Speaking Our Peace The Lilliputians
& the Giant
By Paul Olson, NFP President Global Warming Copenhagen: Games People Play
By Professor Bruce E. Johansen Volunteer Nebraska Peace Stratcom
The Most Dangerous Place on the Face of the Earth Whiteclay
Updates on Nebraska's tiny reservation border town. Goin' Broke Essay Winners
 Goin' Broke The Cost of War
 NFP Sticker Get Your FREE
NFP Bumper Sticker!
Just send us an Email.

Warmer Times on the Coldest Continent

Professor Bruce E. Johansen

With an average temperature of minus 58 degrees F., who but a climate contrarian would wish a colder climate on Antarctica? In an apparent contradiction of temperature trends across most of the world, some areas of interior Antarctica have cooled steadily for more than two decades while areas on the fringes of the continent have warmed rapidly.

Data assembled by Peter Doran, an associate professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, found that temperatures in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of East Antarctica have declined. Similar trends have been observed across other parts of the continent's interior since 1978. Doran and other members of the National Science Foundation's "Long-term Ecological Research Team" assembled temperature data in the Dry Valleys near McMurdo Soundóa snow-free mountainous desert of chill arid soils, bleak bedrock outcroppings and ice-covered lakes which is home to many microscopic invertebrates, mostly nematodes.

The apparent cooling of inland Antarctica has been used by climate contrarians to refute global warming as an idea, much to the consternation of scientists involved in the research. Doran stressed that although scientists could not explain the falling temperatures, his research does not change the fact that the Earth has warmed on the whole. The findings simply point out that Antarctica is not responding as expected. Doran also warned that "You don't want to overstate the effects" of the cooling trend, because any rise in sea level caused by global warming this century is expected to result mostly from thermal expansion of existing oceans — and not from any theoretical melting of the southern ice cap.

Antarctic Inland Cooling in Global Context

Doran emphasized: "Our paper does not change the global [temperature] average in any significant way" Although we have said that more area of the continent is cooling than warming, one just has to look at the paper itself... to see that it is a close call. Our analysis suggests that about two-thirds of the main continent has been cooling in the last 35 years," Doran said. "But there is one-third of the continent that has been warming if you remove the [Antarctic] Peninsula. And with the Peninsula included, it shrinks to 58 percent cooling." Doran bluntly advised the public: "If you want the facts, you have to go to the original scientific peer-reviewed literature, and avoid the broken-telephone effect of the popular press."

Doran said his data did find that 58 percent of Antarctica cooled from 1966 to 2000. During that period, however, the rest of the continent was warming. Climate models created after Doran's study was released "have suggested a link between the lack of significant warming in Antarctica and the ozone hole over that continent. These models, conspicuously missing from the 'warming-skeptic' literature, suggest that as the ozone hole heals — thanks to worldwide bans on ozone-destroying chemicals — all of Antarctica is likely to warm with the rest of the planet. An inconvenient truth?" Doran said.

General Warming in Antarctica

By 2009, however, a detailed analysis of Antarctic temperature records for half a century indicated that cooling there has been limited. This study maintains that assertions of inland warming have been "substantially incomplete owing to the sparseness and short duration of the observations." Instead, Eric J. Steig and colleagues, writing in Nature, found that "Significant warming extends well beyond the Antarctic Peninsula to cover most of West Antarctica, an area of warming much larger than previously reported. West Antarctic warming exceeds 0.1°C per decade over the past 50 years, and is strongest in winter and spring."

The scientists included satellite measurements to estimate temperatures in the vast areas between Antarctic 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 Steig, a professor of earth and space sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. What cooling has been recorded in parts of Antarctica cannot be traced directly to increases in the strength of the westerlies in the upper atmosphere, this study said. "Instead, regional changes in atmospheric circulation and associated changes in sea surface temperature and sea ice are required to explain the enhanced warming in West Antarctica."

Even as some of the skeptics crow about a colder Antarctic, ice shelves along the continent's edge are collapsing. After February 2008, when a large section of the Wilkins Ice Shelf on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula fell apart, what was left was being held in place by a thin ice bridge connecting Charcot Island on the north to Latady Island on the south. Initially, the ice bridge was about 6 kilometers wide, but within five months, during Antarctic fall and winter, the bridge's width ebbed by half. As the summer of 2008-2009 arrived, in November, 2008, the European Space Agency's Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar detected new cracks on the ice shelf's seaward edge.

SOURCES

Chang, Kenneth. "Study Finds New Evidence of Warming in Antarctica." New York Times, January 22, 2009.

Davidson, Keay. "Media Goofed on Antarctic Data; Global Warming Interpretation Irks Scientists." San Francisco Chronicle, February 4, 2002, A-8.

Doran, Peter T., John C. Priscu, W. Berry Lyons, John E. Walsh, Andrew G. Fountain, Diane M. McKnight, Daryl L. Moorhead, Ross A. Virginia, Diana H. Wall, Gary D. Clow, Christian H. Fritsen, Christopher P. McKay, and Andrew N. Parsons. "Antarctic Climate Cooling and Terrestrial Ecosystem Response." Nature 415(January 30, 2002):517-520.

Doran, Peter. "Cold, Hard Facts." New York Times, July 27, 2006.

"New Cracks in the Wilkins Ice Shelf." NASA Earth Observatory, December 9, 2008.

Steig, Eric J., David P. Schneider, Scott D. Rutherford, Michael E. Mann, Josefino C. Comiso & Drew T. Shindell. "Warming of the Antarctic Ice-sheet Surface since the 1957 International Geophysical Year." Nature 457(January 22, 2008):459-462.

Frederick W. Kayser Professor of Communication at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Johansen is the author of the three-volume “Global Warming in the Twenty-First Century” (Praeger, 2006).