Antarctic Warming: Another Mann-made Climate Change, Says SPPI

The growth in the area of the Southern Ocean covered by sea ice over the past 30 years disproves a new theory based on computer modelling of invented temperatures that suggests the Antarctic has been warming over the past 50 years, says a new paper published today by the Science and Public Policy Institute – a Washington, D.C. research organization.

A recent paper in Nature has suggested that the Antarctic had not been cooling for half a century, though temperature measurements taken by research stations on the ice-bound continent had long shown cooling.

Christopher Monckton, the paper’s author, said: “The Arctic has been warming, and there has been some loss of sea ice there, particularly in recent summers. This demonstrates the unsurprising real-world conclusion that warming melts ice. If there had been warming in Antarctica too, the area of the Southern Ocean covered by sea ice would have shrunk over the 30 years since the satellites have been watching. Instead, the extent of Antarctic sea ice has grown – and it has grown fast enough to match the decline in the extent of Arctic sea ice. That means the Arctic has been warming and the Antarctic has been cooling.”

One of the authors of the paper suggesting “warming” of the Antarctic was Michael E. Mann of Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Mann had been the lead author of a paper also published in Nature in 1998-9, in which similar purely statistical techniques had been used to alter the temperature record. On that occasion, Dr. Mann purported to abolish the medieval warm period, when temperatures worldwide were warmer than the present. Now, he and his colleagues are attempting to abolish the cooling of Antarctica, which, like the medieval warming, suggests that the official “global warming” theory has some large gaps in it.

“Finally,” said Monckton, “there has been a global cooling trend throughout the eight years of George Bush’s presidency, though most media have somehow not reported the cooling. It would be remarkable if Antarctica, where the thermometers show temperatures plunging, had somehow bucked the global trend towards cooler weather.”

Added an actual Antarctic researcher, “I feel your study is absolutely wrong.  With statistics you can make numbers go to almost any conclusion you want. It saddens me to see members of the scientific community do this for media coverage.”

The paper can be accessed here:  http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/monckton_man_made.html

Contact:  Robert Ferguson, Science and Public Policy Institute

202-288-5699