Antarctic Sea Ice Increasing

My friends who get their facts from not watching the movies I do, tell me about the huge break in the ice shelf in Antarctica as being a dangerous result of global warming. You know, the ocean will flood NYC, etc.

I had been reading otherwise for some time, but it was hard to argue in the face of a movie and a New York Times headline. I did have direct input from a scientist in Antarctica, who I was helping publish a blog, that they had just gone through the coldest winter in recorded history, but that is not much of proof of anything where non-stellar stars know otherwise.

Below is the introduction of a NASA report regarding the overall increases in the sea ice. This is just from a peer-reviewed analysis of data from satellites, so feel free to ignore it. After all, some unnamed UN experts might disagree, though not for several months as they refine their data to fit the already published conclusions. You can click on the title to go to the NASA article.

There was the big break off of the ice shelf, what - a year ago, but what that means and what caused it have not been voted on, yet. I do recall reading about increased undersea volcanic eruptions, but never in the context of warming the ocean under the ice shelf.

The author, Claire Parkinson, Senior Research Scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, mentions that what is happening in Antarctica is "not what would be expected from a straightforward global warming scenario, but a much more complicated set of events."

I am not sure we want any set of facts to be complicated, these days.

SATELLITES SHOW OVERALL INCREASES IN ANTARCTIC SEA ICE COVER Image 1 While recent studies have shown that on the whole Arctic sea ice has decreased since the late 1970s, satellite records of sea ice around Antarctica reveal an overall increase in the southern hemisphere ice over the same period. Continued decreases or increases could have substantial impacts on polar climates, because sea ice spreads over a vast area, reflects solar radiation away from the Earth’s surface, and insulates the oceans from the atmosphere. In a study just published in the Annals of Glaciology, Claire Parkinson of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center analyzed the length of the sea ice season throughout the Southern Ocean to obtain trends in sea ice coverage. Parkinson examined 21 years (1979-1999) of Antarctic sea ice satellite records and discovered that, on average, the area where southern sea ice seasons have lengthened by at least one day per year is roughly twice as large as the area where sea ice seasons have shortened by at least one day per year. One day per year equals three weeks over the 21-year period. Image 2 “You can see with this dataset that 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,” Parkinson said. The length of the sea ice season in any particular region or area refers to the number of days per year when at least 15 percent of that area is covered by sea ice. Some areas close to the Antarctic continent have sea ice all year long, but a much larger region of the Southern Ocean has sea ice for a smaller portion of the year, and in those regions the length of the sea ice season can vary significantly from one year to another....