In an effort to prove that they are right, when in fact they are wrong, global warming propagandists have been happily pushing breaking Antarctic ice shelves down our throats.

Yes, would you believe it, but a giant slab has broken off the Wilkins Ice Shelf, apparently because of warming seas.

Hold on a second … hasn’t summer just ended there?

Aside from that inconvenience, consider the following:

Cold weather in Antarctica causes water to precipitate out of the air in the form of snow. The snow gathers on the ground, forming glaciers. Gravity drags these glaciers down to the coast, where they are pushed out to sea to form ice shelves. Every day, tides rise and tides fall. Cracks form. When the cracks join up, large chunks of ice fall off.

This has always happened! This is what causes icebergs, which drift into warmer seas and harrass shipping, eventually melting.

(Its not quite as simple as that, of course. In the 1970s, the Pacific Decedal Ocillation, the circumpolar ocean currents, changed slightly. As a result, warmer water has come into contact with the Western Antarctic Peninsula, so that has had a contributory effect.)

In the meantime, ice shelves on the eastern side of Antarctica have grown to such an extent that there has been a net increase in ice levels for Antarctica as a whole, with mass changes of -95 +/-11 Gt per annum in West Antarctica and +142 +/-10 Gt per annum in East Antarctic. So far this year the Antarctic sea ice is already increasing at an above normal rate just two weeks after the end of the Antarctic sea ice melting season.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 12:28 pm and is filed under Global Warming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.