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| Is Antarctica isolated from Anthropogenic Global Warming? Dated 2005, a white paper from International Partnerships in Ice Core Sciences (IPICS) entitled “The IPICS 2k Array: a network of ice core climate and climate forcing records for the last two millennia” contains an interesting graphic. A couple of horizontal lines have been added to help illustrate the point. It clearly shows that over the last 200 years of the last millennium Antarctica temperatures have fluctuated but that the temperatures in the late 20th century were matched in about 1830 and 1940. There are two distinct temperature minimums at around 1865 and 1955. It is also important to note that the continent wide ice core records do not demonstrate the same positive trend of the southern hemisphere instrumented record. By inspection, if the record had been extended to beyond the year 2000, it is likely that the apparent peak in the 1990’s, where the smoothed curve stops, would have turned over and matched fairly closely, or possibly been lower than the other two maxima. Bear in mind that Antarctica is a significant proportion of the Earth's land area, being approximately double the size of Australia, half as big again as the USA or nearly fifty times that of the UK.
Schneider
has released a paper on this work. It contains a slightly extended
graph, and indeed the late twentieth century peak does turn over and plummets.
An excellent critique can be found
here: http://ff.org/centers/csspp/library/co2weekly/20061013/20061013_02.html
Interesting. It seems that peer review missed this one.
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