Study: West Antarctic – Poster Child of Global Warming – is Getting Colder

The West Antarctic has become yet another victim of global cooling.

According to the latest study, in Nature, it has experienced

“an absence of regional warming since the late 1990s”

while

“The annual mean temperature has decreased at a statistically significant rate, with the most rapid cooling during the Austral summer. Temperatures have decreased as a consequence of a greater frequency of cold, east-to-southeasterly winds, resulting from more cyclonic conditions in the northern Weddell Sea associated with a strengthening mid-latitude jet. These circulation changes have also increased the advection of sea ice towards the east coast of the peninsula, amplifying their effects.”

What all this means, in plain English, is that the climate alarmists have just gone and lost one of their most cherished poster children.

For over a decade, the rapidly rising temperatures in the Western Antarctic (aka the Antarctic Pensinsula) have featured very heavily in the litany of man-made climate doom stories unquestioningly swallowed by a compliant media.

Here’s NBC in 2013

The Antarctic Peninsula is one of the fastest-warming places on Earth…

Here is the BBC in 2012

A new analysis of temperature records indicates that the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet is warming nearly twice as fast as previously thought.

US researchers say they found the first evidence of warming during the southern hemisphere’s summer months.

They are worried that the increased melting of ice as a result of warmer temperatures could contribute to sea-level rise.

And here they were again in 2001

UK scientists say parts of Antarctica have recently been warming much faster than most of the rest of the Earth.

They believe the warming is probably without parallel for nearly two thousand years.

This “fastest-warming place on earth” narrative has become so important to the activists who work in climate “science” that, even now, they can’t quite bring themselves to admit the devastating significance of this latest study.

And that includes the people who actually wrote it. That’s why – rather amusingly – they actually begin the abstract of their Nature study by pretending it’s business as usual.

Since the 1950s, research stations on the Antarctic Peninsula have recorded some of the largest increases in near-surface air temperature in the Southern Hemisphere1. This warming has contributed to the regional retreat of glaciers2, disintegration of floating ice shelves3 and a ‘greening’ through the expansion in range of various flora4. Several interlinked processes have been suggested as contributing to the warming, including stratospheric ozone depletion5, local sea-ice loss6, an increase in westerly winds5, 7, and changes in the strength and location of low–high-latitude atmospheric teleconnections.

You’d never guess from that intro, would you that this wasn’t yet another study demonstrating the impact of “global warming” in Antarctica? Still less would you guess that in fact what it was about to say was the precise opposite: that the supposedly fastest-warming place on the planet has in fact been cooling for at least the last 18 years.

As Jo Nova reports, the mainstream media has been driven to all manner of contortions to try to explain away the significance of this story.

Here’s a classic headline from Chris Mooney in the Washington Post.

The Antarctic Peninsula has been cooling, but that doesn’t disprove global warming

Phew. So that’s OK then…