The Washington Post recently ran a shockingabove-the-fold article warning us of "Escalating Ice Loss Foundin Antarctica." A new paper by Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet PropulsionLaboratory shows a net loss of ice where most scientists thoughtthe opposite would occur.

The Post went full-bore with this one, spreading thearticle on to an entire interior page. The piece ends by notingthat Rajenda Pachauri, head of the United Nations'Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is so concernedthat he's is personally going down to inspect the situation.

He should. Before he even gets to Antarctica, Pachauri is goingto see something even more surprising than Rignot's finding.Despite a warming Southern Ocean, the amount of ice surroundingAntarctica is now at the highest level ever measured for this timeof the year, since satellites first began to monitor it almostthirty years ago. This represents a continuation of the record setlast winter (our summer).

Thanks to the miracles of modern technology, we can also look atthe departure from the average for ice mass in a given month. Atpresent, the coverage of ice surrounding Antarctica is almostexactly two million square miles above where it is historicallysupposed to be at this time of year. It's farther above normal thanit has ever been for any month in climatologic records. Around now,because it's summer down there and the ice is headed towards itsannual low point, there should be about seven million square milesof it. That means, as data in University of Illinois' webpublication Cryosphere Today shows, that there is nearly 30%more ice down in Antarctica than usual for this time of theyear.

All of the IPCC's models of Antarctica in the 21st centuryforecast a gain in ice, as a warmer surrounding ocean evaporatesmore water, which subsequently falls in the form of snow when ithits the continent. It's simply too cold for rain in Antarctica,and it'll stay that way for a very long time.

Concerning Antarctica as a whole, the IPCC's new climatecompendium notes "the lack of warming reflected in atmospherictemperatures averaged across the region." Other studies, such asPeter Doran's in Nature in 2003, show actual cooling inrecent decades. (There is a small area of significant warming inthe peninsula that points towards South America, but this is lessthan 2% of Antarctica's total land mass.)

There's brand new evidence, just published in mid-January inGeophysical Research Letters, of a striking increase insnowfall over that peninsula. The few snowfall records that areavailable elsewhere in Antarctica show considerable variation fromdecade to decade, so discriminating the "signal" of increasedsnowfall caused by global warming from all the rest of the "noise"may be very difficult indeed.

We see the same problem with hurricanes and global warming.Their strength and numbers vary considerably from year to year.2005 was the most active year ever measured in the Atlantic Basin,while 2007 was one of the weakest in history. How do you find thefingerprint of global warming amidst such variation?

So it's not warming up, and the snowfall data are equivocal, yetthe continent is experiencing a net loss of ice. How can this be,and is it even important? The current hypothesis is that warmerwaters beneath the surface are somehow loosening the ice. That'splausible, but again, there's precious little proof of it.

And further, the bottom line is that there is more ice than eversurrounding Antarctica.

One of the tired tropes that reverberate throughout globalwarming reporting is that inconvenient facts get left out. In thiscase, it's blatant. Midway through the Post's page-longarticle comes a statement that "these new findings come as theArctic is losing ice at a dramatic rate." Wouldn't that have beenan appropriate place to note that, despite a small recent loss ofice from the Antarctic landmass, the ice field surroundingAntarctica is now larger than ever measured?