For those of you who believe that all the ice of earth is melting, I have some good news. You will recall that in one of my previous posts I showed you this graph:

This article also appeared in Dutch, see here:

I was surprised to find that it IS getting cooler in Antarctica, measured two meters above the ground (1979-2021). The source of these data is from here. This being the case, I decided to look at the current surface area of the Antarctic that is covered by ice.

Fig. 1: Antarctic ice area. Source of cropped chart parts:  NSIDC.

Though Antarctic sea ice fell to a “record minimum” in 2017 – after having reached a “record high” in 2015 – the latest data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center show sea ice at the South Pole has bounced back robustly since, surging some 500,000 sq km above the mean (1981-2010). On March 26, 2017, Antarctic sea ice measured 3.055 million sq km. Four years later, sea ice reached 5.103 million sq km. That is a difference of more than 2 million sq. km., which is an area more than 1.5 x the size of South Africa!

So why would Antarctic ice grow so quickly? If the ice had disappeared, many would blame it on greenhouse gases – absurd of course. Obviously, there is a complex array of natural factors at work – factors that climate alarmists consistently have ignored over the past decades. Note this graphic here:

Fig. 2: Warming of earth versus latitude.

Shown in the picture above is a summary of the warming of all the earth from NASA-GISS made from all the data we have from 1960-2019. It shows that Antarctica is largely blueish/white. This confirms that there are still a few places on earth where it IS getting cooler, and Antarctica is one of them! Fig. 2 (bottom) shows the amount of warming as measured against latitude.

I am a bit skeptical of some of the data shown here for the southern hemisphere (SH). My own results for the SH are even lower than what is indicated here by NASA-GISS. See here some of  my results   (South Africa is mostly on the -30 latitude.)

Never mind all of that, even assuming Fig. 2 (bottom) is completely correct, it still shows exactly what I have been saying all along. Clearly, the pattern of temperature trends for the Southern Hemisphere middle latitudes and the Antarctic is not consistent with hypothesized significant man-made global warming.  Since carbon dioxide concentrations are relatively uniform across the globe on a time scale of years and show persistent upward trends since the 1970’s, these flat and downward temperature trends indicate that man-made global warming is not dominant and that other factors are likely to be more dominant over the last 40 years.  The implication is that the observed upward temperature trends in the Northern Hemisphere are also being dominated by other factors.  These other factors need to be resolved before any kind of accurate future climate predictions can be made. 

In my honest opinion, predictions made assuming that global warming due to carbon dioxide is dominant are likely to fail.