Citizen Power

Much of the northern U.S. has been in a deep freeze this winter, with below zero temperatures for many days in December and January. My power bills have never been so high (and I live in a very small house with plastic on all the windows) Even so, on January 31, the temperature suddenly jumped to over 45 degrees (F) and much of the snow melted. If we didn’t have such a deep snow cover the temperature would have been even higher, probably in the 50’s. For the last day of January in MN, that is a very high temperature. Despite our very cold winter, the northern U.S. is warming, as is the rest of the United States. The whole world, including Antarctica, is now known to be warming.

This is a serious problem for many reasons, mainly that the Antarctic holds 90 percent of the world’s ice and 70 percent of the world’s fresh water. Can you imagine an ice (and snow) -free planet? I can’t, except to know that it would be devastatingly hot. If that ice melts it could raise sea level considerably. Climate change “skeptics” have argued that because the Antarctic wasn’t melting, climate change must not be happening. They were basing their arguments on wishful thinking. Scientists have now proven the melting in Antarctica is taking place, though the warming is happening differently in 3 regions. The West is warming the fastest: ” West Antarctica was found to have warmed by 0.17C every ten years from 1957 to 2006, and the Peninsula warmed by 0.11C per decade.” One detailed report is here.

By Andrea Thompson, LiveScience

“The frozen desert interior of Antarctica was thought to be the lone holdout resisting the man-made warming affecting the rest of the globe, with some areas even showing signs of cooling.

Some global warming contrarians liked to point to inner Antarctica as a counter-example. But climate researchers have now turned this notion on its head, with the first study to show that the entire continent is warming, and has been for the past 50 years.

“Antarctica is warming, and it’s warming at the same rate as the rest of the planet,” said study co-author Michael Mann of Penn State University.

This finding, detailed in the Jan. 21 issue of the journal Nature, has implications for estimating ice melt and sea level rise from the continent, which is almost entirely covered by ice that averages about a mile (1.6 kilometers) thick. The revelation also undermines the common use of Antarctica as an argument against global warming by contrarians, Mann said.

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