much moisture. I live in Colorado and can definitely see that here - we get heavy snow in the fall and spring, but in deep winter a heavy snowfall will be 2-3 inches instead of 9-12 inches. Global warming means that upper atmosphere warms up enough to sustain more clouds and more moisture, so you'll see local temperature drop and increased snowfall.

    I saw a map of predicted changes over North America a while back. There were small pockets over SE Alaska and coastal British Columbia (IIRC) that showed modest temperature drops, but most of the rest of the continent showed larger temperature increases. In the dustbowl states the temperature was much higher.

    Bottom line - the real question here is if this was predicted by the current global warming models.

    --
    For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
  4. Listen to explanation... by BMazurek · · Score: 3, Interesting
    The CBC's radio science program Quirks and Quarks interviewed one of the researchers on this topic. You can listen to the MP3 here. Other stories this week had to do with the Spider Goats, among others.

    Summary: The majority of the Anarctic continent is isolated from the rest of the world when it comes to weather patterns. Most research stations aren't in the isolated part, they are in the most northerly portions of the continent. They are warming. The isolated part of Antarctica is cooling. It's basically a re-analysis of existing data that has resulted in this conclusion.