Antarctica is warming, not cooling: study
ROTHERA BASE, Antarctica (Reuters) – Antarctica is getting warmer rather than cooling as widely believed, according to a study that fits the icy continent into a trend of global warming.
A review by U.S. scientists of satellite and weather records for 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.
“The thing you hear all the time is that Antarctica is cooling and that’s not the case,” said Eric Steig of the University of Washington in Seattle, lead author of the study in Thursday’s edition of the journal Nature.
The average temperature rise was “very comparable to the global average,” he told a telephone news briefing.
Skeptics about man-made global warming have in the past used reports of a cooling of Antarctica as evidence to back their view that warming is a myth.