Green | January 24, 2009 | 11 comments

Eco-myth buster: Antarctica heating up, not cooling as widely believed

source: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/01/eco-myth-buster-antarctica-heating-up-not-cooling.php

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Antarctica is getting warmer rather than cooling as widely believed, according to a study of satellite and weather records for Antarctica published in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature (subscription or payment required to read full text). Antarctica, which contains 90 percent of the world's ice and would raise world sea levels if it thaws, showed that freezing temperatures had risen by about 0.5 Celsius (0.8 Fahrenheit) since the 1950s. Eric Steig of the University of Washington, lead author of the study:

The thing you hear all the time is that Antarctica is cooling and that's not the case... (The average temperature rise was) very comparable to the global average.

And this gives skeptics of man-made global warming one less arrow in their quivers to back their view that global warming is a myth.
Antarctica's ice contains enough frozen water to raise world sea levels by 57 meters (187 ft), so even a tiny amount of melting could threaten Pacific island states or coastal cities from Beijing to London.

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    Green,   Science,   Current News UK
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    Green,  Science,  Current News UK,  Global Warming,  1 more
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11 comments // Eco-myth buster: Antarctica heating up, not cooling as widely believed

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