[Vision2020] Deafening Silence on Real Climate Change- Antartic Ice Melt Lowest Ever Measured

[Objective Reason]

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10638
<http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10638>Deafening Silence on Real
Climate Change

by Patrick J. Michaels

**

*This article appeared on
<http://townhall.com/>*TownHall.com**<http://townhall.com/>
* on October 16, 2009.*

*Antarctic Ice Melt Lowest Ever Measured*.

here's the headline? Where's the television camera? Anyone out there?

It's right there in the September 24 issue of the refereed journal*Geophysical
Research Letters*. The senior author is Marc Tedesco of City College of New
York, not exactly off the mainstream media's beaten path. The work was
sponsored by NASA.

Every summer (our winter), the edges of Antarctica warm up just enough for
some snow to melt. Obviously, a little warming will create quite a bit more
melting, which is a factor in dreaded sea-level rise from global warming.

ASA seems to beat the drum only when the news on global warming is bad, and
remains mute when it is good.

Satellites have been monitoring this activity in both the North and South
polar regions since 1980. What Tedesco wrote was this: "A 30-year
*minimum*Antarctic
snowmelt record occurred during austral summer 2008-09" (emphasis added).

Here's a graph of his snowmelt data. It was obscured in a very busy chart in
the original paper, so I've taken the liberty of stripping it out to stand
alone.

[image: Summer Melt in Antarctica Appears to be Declining, not Increasing]
*Summer Melt in Antarctica Appears to be Declining, not Increasing*.

It's obvious that it's not just this year that is of interest. The last
three years are clearly those with the lowest aggregate melt on record. You
might even see a downward trend since the beginning of the record in 1980.

It's a reasonable surmise that there was no press coverage because there was
no press release. NASA is keeping this thing hushed up. (We wouldn't expect
environmental journalists to occasionally glance at the scientific
literature, such as *Geophysical Research Letters*, right?).

The Agency is also highly selective about the global warming science it
chooses to trumpet. For example, Tedesco has also published on melting in
Greenland, and NASA wrote press releases on those papers, which were not
nearly as newsworthy as the thirty-year decline in Antarctic melt. Examples:

*May 29, 2007*: *NASA Researcher Finds Days of Snow Melting on the Rise in
Greenland*. "In 2006, Greenland experienced more days of melting snow and at
higher altitudes than average over the past 18 years." Stop the presses! The
last we heard each and every year has a fifty-fifty chance of being above
(or below) average.
<http://www.cato.org/people/patrick-michaels>

*Patrick J. Michaels <http://www.cato.org/people/patrick-michaels> is a
senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of *Climate of Extremes:
Global Warming Science They Don't Want You to
Know<http://www.catostore.org/index.asp?fa=ProductDetails&method=&pid=1441420>
*.*
More by Patrick J. Michaels <http://www.cato.org/people/patrick-michaels>

*September 20, 2007*: *NASA Researchers Find Snowmelt in Antarctica Creeping
Inland*. "…Only satellites can fully capture the extent of changes in snow
melting…researchers [including Tedesco] …confirmed that Antarctic snow is
melting farther inland…melting at higher altitudes than ever, and
increasingly melting on Antarctica's largest ice shelf." How on earth does
this square with the obvious decrease in melt just published by the same
researchers? Doesn't this press release demand another on the newer work?

Earth to NASA: The 2007 Antarctic paper used twenty years of data, the 2009
paper has the entire record back to 1980. Even looking at the graph through
1998, it's apparent that there is no net increase in melt.

*September 25, 2007*: *NASA Finds Greenland Snow Melting Hit Record High in
High Places*. This one is unbelievably misleading. "In fact, the amount of
snow that has melted this year over Greenland is the equivalent of more than
twice the surface size of the U.S.". This is patently impossible — as
Greenland's total area is about a quarter of that of the lower 48 states.

There's more. In the most recent paper, Tedesco and his co-authors take
pains not to step on a highly publicized study of surface temperature trends
published by University of Washington's Eric Steig that was hailed as
evidence for human-induced warming. At the time it was published, critics
pointed out that there was no trend whatsoever in recent decades and that
what warming had occurred took place before the great increase in
atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Indeed, Tedesco begins his conclusions by stating that his results "do not
contradict" the Steig study. Why? According to Tedesco, because Steig's work
begins in the 1950s, long before his 1980 start date. All this did was to
confirm that warming pretty much stopped three decades ago. Where's
*that* press
release?

NASA's seems to beat the drum only when the news on global warming is bad,
and remains mute when it is good. And, for that matter, so is that of the
environmental journalism community, apparently incapable of filing an
original story about an article from a refereed scientific journal that
flies in the face of previous reportage on climate change.
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