West Antarctica Warming Faster Than Thought

New submitter dgrobinson writes "NY Times reports that West Antarctica has warmed more over the last half century than was first thought. A paper released Sunday by the journal Nature Geoscience (abstract) found that the temperature at a research station in the middle of West Antarctica has warmed by 4.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1958. That is roughly twice as much as scientists previously thought and three times the overall rate of global warming, making central West Antarctica one of the fastest-warming regions on earth."

Re:Fahrenheit below freezing?!

[bunratty]

Kelvins below freezing would not make any sense. Kelvins are absolute units. 0 K is absolute zero. 1 K is one degree Celsius above absolute zero. On the other hand, degrees Fahrenheit below freezing makes perfect sense. One degree Fahrenheit below freezing is 31 degrees Fahrenheit.

Re:West?

[Anonymous Coward]

That still doesn't correct any ambiguity. The "western half" of Antarctica is the part to your left if you are standing at the pole facing along the prime meridian towards Greenwich.

West Antarctica...

[Ferretman]

...is an interesting place. It "stick out" more than the rest of the continent and hence is surrounded by more water, and it's home to at least 6 surface volcanoes (http://icecap.us/images/uploads/AntarcticVolcanoes2.jpg).

A few years back scientists discovered at least a bunch of sub-oceanic volcanoes with at least one merrily bubbling away. They remarked on how warm the waters were and how this had caused unique "oases" of lifeforms all along the extent. (http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/press/press_releases/press_release.php?id=1541}

These and the unusual "surrounded by water" nature of this area are more likely contributors to localized melting.

Ferret

And in a other news

[jacekm]

Jupiter pole has warmed by 10 degrees.

JAM

Re:And in a other news

[bunratty]

Unlike Earth, whose temperature varies as one moves closer to or farther from the equator, Jupiter's temperature depends more on height above the surface. This is because heat is driven not by the sun but by the interior of the planet. [space.com] Nice try, though!

Re:Meh.

[bunratty]

It will be hard calling you six years ago [spiegel.de].

Nevermind, figured it out...

[wakeboarder]

This is a better link, and has more info: http://phys.org/news/2012-12-rapid-west-antarctic-ice-sheet.html [phys.org]

Re:How about the rest of Antartica?

[Nocturnal Deviant]

http://data.un.org/Explorer.aspx?d=CLINO [un.org]
About 5 minutes on google, didn't really check for much else being that i don't really care, but that should give you a starter point at the minimum.

...alternatively

[Roger W Moore]

But if you flip a coin 1000 times and it comes up heads 659 times, you can say with a high degree of confidence that the coin is not fair.

Not quite - it might also be because the person tossing it is not flipping it fairly...which interestingly is also like climate change. We can have a very high degree of certainty that the Earth is warming but the degree to which this is due to human influence vs. natural influences is not yet very clear (at least that's what my colleagues in geophysics tell me).

Re:and some areas in Russia...

[bunratty]

We would expect to see some record lows even during warming [skepticalscience.com]. The important point is that there are many more record highs being hit in recent years than record lows, which is exactly what you'd expect if the climate is warming. You can't tell whether the Earth as a whole is warming or cooling based on cherry-picking data.

Re:...alternatively

[Roger W Moore]

What specific "natural influence" is causing the Earth to warm, and where is the evidence that supports this idea?

There are many natural influences: precession of the earth's axis, precession of the earth's orbit, ocean currents which change due to continental drift, massive volcanic eruptions, meteor impact etc. There is an established record of global temperature variations thousands, if not millions, of years before humans burnt fossil fuels from e.g. O16/O18 isotope ratios. The causes of some are believed to be known and understood but others are not but it is very clear that the climate has fluctuated by itself before humans were on the scene. That is not to say that we should not be very careful about our impact on the environment because we don't know exactly what the effect is but I have yet to see compelling evidence that humans are primarily responsible for the current change but that certainly remains a distinct possibility.

Re:Last post

[todrules]

That's incorrect. If you read the article on nature.com, it states that the rise in temperature was 2.4 +- 1.2 C, not F. The 2.4 was also twice what was expected.

Study shows anything can happen

[TapeCutter]

There's a good write up on realclimate [realclimate.org] for anyone interested in what "the scientists" have to say. The write up is by the lead scientist who did the earlier 2009 study. Despite the pile of posts below decrying the "one station" thing, the new study used several lines of evidence. Also both papers were published in Nature, which is not really well known for publishing sloppy statistical papers.

The 2009 study questioned the assumption that WA was neither warming or cooling. This new study extends and refines the first, it has a steeper trend and better confidence levels.
This is good old fashioned, plodding, science that evolved something like this....
Stage 1 - "That's odd" - why is everywhere warming except WA?
Stage 2 - We looked more closely at the numbers for WA, it is warming so the assumption is incorrect.
Stage 3 - We looked again in a different way with cleaner data, we now have a better estimate of how fast it's warming that is at the upper bound of the previous error bars (error bars that IIRC were mercilessly ridiculed by anti-science types as "study shows anything can happen").

Speaking of climate trends, I've personally noticed (as opposed to measured ;) a change in the slashdot climate over the last few years, there is much less outright AGW denial on slashdot, my hypothesis is that "teaching the controversy" works against the "teacher" on a site full of amateur and professional nerds. The post with a barrage of well rehearsed talking points is slowly byt surely being replaced with a sort of insolent shrug, almost like as surly teenager's "whatever" when they just lost an argument to a parent, lets hope that in the new year they get over their embarrassment at being duped by amoral lobbyists, drop the defensive behavior, and get angry at the people who deliberately mislead them.

Re:WEST Antarctica?

[FatLittleMonkey]

It's a reference to the Western/Eastern Hemisphere, not magnetic or rotational west.

"West Antarctica" is the bit that's south of South America. "East Antarctica" is the bit that south of southern Asia. The dividing line is the Prime Meridian (ie, from Greenwich around the International Date Line, through both poles.)

Re: 2.4 +- 1.2C ?!

[fygment]

The error margin is 50%? So the 2.4 was twice what was expected BUT with the margin of error, it actually could be what was expected?
What is satisfying is seeing someone actually included the error margin. The climate models never seem to. The best you can say is that they reflect their assumptions very precisely, you just never know how bad the assumptions are.