Jon J,

Some additional info on the acceleration of the summer melt in Antarctica.

http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ngeo1787.html

Poirot, the Antarctic peninsula is about 4% of the Antarctic total and has always been warmer than the rest; try this paper:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v489/n7414/full/nature11391.html

Which concludes:

"Repeating the temperature trend analysis using 50-year windows confirms the finding that the rapidity of recent Antarctic Peninsula warming is unusual but not unprecedented ... natural millennial-scale climate variability has resulted in warming on the eastern Antarctic Peninsula that has been ongoing for a number of centuries and had left ice shelves in this area vulnerable to collapse."

In short what is happening now in the warmest part of the Antarctic is not historically exceptional.

Cohenite is there any info about why the Antarctic Peninsula is warming?

And here's a question. We have seen that European glaciers have been in retreat recently but I haven't seen anything on that for several years. With cooler winters and increased snowfall in the past few years, have there been changes in rates of decline?

Hi Graham; a lot of reasons are offered as to why the WAP is warming while the rest of the Antarctic is not, or at least not warming at the rate the WAP is.

One reason is that there is more temperature data in the WAP; another has to do with warmer currents impacting the WAP but I would suggest looking at the underlying geology of the Antarctic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:AntarcticaRockSurface.jpg

All of these disparate rock areas are joined by ice cover but still have greatly varying water currents affecting them.

Then there are the volcanoes:

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/antarcticvolcanoes2.jpg

All of them active.

Now compare the Antarctic temperature map with the volcanoes and geology:

http://nsidc.org/data/thermap/antarctic_10m_temps/dixon_map.html

Late stage democracies, the greatest analyst of democracy at the birth of modern democracy, Alexis De Tocqueville [1833]:

"Now it is in the nature of all government to wish to enlarge its sphere continuously. It is therefore very difficult for it not to succeed in the long term, since it acts with a fixed thought and a continuous will on men whose position, ideas, and desires vary every day. Often it happens that citizens work for [the central power] without wanting to. Democratic centuries are times of attempts, innovations, and adventures. There is always a multitude of men engaged in a difficult or new undertaking….They do indeed accept for a general principle that the public power ought not to intervene in private affairs, but each of them desires that it aid him as an exception in the special affair that preoccupies him, and he seeks to attract the attention of the government to his side, all the while wanting to shrink it for everyone else. Since a multitude of people have this particular view of a host of different objects all at once, the sphere of the central power spreads insensibly on all sides even though each of them wishes to restrict it. A democratic government therefore increases its prerogatives by the sole fact that it endures….One can say that it becomes all the more centralized as the democratic society gets older."

Intangible, unmeasurably complex, emitted in every energetic activity in industrial society, pantheistically soft for a soft people, grasped as a boon by brain-dead elite as something universaliseable (something plausibly able to unite those you wish to rule over) but undemanding enough for elite functionaries themselves to subscribe to. Global warming! There has never been anything like the neoplasmically parasitic meritocratic elite we have today. Just abysmal. You know the geographic centre of global liberalism, N.E. USA, something like as deranged as Saudi Arabia the geographic centre of that other voluntarism - Islam, forces girls changerooms to accomodate anyone who identifies as female for the day. Google it.

Very interesting Martin. AGW seems to me to be a perfect example of Foucault's view of humanity as plastic beings whose identity and values are entirely determined by their society.

For Foucault this is different from the nature versus nurture debate since this is a universal characteristic always prevailing over individuality.

I disagree and think belief in AGW unifies a certain type of human. A type who is not independent of their society but who thrives only in the Western societies where there exists massive subsidisation of nominal and expedient non-conformity.

AGW is a classic case of expedient non-conformity where people who only exist in their society actively espouse superficially moral issues which undermine that society. AGW does this by threatening the economic, technological, political and existential basis of Western society. The primary irony of this cognitive dissonance is that these believers in AGW would be the first to suffer and perish if Western society collapsed.

Is this the lemming gene manifested in humanity?