Earlier this week the eyes fell upon an item at a blog and essay site that a redoubtable former TV weather man maintains. His readership is mainly people who prefer to regard anthropogenic climate change as a fallacy, a fraud, or outbreak of dementia by deluded top guns at Academies of Science and among liberals and progressive bent on destroying capitalism:
- Wattsupwiththat – Anthony Watts: Coldest ever temperature recorded on Earth found in Antarctica ;
I expected a certain amount of snark by Watts. But he does not editorialize. In fact, his posting is essentially the Nat'l Snow and Ice Data Center press release (linked below in Grist), passed on without comment by Watts. The discovery has not much to do with global warming. It is that if the winds across Antarctica's ice cap blow just so, air pretty much stalls in a region with broad depressions, like giant shallow dimples, in the ice field. There, during clear austral winter days (which are ALL nighttime) the cooler, denser air draining to the low spots further radiates its heat to space. The combo outchills anything on Earth not inside a specialized laboratory refrigerator. Because the data are from satellites including the new Landsat 8 but not thermometers at these sites they don't pass muster as official World Meteorological Organization or Guinness-class records. Nonetheless the remotely sensed temperatures – in the range of minus 134 to 137 F (-92 to -94C) – are several degrees colder than a temperature Russian scientists reported in 1983 from their Vostok Research Station.
Because it fits a world view that the world is not warming due to our meddling, the news is suitable for Watts's site even without added polemics. It naturally attracted a lot of comment from readers satisfied to see that the planet isn't getting warmer, but is setting cold records left and right as well as those pesky high temperature records. Neither Watts nor his readers noted the sort-of irony that the Antarctic study leader, Ted Scambos of NOAA's National Snow and Ice Data Center, is usually in the news for reporting on Arctic temperatures and declining sea ice where events generally give support to a dramatically warming planet.
A search quickly found that this news got other coverage. The most widely distributed account is from one of the world's best wire service science writers.
- AP – Seth Borenstein: Cold Dis-Comfort: Antarctica Set Record of -135.8; Borenstein datelined the story Washington DC, because that is where he is, but reported it via streaming connection to the American Geophysical Union fall meeting in San Francisco. He has some good lines and fine quotes. A few more of his remote reports on AGU are included at his personal AP site. One found there, to take off on a tangent, concerns the demise of the failed expected-to-be-sensational comet ISON. One is compelled to note that at a dinner Wed night of the Northern California Science Writers Association, just before a wonderful talk by Alex Witze on her volcano book and during a raffle multiple choice door prize contest MC'd by the unflappable Bruce Goldman, one of the proffered answers to "What does ISON stand for" was "It's the Sun! Oh No!!!". That's a coinage Goldman credited to Santa Cruz's absent Rob Irion off lazing in Maui. It's not what ISON stands for. But it should.
What Borenstein's story has in common with the (press release) version at Wattsupwiththat is a lot of comments embracing the idea that a super stone-cold Antarctica plucks a few more bricks from the edifice of manmade global warming. These comments however are more troll-like, vehement and generic denunciations of the likes of Al Gore (Wattsupwiththat commenters are of similar bent but tend toward a more chummy tone in keeping with the site's readership of fellow travelers). Borenstein, who reports science with stout rationality, gets plenty of such vituperation when he writes on climate.
The supercold Antarctic temps got some other coverage:
- Washington Post/Capital Weather Gang blog – Dennis Mersereau: 136 below: Shockingly low temperature report from Antarctica, but not a record ; The release (and AP's version) mention that some sort of atmospheric equilibrium floor may prevent these Antarctic depressions from getting much colder than this. Mersereau doesn't mention that – but instead reports it could have gotten colder before the satellites took a gander. Either way, the results say little about global or even local trends.
- Alaska Dispatch – Ned Rozell: A place much colder than Alaska: Antarctica thermometer hits rock bottom ; Enterprising roundup of the coldest temps in Alaska, which are nowhere near the Antarctic's larynx-freezing winter air.
- Reuters – Irene Klotz: Record low temperature recorded in Antarctica – scientists ; Fairly brief and does not try to split hairs over what determines what a record temp is or is not. Just says it broke the old record.
Grist for the Mill: Nat'l Snow and Ice Data Center Press Release ; NASA/USGS Press Release ;
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