Antarctica’s ice paradox has yet another puzzling layer. Not only is the amount of sea ice increasing each year, but an underwater robot now shows the ice is also much thicker than was previously thought, a new study reports. The discovery adds to the ongoing mystery of Antarctica’s expanding sea ice. According to climate models, the region’s sea ice should be shrinking each year because of global warming. Instead, satellite observations show the ice is expanding, and the continent’s sea ice has set new records for the past three winters. --Becky Oskin,
LiveScience, 24 November 2014
A team of UK researchers has shed new light on the climate of the Little Ice Age, and rekindled debate over the role of the sun in climate change. The new study, which involved detailed scientific examination of a peat bog in southern South America, indicates that the most extreme climate episodes of the Little Ice Age were felt not just in Europe and North America, which is well known, but apparently globally. These extreme times coincide with periods when it is known that the sun was unusually quiet. In the late 17th to mid-18th centuries it had very few sunspots—fewer even than during the run of recent cold winters in Europe, which other UK scientists have linked to a relatively quiet sun. --
University of Gloucestershire, 18 November 2014
Some media outlets have been reporting that the oceans are starting to get warmer, and that it signals the end to the current hiatus in annual average global surface temperatures. 2014 is going to be warm, but how warm, and the year’s rank depends upon which data you use. I suspect that if 2014 does technically become the warmest year on record (in any one of the non-satellite data sets) then we will see dramatic headlines to that effect, even if the record is broken by a hundredth or a few thousandths of a degree. The real story will be that the so-called biggest puzzle in climate science – the global surface temperature standstill – then entering its 19th year. --David Whitehouse,
Global Warming Policy Forum, 22 November 2014
