Cold facts about global warming

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 23, 2002 | by J. Michael Waller, | Wade-Hahn Chan, | Daniel George

Science starts to have trouble with ideology when facts start getting in the way. Contrary to the theory of global warming, NASA satellite observations have determined that during the last 20 years the ice in the Antarctic has not melted but, in fact, has increased. The study was published in the peer-reviewed journal Annals of Glaciology.

The study was done by Claire Parkinson, a NASA climatologist who has analyzed the role of sea ice in the global-climate system since 1979. She measured the duration of Antarctic ice seasons--the time during which ice covers at least 15 percent of the area--and found nearly twice as much land that had seasons increasing by one day per year between 1979 and 1999 than areas where the opposite occurred.

Several other studies support the recent NASA observations. In 2000, the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate published two separate works that found increases in Antarctic ice between 1987 and 1996, as well as an expansion of the edge of Antarctic sea ice toward the equator by 0.011 degrees. A 2001 study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters found little change as measured by six submarine cruises during the 1990s.

The current data suggest that alleged global warming is inconsistent with trends of the Antarctic ice. "What is happening in the Antarctic is not what would be expected from a straightforward global-warming scenario, but a much more complicated set of events," says Parkinson.