Reference: Global warming hitting all of Antarctica, Bangkok Post, January 23, 2009

It is claimed that temperature data from 1957 to 2008 show that the whole of Antarctica including Western Antarctica, the Antarctic Peninsula, and Eastern Antarctica, is warming due to greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels (Global warming hitting all of Antarctica, Bangkok Post, January 23, 2009). Temperature data from weather stations in Antarctica are available online from the British Antarctic Survey website (http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/met/gjma/). These data cover the entire time frame of interest from 1957 to 2008. The Antarctic Peninsula stations (eg. Faraday and Esperanza) do indeed show a warming trend but the eastern and central weather stations (eg. Amundsen-Scott, Halley, Mirny, and Dumont) show either no temperature trend at all or a slight cooling trend. These data are inconsistent with the claim that Eastern Antarctica, the bulk of the continent, is warming. We should also consider that known volcanic activity underneath the ice in Western Antarctica (The fire below, Bangkok Post, April 28, 2008) at the base of the Peninsula is absent in the global warming climate model so that whatever warming or melting the volcanoes may cause is attributed to greenhouse gases. The article also refers to the ozone hole over Antarctica and we note in that regard that the size of the ozone hole turns out to be not an effect of human activity but part of a natural cyclical phenomenon caused by shifting wind patterns in the upper atmosphere. It is likely that the loss of the ozone scare is what has driven the same scientists who once made a living by scaring us with ozone to shift their attention to carbon dioxide.

Cha-am Jamal

Thailand