NEW STUDY SHOWS MAJOR INCREASE IN WEST ANTARCTIC GLACIAL LOSS

http://news.agu.org/press-release/new-study-shows-major-increase-in-west-antarctic-glacial-loss/

As Arctic sea ice melts away, at the rate of several percent a year, Antarctic sea ice continues growing in extent and breaking records, as climate change skeptics and global warming deniers keep gleefully pointing out.

The differences between the two poles are obvious. One is a land-locked sea covered by several meters of floating ice, the other a continent covered with miles-thick ice surrounded by sea. Although growing sea ice in the Antarctic may be a result of melting continental ice as this AGU article suggests, it still raises the possibility that perhaps the increase in Southern albedo may make up for its decrease in the North.

Is it possible some kind of equilibrium may be reached? The Antarctic ice cap is a colossal heat sink, and unlike the Arctic, it will continue to help cool Earth by reflecting summer sunlight until it is totally gone, regardless of how much melts away off the surface of the ice cap. The melt cooling of the surrounding seas may even create more Antarctic sea ice, helping to counteract the losses in the Arctic, perhaps even balancing them out–or maybe even overcompensating.

It is anybody’s guess how this will all work out, we might even get lucky and find the losses at one pole will be exactly made up by gains in the other. Even so, assuming this does happen, what will be the consequences to the global heat budget and oceanic/atmospheric circulation as a whole as this planetary asymmetry comes to dominate the climate? I have a feeling we’re about to find out.

Before we celebrate, there is one thing we should keep in mind. The Southern Hemisphere is mostly ocean. Most of the land, and the people, are to be found N of the Equator.