Antarctic Sea Ice Hits New Record: Warming Scientist Blames Global Warming

This was a bad week for those proponants of the global warming hypothesis.  First June numbers are out and now officially the Earth hasn't warmed for 17 years and 10 months.  Also the amount of Antarctic sea ice hit broke the all-time record maximum last weekend and then broke it again a few days later. But that wont stop the global warming proponents to keep trying to spin the news by blaming all that ice on---global warming.

 The new record is 2.112 million square kilometers above normal. Until the record was first surpassed this past weekend, the record had been 1.840 million square kilometers above normal.

Harold Ambler who blogs at Talking About The Weather contacted Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center a supporter of the global warming hypothesis about the record ice levels. Serreze blamed it on global warming.

What we’re talking about is water that is 60 degrees south and more southerly than that, and so the basic thing is you have got surrounding the Antarctic continent a band of fairly strong and somewhat steady west-east winds, which they call the Roaring 40s, but then you’ve got this thing called the coriolis force, which wants to turn things to the left. What happens is that water at the high latitudes, what happens is that as we heat that water, you set up what’s called an Ekman drift, which at the surface transports that water from the high southern latitudes toward the equator.

What happens is you have to set up a continuity that has to occur so that what happens is that there’s an upwelling of cold waters from below, there’s a whole circulation loop where water sinks in the lower southern latitudes, then there’s a return flow that brings the same amount of mass to the higher latitudes.

Basically, what happens is that in the Arctic you can warm that surface water up and it doesn’t get transported away. It stays there, and it helps melt more ice, but in the Antarctic, the water gets carried away.

I thanked Serreze for his response but told him that I still didn’t know what heated the water at high latitudes. Was it, simply, global warming?

“Exactly!” he said.

“How many degrees is the water heated, before it is transported toward the equator?” I asked.

“I don’t have data on that,” Serreze said. He indicated that Marika Holland, a sea ice specialist and climate modeler at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, would possibly have some data as well as, perhaps, a fuller description of the mechanism warming the water nearest Antarctica and the associated growth of sea ice.

Holland did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In other words Serrez's answer was I know its because of global warming...I just don't know why.