Stoat

Exciting BAS press release...

The first direct evidence linking human activity to the collapse of Antarctic ice shelves is published this week in the Journal of Climate. Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, University College London, and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, (Belgium) reveal that stronger westerly winds in the northern Antarctic Peninsula, driven principally by human-induced climate change, are responsible for the marked regional summer warming that led to the retreat and collapse of the northern Larsen Ice Shelf.

Read the rest of it at http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/News_and_Information/Press_Releases/story.php?id=293.

[Update: wouldn't you know it, BAS's webserver is out of action, probably due to a brief power cut (it did odd things to our induction hob, too). What wonderful timing. I presume it will get fixed tomorrow morning -W]

[Uupdate: oh good, its back... -W]

[Uupdate: down again. Sigh. OK, here is some more of the story, in both ways. First, our webserver and stuff: its been pointed out to BAS high up that having a webserver that isn't robust to power outages can give a rather unimpressive view to the outside world. I'm pretty such our technical people would have no problem with creating a hot-swappable replacement but they are busy on other stuff. So we're left with the current situation, sorry. What happened was that power probs last night lead to circuit breakers tripping and other stuff I don't know in detail. By mid today, it was all fixed, but scheduled to be taken down at 4pm today for re-fixing. So it looks like that hasn't gone as well as it might.

As to the contents of the paper... since I haven't actually read it I'm going to have to guess... but variations in the SAM (aka westerly winds) are known (in the obs) to be correlated to Peninsula temperatures especially in the summer, which is the key time for melting ice shelves. The models, like the obs, show increases in the winds. By running natural/anthro/ozone type runs its possible to attribute the increases. Now the interesting bit is, if you simply look for Peninsula warming in these runs, you don't really find it. And we attribute *that* to failure to resolve key processes (waves hands). However, since the wind-temp link is fairly good in the obs, the ability to attribute the winds allows you to do the T's. Or at least I think thats how the argument runs

Seems to have made Reuters and CNN: http://edition.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/10/17/ice.collapse.reut/ Not to mention the Toronto Sun http://torontosun.com/News/OtherNews/2006/10/17/2048866-sun.html :-) -W]