Is Global Warming Melting Antarctic Ice or Growing Antarctic Ice?

Favorite Answer

a little bit of both. It is a transition state, a modification from a broadly steady-state condition that existed for a short while involving roughly the same amount of ice loss and gain. Ice is definitely melting, but there is also migration of ice toward the peripheries, and increased precipitation in some areas, that give the appearance and fact of more ice (more ice area does not necessarily mean more ice volume, which is where some of the semantic argument comes into play; why there can be conflicting conclusions in how the change is expressed).

I think it is pretty obvious that we are in an era of climate change on a global scale. The question is one of the hows and whys, and which direction things are migrating. Kind of like how you can throw your weight on a bike to make it turn: if you throw the bike to the left and turn your upper body to the right, you can make the bike turn to the right (shift the center of mass to the right), but if you concentrate only on the way the bike itself has moved at the beginning, you might think that the turn would be directed to the left.

Climate and heat exchange within the global system are very complex and poorly understood. Some people appear to concentrate on only minor aspects and misinterpret what is truly happening. Things are not uniformly changing in one direction, and this is normal for a complex system, rather than unusual....Show more

Do you know the difference between Antarctic sea ice and Antarctic ice mass because it seems as if you do not. Ice mass is decreasing. Sea ice is increasing slightly. The reason for Antarctic sea ice increasing is a debated topic. It is odd that sea ice is increasing while ice mass is decreasing. One of the past possibilities was increasing stratospheric wind speeds doe to ozone depletion.

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~eps5/writing_assignment/SEA_ICE/TurnerGRL2009.pdf

This has since been shown to be false.

https://courses.seas.harvard.edu/climate/seminars/pdfs/Sigmond_GRL_2010.pdf

Another possibility is increased glacial speed due to possible volcanic activity and increased precipitation and calving.

http://envsci.rutgers.edu/~toine379/extremeprecip/papers/westra_et_al_2013.pdf

But the most widely current accepted theory is oceanic oscillations are a major contributing factor.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2004JC002403/full
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/pub/stammerjohn/Stammerjohn2008.pdf...Show more

By the way, Al Gore does not want us to use the term 'global warming' anymore (since
it's been proven there is none); instead use climate change. Global warming was pure
politics as you surmised....Show more

Global warming has caused the increased ice, in fact it is causing the coming ice age....Show more

It has been shown to melt and grow. But it is melting more than it is growing.

Even though most won't do this. I'd say it's better to see it in person, because the media is only right 50% of the time. If not less....Show more