The Antarctic Climate Card

By Paul Homewood

When it comes to the poles, it is always the Arctic which gets most of the attention. Time then to update what has been going on down under lately.

RSS shows that atmospheric temperatures have effectively remained unchanged during the satellite era, dropping by just 0.02C/decade. (UAH are similar, with a drop of 0.01C).

http://images.remss.com/msu/msu_time_series.html

2015 finished at 0.15C below the baseline average of 1979-98.

http://data.remss.com/msu/graphics/TLT/time_series/RSS_TS_channel_TLT_Southern%20Polar_Land_And_Sea_v03_3.txt

Sea ice extent has been running close to average for the last few months, down from last year’s record levels.

http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/index.html

Sea ice area also shows no long term changes.

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png

And, to complete the picture, SSTs across the Southern Ocean remain much lower than they were prior to 2005.

https://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/january-2016-sea-surface-temperature-sst-anomaly-update/

In short, the climate in the Antarctic appears to be remarkably stable.

Antarctic Peninsula

It is regularly claimed that the Antarctic Peninsula is one of the fastest warming regions on earth.

However, if we check the actual data, we find this claim is grossly misleading. There seems to have been a shift upwards in temperatures during the 1970’s and 80’s. But since then, there appears to have been little trend at all.

Indeed, last year was unusually cold, compared to many recent years.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/find_station.cgi?dt=1&ds=12&name=&world_map.x=240&world_map.y=404

We can see this clearly when we look at the trends for the two longest running stations, Faraday and Esperanz, at different ends of the peninsula . (Faraday aka Vernadsky).

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=700890630008&dt=1&ds=12

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=301889630008&dt=1&ds=12

5-Year averages are now lower than they were in the 1970’s at Faraday, and in the 1980’s at Esperanz. At both sites, temperatures appear to be past their peak.

So it appears that another myth has been blown apart.

None of this, of course, was supposed to be happening. Global warming theory demands that warming is faster at the poles. Whatever is going on in the Arctic, the Antarctic is not playing ball.