No doubt you’ve seen the headlines, in some quarters (ahem, the usual suspects), screaming out the news of Antarctic sea ice hitting an all-time high. Whew! Global warming averted! Of course that’s not the case at all. It just means there’s more moisture in the coldest continent on Earth. Greg Laden had this great write-up:
Did you ever leave your freezer door slightly open on a humid day only to find chunks of new ice formed at the gap? When that happens, did you conclude “Oh, my freezer is colder than usual, I wonder how that happened?” No. You concluded that you had left the door slightly open, some cold got out, and vapor froze on your gasket. … So, thinking about our freezer, and the overall problem of making sea ice, there seem to be three things that can cause more of this ice.
- Art is old and universal.
- It’s a snake-bot!
- Adorable!
- Joe Romm has more on the freezy-breezy topic at Climate Progress:
The most important thing to know about Antarctica and ice is that a large part of the South Pole’s great sheet of land ice is close to or at a point of no return for irreversible collapse. The rate of loss of that ice has reached record levels, tripling in the last five years alone. Only immediate action to sharply reverse carbon pollution could stop or significantly slow that.
