Scientists Find “Surprising” And “Statistically Significant” Cooling Trend Across Antarctica
East Antarctica, which covers two thirds of the South Pole, has cooled 2.8C over the past 4 decades, with West Antarctica having cooled 1.6C. It stands that only a tiny slither of Antarctica (the Antarctic Peninsula) has seen any warming –statistically insignificant warming at that– but guess which area the MSM focuses on…
German climate website Die kalte Sonne recently posted its 64th climate video. In it, they examined a new paper on Antarctica by Zhu et al (2021) entitled “An Assessment of ERA5 Reanalysis for Antarctic Near-Surface Air Temperature”.
The European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) released its latest ERA5 reanalysis dataset in 2017, and Zhu and his researchers compared the near-surface temperature data from ERA5 and ERA-Interim with the measured data from 41 weather stations.
What they found is that the temperature trend from ERA5 is consistent with that from observations. In other words: a cooling trend dominates East Antarctica and West Antarctica while a warming trend exists in the Antarctic Peninsula.
The below map illustrates just how small the Peninsula is:
The results reveal that East Antarctica, which covers two thirds of the continent, experienced a cooling of 0.70C per decade over the past 40 years, resulting in a total cool-down of roughly 2.8C since 1980. While West Antarctica has cooled at a rate of 0.42C per decade over the past 40 years, resulting in an overall drop of 1.6C.
Die kalte Sonne notes that the results are “surprising” and “statistically significant”. And although the Antarctic Peninsula has experienced some moderate warming, Die kalte Sonne states that nothing significant is occurring over this comparatively small region — the noteworthy development, on the other hand, is the stark cooling witnessed over the Antarctic continent as a whole.
