I recall I as I was trying to keep my eyes open during Al Gore’s Inconvenient movie hearing him say something about melting ice caps and how they were proof of a warming climate. I also remember hearing something about carbon dioxide being the cause of the warming climate which in turn melted the ice which in turn was going to kill us all. It turns out that NASA has now proven Gore wrong on all counts!

Back in August, NASA corrected their data on global temperatures after an error in their calculations was pointed out by Steve Mcintyre. This effectively destroyer Al Gore’s argument that the earth is unmistakingly warming because of the high temperatures recorded recently, as 6 of the 10 hottest years occurred before 1960, with 4 of them in the 1930’s. But what about those melting glaciers we saw in the movie, they are proof the climate is getting warmer right? Wrong!

NASA released a report recently explaining the melting arctic ice, and it has nothing to do with global warming:

A team led by Son Nghiem of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., studied trends in Arctic perennial ice cover by combining data from NASA’s Quick Scatterometer (QuikScat) satellite with a computing model based on observations of sea ice drift from the International Arctic Buoy Programme. QuikScat can identify and map different classes of sea ice, including older, thicker perennial ice and younger, thinner seasonal ice.

Nghiem said the rapid decline in winter perennial ice the past two years was caused by unusual winds. “Unusual atmospheric conditions set up wind patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and then sped its flow out of the Arctic,” he said. When that sea ice reached lower latitudes, it rapidly melted in the warmer waters.

“The winds causing this trend in ice reduction were set up by an unusual pattern of atmospheric pressure that began at the beginning of this century,” Nghiem said.

Everyone read that again…. the ice is melting because strong winds are pushing it into warmer waters, not because the climate as a whole is getting warmer!

Anthony Watts is even reporting that although the arctic ice is diminishing, the Antarctic is growing to record levels, currently 16 million square kilometers.

Somehow I doubt this new report will be enough to convince the Democrats that we don’t need a new tax to ’save the world’.

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Global Warming