Rises in the sea level around Antarctica in the past decade are almost entirely due a warming ocean, not ice melting, an Australian scientist leading a major international research program said.

The 15-year study of temperature and salinity changes in the Southern Ocean found average temperatures warmed by about three-tenths of a degree Celsius.

Satellites also measured a rise of about 2 centimeters (about an inch) in seas in the southern polar region over an area half the size of Australia, Rintoul told Reuters.

"The biggest contribution so far has been from warming of the oceans through expansion," said Steve Rintoul, Australian leader of an Australian-French-U.S. scientific program.

Melting sea ice or Antarctic ice shelves jutting into the ocean do not directly add to sea level rises.

Rintoul was speaking as French ship L'Astrolabe prepared to depart on Monday from Hobart, on Australia's southern island of Tasmania, for its fifth voyage of the current summer season for the Surveillance of the Ocean Astral (Survostral) program.

The research program has been taking temperature and salinity readings for 15 years to a depth of 700 meters along the 2,700 km, six-day route between Hobart and the Antarctic.

This has produced the longest continuous record of temperature and salinity changes in the Southern Ocean for scientists studying how the ocean contributes to global climate. 

First, I would like to say that I believe global warming is occurring.  The evidence is overwhelming that the Earth has warmed over the past 200 years.  Growing seasons have increased by as much as two to three weeks in many areas, and that could only happen when the temperature rises.

The question is has man caused the warming or is it 100% natural?  I was taught a long time ago never to trust absolutes.  So, I have difficulty believing that man is the only cause of global warming and with the current evidence of increased carbon levels in the atmosphere I have trouble believing that this warming cycle is totally natural.

With this in mind I want to give you some information about non-Earth based factors that could be contributing to global warming.

The sun is the source of essentially all heat in the climate system.  As the Sun ages it gets brighter and its energy output increases slightly.  Thus, as time goes on the Sun will cause the Earth to warm.  This is a very long process, and most likely has only a small effect on the Earth.

It is my sincere wish that climate alarmism has finally hit the buffers with the definitive and scientific deathknell administered by two German physicists, Dr. Gerhard Gerlich, of the Institute of Mathematical Physics at the Technical University Carolo-Wilhelmina in Braunschweig and Dr. Ralf D. Tscheuschner, co-author of a July 7, 2007 paper titled “Falsification of the Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within the Frame of Physics”.

The full story is online here, with all relevant links within the document.

Allow me to quote some highlights, so you can decide whether or not to read the whole document.
“The main results of our paper are:
- the CO2 greenhouse effect is not an effect in the sense of a physical effect and, hence, simply does not exist;
- computer aided global climatology will not be science, if science is defined as a method to verify or falsify conjectures, according to the usual definition of science.”

“Due to research grants, huge amount of financial support, virtual global climatologists suffer from a kind of omnipotence delusion comparable to the state of highness of the early super string community. However, physics is different. “Physics is where the action is”, I.e., finally, reproducible results in the lab. We cannot overemphasize that science is a method to prove conjectures, and not to go on-stage like the pop star Al Gore performing what-if-when-scenarios beyond any reality and scaring kids.” 

Last December, Dr. David Whitehouse wrote a number of articles about the tardiness of Sun cycle 24 and its potential impact on Earth’s Climate. He noted that the apex of solar activity at the end of last century corresponded with the periods’ unusually high temperatures and that temps have been flat since activity abated.

Whitehouse created quite an outcry among climate hysterics when he suggested that not only had global warming ended, but that we may be entering into a new solar cycle which would begin a period of global cooling. The Sun expert reminded readers that a similar sunspot holiday in the 17th Century (The Maunder Minimum) corresponded with the coldest temperatures of that millennium (The Little Ice Age).

Luckily for the doctor, heretics are no longer burned for blasphemy.

But an article in yesterday’s IBD, cleverly titled The Sun Also Sets, reported that Canadian scientists are seeking emergency funding for equipment to better observe our Sun. To study Global Warming, you’d expect, right? Not quite.

Global warming may not be entirely to blame for the collapse of an Antarctic ice shelf in 2002, according to research published today. The 10,000-year-old Larsen B ice shelf was initially believed to be a victim of climate change. But a paper published in the Journal of Glaciology claims the shelf had been teetering on collapse for decades. Professor Neil Glasser, of Aberystwyth University, the paper’s lead author, said cracks and fault lines in the ice had significantly weakened the structure. “A number of other atmospheric, oceanic and glaciological factors are involved. For example, the location and spacing of fractures on the ice shelf such as crevasses and rifts are very important too because they determine how strong or weak the ice shelf is.”

From their abstract: We define domains on the ice shelf related to glacier source areas and demonstrate that, prior to collapse, the central Larsen B ice shelf consisted of four sutured flow units fed by Crane, Jorum, Punchbowl and Hektoria/Green/Evans glaciers. Between these flow units were ‘suture zones’ of thinner ice where the feeder glaciers merged. Prior to collapse, large open-rift systems were present offshore of Foyn Point and Cape Disappointment. These rifts became more pronounced in the years preceding break-up, and ice blocks in the rifts rotated because of the strong lateral shear in this zone. We suggest that the ice shelf was preconditioned to collapse by partial rupturing of the sutures between flow units.  See full paper here.

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