Antarctic Ice Sheet Growing?

kraut_juice writes: "The West Antarctic Ice Sheet just may have stopped melting, scientists reported on Thursday. Experts have been saying there is little evidence that global warming is responsible for melting the ice sheet."

increased snowfall was predicted in some areas

[coyote-san]

Global warming is incredibly complex - it does not mean that everything is the same except that the temperature is a few degrees warmer everywhere.

Specifically, there were some predictions that GLOBAL warming would cause LOCAL cooling and increased snowfall. The reason is simple - increased temperatures means increased evaporation and increased clouds. Some early naive rebuttals thought that the cloud cover would increase globally, reducing the amount of sunlight and throttling global warming, but more sophisticated models (and experience) shows that there will be stronger "high pressure bubbles" that keep the skies clear of all clouds for prolonged periods. Read: expect more droughts, and more severe droughts.

In the high latitudes, there's been relatively little cloud cover or snowfall because cold air can't hold much moisture. I live in Colorado and can definitely see that here - we get heavy snow in the fall and spring, but in deep winter a heavy snowfall will be 2-3 inches instead of 9-12 inches. Global warming means that upper atmosphere warms up enough to sustain more clouds and more moisture, so you'll see local temperature drop and increased snowfall.

I saw a map of predicted changes over North America a while back. There were small pockets over SE Alaska and coastal British Columbia (IIRC) that showed modest temperature drops, but most of the rest of the continent showed larger temperature increases. In the dustbowl states the temperature was much higher.

Bottom line - the real question here is if this was predicted by the current global warming models.

Listen to explanation...

[BMazurek]

The CBC [www.cbc.ca]'s radio science program Quirks and Quarks [radio.cbc.ca] interviewed one of the researchers on this topic. You can listen to the MP3 here [radio.cbc.ca]. Other stories this week had to do with the Spider Goats, among others.

Summary: The majority of the Anarctic continent is isolated from the rest of the world when it comes to weather patterns. Most research stations aren't in the isolated part, they are in the most northerly portions of the continent. They are warming. The isolated part of Antarctica is cooling. It's basically a re-analysis of existing data that has resulted in this conclusion.