The IPCC and Michael Mann claimed that modern Antarctica climate change is "unprecedented' - new polar research demolishes that myth
Read here. Without doing any scientific field research, the IPCC and Climategate's Michael Mann chose to promulgate a non-scientific position that the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age were only local European phenomena. Their political agenda was to establish the myth that Antarctica climate change was unaffected by the MWP and the LIA.
That myth is no longer sustainable.
The team of Lu et al. published new research conclusively proving that the Antarctica continent also experienced both the MWP and LIA. In essence, the climate of previous centuries is similar to the climate Antarctica now has (as depicted in the adjacent image) - the modern South Pole climate is not "unprecedented."
"At present the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) argues that the Medieval Warm Period was confined to Europe – therefore that the warming we’re experiencing now is a man-made phenomenon...However, Professor Lu has shown that this isn’t true – and the evidence lies with a rare mineral called ikaite, which forms in cold waters...The scientists were particularly interested in crystals found in layers deposited during the ‘Little Ice Age,’ approximately 300 to 500 years ago, and during the Medieval Warm Period before it...‘We showed that the Northern European climate events influenced climate conditions in Antarctica,’...They were able to deduce this by studying the amount of heavy oxygen isotopes found in the crystals." [Zunli Lu, Rosalind E.M. Rickaby, Hilary Kennedy, Paul Kennedy, Richard D. Pancost, Samuel Shaw, Alistair Lennie, Julia Wellner, John B. Anderson 2012: Earth and Planetary Science Letters]
Conclusion: Modern Antarctica climate change is not unusual; is likely to have nothing to do with CO2 emissions; and similar climate variation happened in the past.
Previous climate-history and peer-reviewed postings.
