From the “I told you Angry Penguins were the new icon” department
The world’s polar regions are warming up faster than the global average, but the western edge of the Antarctic Peninsula is especially steamy. Over the past 50 years, winter temperatures have shot up by an almost unbelievable 6°C—more than five times the global average, according to a paper just published in Science.
The new study, part of a special report on oceans and climate, focuses on the Antarctic Peninsula not only because it represents an extreme, but because it gives scientists a chance to look at a marine ecosystem under rapid climate change (the other polar hotspots, in Siberia and western North America, are well inland).
Rapidly rising temperatures—mostly driven by warmer ocean currents–have transformed the West Antarctic Peninsula’s landscape. The massive ice shelves that sit just offshore at the peninsula’s southern end have begun collapsing en masse . Overall, say the authors, 87% of the region’s glaciers are in retreat, the ice season has shortened by 90 days and, they write ominously, “These changes are accelerating.”
That being the case, it’s not surprising that the creatures who live here are under enormous stress. Adélie penguin populations, which need ice and cold weather to survive, have plummeted by 90% in the northern part of the peninsula over the past three decades, says lead author Oscar Schofield, a marine scientist at Rutgers University, while chinstrap penguins, which prefer more temperate climates, have increased. “The penguin populations near Palmer Station [the largest U.S. base in that part of the continent] have flipflopped,” says Schofield. “The area will probably be completely devoid of Adélies in five or ten years.”
*yawn*
*blink blink*
…. (did somebody say something about unprecidented warming, penguins, and ice melting)…. ?
*yawn*
*blink blink*
maybe the penguins swamp to the northpole to party with the polar bears. I mean I hear the aliens, Santa and the Mrs., and Yoda throw a mean party at Christmas.
Sigh, I guess the really frustrating thing is my wallet and my nations soverignty is at risk because of these morons and they pat us on the head and tells us we’re too stupid to understand. However most of us in here at least are far more intelligent than the majority of the politicians I’ve been listening to since I’ve been unemployed for the last year and a half.
Over the past 50 years, winter temperatures have shot up by an almost unbelievable 6°C—more than five times the global average, according to a paper just published in Science.
has any one got the data to support this. All 50 years of it?.
@899: I’m sceptical about claims made about global warming. I’m extremely sceptical about the claims made about the Piri Reis map.
Global warming at least has some evidence to support it and a halfway rational theory to back it up. There isn’t enough evidence to convince me, but there is enough to make it a plausible conjecture which needs looking into.
The Piri Reis map thing on the other hand is just way out there in lala land with the homeopathists, the Atlantis theorists, and the the new age cosmic wonderdust sniffers. I invite you all to have a look at that thing for yourself.
To me clearly the bit which the crystal gazers claim is Antarctica is nothing but a mislocated and distorted piece of South America drawn in completely the wrong place because the proportions or the rest of the map are so wrong there was nowhere else to put it. As a map of the world it is utterly hopeless. It beats me how anyone can think this map accurately shows the coastline of Antarctica when it doesn’t manage to accurately map anything else!
It beats me how you can think theories about the Piri Reis map will get a warm reception here on a website full of confirmed sceptics.
Slightly OT, but is the weather for World Cup in South Africa colder than usual? I know it is winter, but South Africa latitude ranges from about 25° to 35°S. In a game today, a coach had a heavy jacket.
I like penguins. Just like dolphins, they taste like chicken.
Since when has any animal needed inhospitable icy conditions to survive? None of their food sources are frozen. As the seasons change, so too their environments from ice to rock. I bet polar bears are happier on tundra as seals usually come ashore to bask, and penguin chicks are far less likely to freeze on rocks or ground rather than ice.
Charles Fort anyone?
jakers says:
June 18, 2010 at 10:48 am
I see the Antarctic sea ice has gone just outside the 2 stnd deviations. http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_stddev_timeseries.png
Get with the message. That’s because the Adelie penguins have been breaking lumps off the WAIS to use as rafts in their desperate search for somewhere colder.
It beats me how you can think theories about the Piri Reis map will get a warm reception here on a website full of confirmed sceptics.
Agree totally.
One thing the sceptic camp should avoid is looking like nuts on anything. The fringe allows the warmists to paint us all as incapable of reason. That means no Piri Reis looniness, but also less of the “we should try the warmists for treason” nuttiness too.
While I’m at it, this isn’t the place to discuss tax policy. I appreciate that some of you don’t want carbon taxes. I don’t either, but I keep my political beliefs out of it. I just say “they don’t achieve what they set out to achieve, and are therefore bad taxes”.
MSM buttcovers the “AGW experts”.
…-
“Nunavut’s claim polar bears are fine ignores science, environmentalists say
Government will no longer back attempt to have species listed as threatened”
“Part of the Nunavut government’s position is that polar bears can and have adapted to changes in climate in the past, according to Inuit traditional knowledge and modern science. Some experts say that is not the case.”
“Environmentalists are reacting with dismay to a Nunavut government decision to no longer back attempts to list polar bears as threatened.
Dan Shewchuk, Nunavut’s environment minister, says the territory’s polar bear population is healthy, with the exception of a couple of populations, and action is being taken to help those.
“We live in polar bear country. We understand the polar bears, and we do actually think our polar bear population is very, very healthy,” Shewchuk said in justifying the reversal.”
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/technology/Nunavut+claim+polar+bears+fine+ignores+science+environmentalists/3174753/story.html
From the Atlantic post earlier:
” Second, government can use any profits from carbon prices to pay down the deficit and even reduce other taxes on Americans
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/06/why-carbon-pricing-matters/58386/”
What a great example of how irrational and disconnected from reality these people are.
They actually believe that if we paid a carbon tax…other taxes would go DOWN?
Someone please show me when that’s ever happend? At best, my overall taxes will go UP by something like 10%, and one individual tax will go down 1%, and they’ll claim victory.
Amazing.
JimB
Sigh
Do these people ever bother to read the relevant literature? It is pure nonsense that the Adelie Penguins can’t change breeding sites when climate changes, they can and they do, all the time. Steve Emslie has researched this very subject extensively, and shown that the changes in breeding sites can actually be used as a proxy for changes in ice conditions (and incidentally he has found that almost all Adelie colonies are rather recent, less than 2000 years old):
http://people.uncw.edu/emslies/research/Emslie%20et%20al%20Geology%202007.pdf
http://people.uncw.edu/emslies/research/Emslie%20and%20Woehler%202005.pdf
And here is a letter to Science (from 2003!) where he points out the fallacies in the catastrophy prophecies about Adelie pengunis:
http://people.uncw.edu/emslies/research/Ainley%20et%20al%20science%20letter%202003.pdf
Doug in Seattle,
sea ice has been lost extensively on the antarctic peninsula unlike other places in antarctca. Have a bit of intellectual honesty there when making statements.
bubbagyro,
The temperatures on the antarctic peninsula are not -60… MAATs in the regions range from near 0 to – 10… Please fact check yourself before making ridiculous statements.
To everyone, why don’t people fact check skeptics (as above) when they make ridiculous statements that have no scientific merit? Double standard much?
Every service and any goods we purchase has a hidden, but quite large energy cost included. Not only would a carbon tax increase the taxes we directly pay, but would saubstantially increase the prices we pay for anything at all. It would be a double whammy from an economic standpoint. Governments can improve economies only by having less involvement. More involvement by government always results in a worse economy than before the involvement, and the opposite is true.
If you want less of anything, tax and/or regulate it. If you want more, do the opposite.
Socialism/communism has attempeted to negate the natural basic laws of economics, and has always failed miserably at this impossible task.
Steven Mosher says:
June 18, 2010 at 12:41 pm
“Palmer station and a few others in the area. ”
So do I understand correctly that if a few stations in one area are cherry-picked, then and only then is a 6 degree rise evident? If this is true, it would be worth updating the article, perhaps comparing the trend for these few stations vs. for all remaining stations.
IanH
Having been exposed as a child to the nonsenses of Eric Von Daniken and others, I take the map-and other proofs of ancient civilisations predating those already known- with an enormous pinch of salt.
The introduction to the article says the following;
“Research showed that it was a genuine document drawn in 1513 by Piri Reis, a famous admiral of the Turkish fleet in the sixteenth century.
His passion was cartography. His high rank within the Turkish navy allowed him to have a privileged access to the Imperial Library of Constantinople.
The Turkish admiral admits in a series of notes on the map that he compiled and copied the data from a large number of source maps, some of which dated back to
the fourth century BC or earlier.”
It is worth pointing out that the Imperial Library was the source of all knowledge of the Roman Empire which split into two around 380AD. The western Empire collapsed within 100 years but the Eastern Empire from Constantinople continued until 1452. We have many climate references from both empires which stretch back to around 400BC. The Romans are now thought to have sailed at least a day past Iceland where they met ice. They certainly collected maps from societies they conquered and drew many of their own.
I by no means believe they mapped South America or the Antarctic and think it extremely unlikely that anyone else did. Reis would have access to lots of material though and maybe for political puropses (funding to find new lands?) might have done an imaginative composite of the material available to him.
As a sceptic I remain open minded as to what else comes to light in the years ahead but certainly if the raw basics for such a map existed it would have been stored in the Imperial Library.
tonyb
“”” Robert says:
June 19, 2010 at 11:35 am
Doug in Seattle,
sea ice has been lost extensively on the antarctic peninsula unlike other places in antarctca. Have a bit of intellectual honesty there when making statements.
bubbagyro,
The temperatures on the antarctic peninsula are not -60… MAATs in the regions range from near 0 to – 10… Please fact check yourself before making ridiculous statements. “””
A very good piece of advice Robert; and one that I urge you to follow. The story printed above; that ius the one about the pengiuins; specifically says:- “”” Over the past 50 years, winter temperatures have shot up by an almost unbelievable 6°C—more than five times the global average, “””
From which one would take note of the following:- “”” winter temperatures “””
Now of course bubbagyro was being facetious when he talked about -65 to -60; to simply make the point that the relevence of a 6 deg C rise does depend on from where to where.
But as to your own robust information; do you stand by your assertion that winter temperatures on the Antarctic peninsual only vary from zero to -10 deg C; that is as almost unbelievable as the rapidity of that 6 deg C rise by the original story’s authors.
And as to that Antarctic peninsula; have you noticed that is is largely OUTSIDE of the Antarctic Circle, and that the whole southern ocean goes sloshing by back and forth twice a day, through that narrow gap to south America.
So applying a little “intellectual honesty” would anybody smarter than a fifth grader expect the weather conditions there, to be substantially different from the rest of Antarctica which is ALL inside the Antarctic circle.
Meanwhile, back here:- “”” Over the past 50 years, winter temperatures have shot up by an almost unbelievable 6°C—more than five times the global average, “””
You don’t happen to have a robust, maybe even peer reviewed value, or maybe a graph of, the “Global Average Winter Temperatures” do you. Those authors wouldn’t be comparing Antarctic Peninsula Winter Temperatures to all year round global average temperatures would they ? How do you get a global average winter temperature when it isn’t winter all over the globe at any time ?
But I wouldn’t worry about the Antarctic winter temperature rate of rise being five times the rate of increase of global average winter temperatrures; it is stll a far slower rate of change, than the recent rise and fall of the Dow Jones Industrial Average; which I am sure is linked to Antarctic peninsula Winter Temperatures just like global average winter temperatures are.