You mean Antarctica is warming? B-b-b-but I thought it was supposed to be cooling!?! At least that's what the Denial Machine tells us.

Oh well, at least we can hear about how cold it is on the top of some mountain in Greenland. Surely, that proves AGW doesn't exist.

Information used to make that map was between 1981-2007! The world has been warming gradually in this period, no wonder the antartic is above average! :0 If you think about it, the temperature can either goes up or down. It can't stay "normal", it can't go sideways, and it can't go on angles! If I take the time period between 1940-1960 guess what, IT WOULD show a cooling phase!

I still believe the reasons for global warming have to do with Norway's moose population. (inside joke)

The pink represents 5 hundredths of a degree per year and the measurements are accurate within 2 or 3 degrees. Consider that against the recent reports of record maximum sea ice.

Mark - I'm not sure the gist of your comment is correct. A level of uncertainty of 2-3 deg C on a measurement of about 0.5 deg C means that the entire continent could be warming dramatically, or cooling. Moreover, as Brett is very careful to point out, this is a skin temp, the implication being that it doesn't give the overall picture. Again, the continent could be warming dramatically, or cooling. At any rate, it isn't behaving like the Arctic.

Brett - What do the surface stations and weather balloons say? I know the surface stations are locationally biased, but it would be good to know. Or, if you wait long enough, I'm sure our Antarctic sub-group will weigh in ((-:

Mark,

I think that Patrick Henry usually provides us with info from the Summit camp, which isn't really on a mountain, just at the highest point of the Greenland ice cap. Of course, I'm just nitpicking.

Mark,
If you read closely this is a graphic of the 1981-2007 temperature anaomaly. The SH has been cooling since 1998 -just this past summer the Vostock weather station came close to setting an all time global record for the lowest temperature ever recorded (it got down to -81 deg C).

Believe it or not, if it was possible to create a satellite temp anomaly since 1680 of the globe, the majority of the globe would be red, as global temps have been rising since the coldest decades of the LIA.

Uncertainties that high and trying to measure something at .05 of a degree?!?!? And someone is allowed to publish that??

This graphic is nothing more than a cool picture.

And people wonder why data in the AGW camp is questioned.....

sheesh....

Brett: Sea ice Index

This data from NSIDC suggests consistent but slight cooling during nearly that whole period you mention. How can this be (maybe heating causes greater precipitation? (Reply: Yes, that is generally true). What about circulation and salt content around?

http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/s_plot.html
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/s_extn.html
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/s_anom.html

I like how the reds and blues are mixed in some locations. I wonder if ocean currents correlate to the difference in temps or if these temps are actually penguin colonies. ;)

Looks like a checkborad of temps to me and we know wha tthat menas,another map that has been messe around with or else as you said picking up something tha tdoes not really exsist like hot springs,volcanoes or who knows ice in the sunlight.

Off topic but ICECAP has pulled together a piece on biases unaccounted for in temp measurement, which includes references that discuss the biases in more detail(http://icecap.us/images/uploads/DATA_ISSUES.pdf). Their conclusion reads:

If indeed there is even a small warm bias introduced by siting, land-use change,
inhomogeneity and other issues discussed herein, the climate today may be no warmer
than 70 years ago. These issues also add to the difficulty of comparing temperatures
today to those over the past 1300 years, as the IPCC claims to be able to do.

Interesting tidbits include UHI, the latest on improper siting (Watts), a commitment by NOAA to build properly sited US stations, and the lack of AGW for certain perspectives (".....virtually no warming for maximum temperatures and warming for minimum temperatures only near urban center airports").

There's also a cool graphic showing the dropout of stations worldwide(http://climate.geog.udel.edu/~climate/html_pages/Ghcn2_images/air_loc.mpg. It is visually dramatic to see most of Canada go "white" about 1990, and the US go from "black" with high station density to almost white about 1999.

Considering that this past year broke the record for sea ice coverage(since 1979), and the last five years have seen a trend upward,(am I right on that Brett? Reply: I believe you are) it seems kind of odd that we would be seeing, what appears to me, as so much warming. Appears a bit contradictory.

BT, if you're out there.
Remember that tenth century mentality of Iran I talked about. It just popped up in Sudan. Good luck with diplomacy.

Brett, I know you think the temp data is so fuzzy as to not mean much, but what do the scientists involved say?

Also, pictures are fun, but I think a more informative post would be on this presentation. In addition to the written summary, note the link to a C-SPAN video of the complete seminar. I haven't had a chance to watch the video yet, but I understand that it includes much else of interest. Reply: Steve, I will check it out and may do a foolow up to that. But keep in mind, most of the readers of this blog do not have time or have the sustained interest to watch a c-span video of a seminar on their computer.

Hi cmbclean,

The Greenland Summit Camp is on a plain considerably flatter than Kansas. As always, I suggest a fly over on Google earth to understand the geography. I would direct you to the Summit webcam, expect that it is dark up there now above the Arctic Circle. The ice sheet is nearly flat in the middle, and tapers of towards sea level near the edges. It is representative of the ice sheet, and the only weather station in the interior of the ice sheet. The surface area of the ice sheet is also vastly larger than the land area which the few Greenland communities are built on.

Most of Greenland is very much like the Summit Camp i.e under 10,000 feet of ice. On the other hand, Barbara Boxer chose to view Greenland from a very atypical location and time of year. So who is cherry picking - me or her?

Mark,

Antarctic Sea Ice has been generally increasing for the last 30 years, and set an all-time record this year. That is a good indication that the area around the periphery of Antarctica is getting colder - and fairly solid evidence that the even the minuscule (0.05 degree) warming claimed in this study is incorrect.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5337583.html

Decisions to name storms draw concern
As season ends, some say center rushes to classify, which costs you

Some meteorologists say six systems during the 2007 hurricane season � Chantal, Erin, Gabrielle, Ingrid, Jerry and Melissa � might not have deserved tropical storm status because of relatively high central pressure.

With another hurricane season set to end this Friday, a controversy is brewing over decisions of the National Hurricane Center to designate several borderline systems as tropical storms.

Some meteorologists, including former hurricane center director Neil Frank, say as many as six of this year's 14 named tropical systems might have failed in earlier decades to earn "named storm" status.

"They seem to be naming storms a lot more than they used to," said Frank, who directed the hurricane center from 1974 to 1987 and is now chief meteorologist for KHOU-TV. "This year, I would put at least four storms in a very questionable category, and maybe even six."

Yeah, yeah, that Antarctic sea ice is goin' nuts. Just look at that upward trend, especially compared to the Arctic. Wow! There was that *huge* jump in 1980, followed by, followed by... Well anyway, that *huge* jump in 1980 *proves* we'd better follow Joe D'Aleo's advice and call global warming off. So there.

Actually, Brett, if iceman and PH are any sort of indication, readers of this site do have some serious comprehension problems. Watching C-SPAN would probably be too much of a strain for them.

This map is a good lesson in Geology. Note the active volcanoes along the Antarctic Peninsula, which can be clearly seen as dark red areas. Particularly under the Larsen Ice Shelf.

The Antarctic Peninsula is a continuation of the ring of fire which runs down along the western edge of South America.

Rather than seeing the obvious explanation, I'm sure some here will choose to see an invisible gas.

That ice is red! It must be extremely hot in Antarctica.

More bad news for the evil United States Middle East policy.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-11-04-afghanistanhealth_N.htm

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) � Close to 90,000 children who would have died before age 5 in Afghanistan during Taliban rule will stay alive this year because of advances in medical care in the country, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said

I am not sure what this new map of antarctica means. From the look of it a non-specialist like me gets the impression.."OH MY GOD the Ice Cap is on fire! Does anyone recall the dramatic ice shelf break up a few seasons ago? Was it the Ross Ice Shelf? I remember all this media brue ha ha that GW was the reason for so massive an ice break up. I feel that the idiot scientists who were doing "soundings" of the seafloor useing dynamite blasting charges in series of holes drilled into the sea ice shelf in strieght lines for miles and miles (probably a grid for graphing the sonar readings) had SOMETHING to do with the massive breakup. I saw no artical connecting these activities. Oh well, maybe I am off the mark. I found a great site refuting AGW argument:

http://www.wcflunatall.com/globalwarminglie.htm

Hi Steve Bloom,

Here is a polar crisis for you. Worldwide sea ice is within a few percent of normal and in danger of going above normal during the next few weeks.

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg

Oh No!!! Nothing to panic about!

WOW ... with uncertainties of several degrees C we are able to map .05 degree differences.
I map for a living & this is so wrong it is unbelievable.
I wonder if Hansen was consulting on this one to help with " adjusting the data ".
It is amazing that the entire world has not migrated to the GLO-BULL warming sceptic camp ... but then one only has to look at the number of people out there that couldn't pass high school physics and it becomes obvious how crap like this can be feed to an unsuspecting public.
The propaganda machine is in full BS mode since the cool southern hemisphere temperatures are taking all the hot air out of the GLO-BULL warming arguement ... it ain't really global if only the northern hemisphere exibits warming & it raises those station questions again.
- 25 C windchill up in Calgary this AM so my morning walk was a brisk one!!

Be good folks,
Rick.

Yep that map looks like a child made it and true those bright reds match up with volcanoes like Mount Erebus

Patrick,

There was also the tragic sinking of that cruise liner last month. It was somewhere off the coast of Antartica when it ran into an iceberg. Luckily no one died, and yahoo actually had a photo of the cruise liner as it listed to portside. In the background were dozens of ice flows.

I think the cruise ship was doing one of those conscious raising-eco trips. The intent was to raise awareness of our shrinking icecaps. How ironic. Kind of like those Scandanavian hikers, who hiked across the Artic Ocean last Feb in order to raise awareness of the shrinking ice caps. They almost died of hypothermia.

Marie,

I have more good news for you. They're up to 9 hours of electricity per day in Baghdad now! As Bush always says, "We're making progress!"

Perhaps we should build nuclear power plants over there to help with their electricity problem. Although the irony would be that building one nuclear power plant over there would mean Iraq would have far more WMDs than they had prior to the war.

Go figure.

My theory of global warming is one I haven't seen any articles or comments about. It is that the warmth and ice sheet melting is coming from underground. As we aproach the planetary alignment of 2012 the magnetic and electrostatic affects from the sun and interaction between the planets is increasing the nuclear ractions at the core of the Earth. This will not only increase the heat emitted subteraniously from the thermo part of the thermonuclear reations but also increase the magnetic and electrostatic forces that will increase both volcanic and earthquake activity. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide increase the retention of this heat whch would otherwise be radiated into space.

PH,

Still, the figure you linked to shows a noticiable downward trend in sea ice. More and more times is spent in negative anomaly and less in positive.

Marie - Just to back up the point of your 1st post (11/29 10:41), Louisiana's chief climatologist is claiming in the capitol city paper that this hurricane season was "above average" because there were 14 named storms, as compared to an historical average of 10 named storms per year.

http://www.2theadvocate.com/news/11959471.html

Patrick - If I understand you correctly (11/29 19:22 post), you are implying that Barbara Boxer and other Dems were picking cherries in Greenland ??? While many readers of this blog are willing to believe sight unseen that the Dems would try something ludricrous like this, we independents will require some visual proof. On the other hand, if there are cherries in Greenland to be picked, the Dems are on to something, and that pretty much blows your anti-AGW theories out of the ice water.