O’Donnell, Lewis, Condon and McIntyre

The big news on sceptic blogs is the acceptance in Journal of Climate of a paper by O'Donnell, Lewis, Condon and McIntyre that refutes a 2009 paper in Nature that claimed that not just the peninsular but western Antarctica itself was warming. There are good grounds for the warming of the peninsular that juts out into the Southern Ocean in the direction of the tip of South America and that is tectonic activity and a propensity for warm water from the central Pacific to flow in that direction on its way into the South Atlantic. The actual continent of Antartic, west, east, north or south, has been cooling for the last 50 years – but Steig et all claimed otherwise. At the time I took little notice of the Nature paper as it flew in the face of perceived wisdom and therefore assumed some kind of malpractise was involved. The authors of the new paper set out to find out how the Nature paper arrived at their conclusions by first cracking the code they used. The story is at http://climateaudity.org (December 2nd), at the Air Vent and Bishop Hill, and at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/01/skeptic-paper-accepted-on-antarctica-rebuts-Steig-et-al/ … an excellent piece of investigative sleuthing.